Fuze + Plus playback freeze / data abort when using larger fonts

[anothereffingaccount]

I got a Fuze + as a refurb, and, as has widely been reported in other venues, the OF is the worst doubleplus ungood super extra loathesome piece of code ever pinched out from inside a programmer Lovelace and Babbage started this whole digital thing.  I was ready to put it on the shelf - with extreme predjudice - when I started Googleing for "Fuze firmware hacks" and discovered Rockbox.

FINALLY! A UI that was FAST, understood that a paramater called "file name" was enough to uniquely identify a track WITHOUT a confusing, misleading library / manager program (iTunes anyone?).  Just one problem - my eyes aren't what they were 20 years ago (all right, 30 years ago - more or less...).  BUT no problemo as the Font directory had fonts up to 35 points!

THANKS ROCKBOX DEVELOPERS for saving my Fuze +.

Except... Problemo after all.  Not all tracks (.mp3 exclusively) would play - not on the SD card or internal memory - despite playing in the OF and on every other concievable Mac or PC player I could test on. But only some, others had no problem.

Doing a Settings Reset restored ALL tracks to playfulness, but then the font was too small, so make it bigger and - BANG - some tracks won't play again.  In fact the SAME tracks won't play - it's a REPEATABLE phenomena.

For what it's worth, everything I have tried to play seems to work in the 15pt Adobe Helvetica default font.  Also 21 pt Adobe Helvetica - Bold seems to work for all.

Anything above 21 pt seems to affect some files.  There seems to be some correlation  between the length of information in the ID3 tag fields with longer album names and track names being most likely to freeze or crash with a "Data abort" message.

I've got thousands of tracks on my 32Gb micro SD card and there's a lot of fonts, so complete testing is impractical and, given that I've got things working with a readable 21 pt type, unnecessary.

I'm not sure this a bug even - some fonts will necessarily take more resources to render on the screen.  If you have a large font and a long title and long album name to be scrolled on the screen while playing, the CPU might simply be unable to do it all.  This is just speculation on my part.

Anyway if you're having apparently random track freezing / aborting during playback, try changing (reducing) the font size, reverting to the default 15 pt Adobe Helvetica as a last resort.  Turing the title / album scrolling off during playback might work too - but I haven't tried it myself.