Some files won't play (Sansa Clip Zip)

[mrzapp]

I've got some very specific cases of whole albums that won't play.

For example, all MC Frontalot's albums that I got from Bandcamp all play just fine, except for the latest one: "Net Split"

Here's what I've tried:

• Shortening the filenames, as they were quite long
• Downloading as .ogg, .mp3 and .flac
• Scrubbing the files of any unnecessary tags
• Re-encoding the files

From a technical standpoint, everything seems the same across the albums, sampling rate and all. There are no extra audio channels either.

Is there anywhere I could get maybe a log or something detailing why the Sansa Clip Zip won't play certain files?

[saratoga]

Can you post a link to one of the files (maybe a short one) that doesn't play?  It would be surprising for mp3, flac and ogg to all have the same problem since the codecs have little in common.

[mrzapp]

I was trying to slice up some of the audio to avoid copyright violation when I noticed something really odd.

The files that won't play will actually play if I move them to another folder 

One of the files in question is called "01 Internet Sucks.ogg"

When it's located in "/Music/MC Frontalot/Net Split", it won't play

But when I copy/paste the file to "/Test" (from within Rockbox or from my PC) it does play.

Permissions are the same for both folders

I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but I still can't see it.

[mrzapp]

OK, I think I've found out why it won't play.

When I remove the "cover.jpg" file from the folder, all songs play as they should. Turns out that image is huge, about 6MB. Why Bandcamp would include a cover file of that size in the download is beyond me.

Could it be that player is running out of RAM trying to display such a big image? If that's the case, it would probably be useful to perform a check before attempting to display the cover image, rather than playback just failing entirely.

[saratoga]

Could you post a link to the cover? Decoding large jpegs uses only a little ram so it should work.

[mrzapp]

Sure, the cover is here: https://we.tl/t-cYqoRqOrsf

[saratoga]

I took a quick look and the issue is memory related, basically the image is so wide the scalar cannot fit one horizontal row of pixels into memory.  I'm a little confused why that freezes playback, the decoder correctly notices that this is an issue and tries to fail gracefully, so I'm not sure why playback stops.

[saratoga]

I put up a fix for this on gerrit:  https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/3074

If there are no issues I'll push to the main build in a few days.

Also, while looking at this, I fixed an unrelated crash in resizing:

https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/3073

I'll also commit that at the same time.

[mrzapp]

Cool! I'm glad this incident turned out to be useful 

[saratoga]

Fix is committed. If you have further problems with album art in the current build please let us know.

[mrzapp]

I'll check it out right away. Thank you! 🙏

[KeithSPG]

I am running this on an Ipod Video with the current image (not the development version) and have the same issue with a large jpg. As was suggested above, I deleted the jpg and I was able to play the flacs.
The image is here:
It is 11,605KB as reported by Windows.
Should I try with the development version?

[saratoga]

Should I try with the development version?

Only if you want the fix discussed in this thread