Long File Names?

[TimeConsumer]

I have had my D2 for about a week now and tonight I experienced some freezing and shutting off of the player. I remembered reading a post here that a few people experienced freezing and/or power offs and were told to retag their music(and that solved the problem). Since I just re-ripped my collection(see below) I didn't really want to do that

In preparation for my D2 I ripped the bulk of my cd's to FLAC via Cdex and then encoded to ogg using foobar so everything was fresh and new[biggrin]. My file name output for the ogg file was artist-track#-song-album-year-genre.

After a few freezes I put things together....... the albums that were freezing on me were....

Coheed and Cambria - Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness

Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Dawn till Dusk) and (Twilight to Starlight).


As you can see they make for some stupid long filenames with the format I chose. I went to my pc and re-encoded leaving out the album in the filename. No more freezes.[thumbsup]

My question is was it file name length or was it the semi colon and parenthesis that were causing the problem[unsure]

[MaxSt]

My question is was it file name length or was it the semi colon and parenthesis that were causing the problem[unsure]

Can you rename some of them and test?

[neoxerxes]

I have had my D2 for about a week now and tonight I experienced some freezing and shutting off of the player. I remembered reading a post here that a few people experienced freezing and/or power offs and were told to retag their music(and that solved the problem). Since I just re-ripped my collection(see below) I didn't really want to do that

In preparation for my D2 I ripped the bulk of my cd's to FLAC via Cdex and then encoded to ogg using foobar so everything was fresh and new[biggrin]. My file name output for the ogg file was artist-track#-song-album-year-genre.

After a few freezes I put things together....... the albums that were freezing on me were....

Coheed and Cambria - Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness

Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Dawn till Dusk) and (Twilight to Starlight).


As you can see they make for some stupid long filenames with the format I chose. I went to my pc and re-encoded leaving out the album in the filename. No more freezes.[thumbsup]

My question is was it file name length or was it the semi colon and parenthesis that were causing the problem[unsure]

For the sake of organisation, I would recommend having this folder structure as this might help with the problem you are experiencing:

Genre -> Artist -> Album -> artist - album - track - title OR track - title

It shouldn't be the semicolon as that's a pretty common character.

[nrwilk]

I think the issue is more likely due to the filename length than the presence of certain characters.

[TimeConsumer]

Can you rename some of them and test?

I did some testing today...

First I hooked up the D2 to the pc and browsed to the SD card(which is where all my music is) and manually tried adding a colon to the filename of a song. I got the message "a filename cannot contain any of the following characters / \ : * ? < >|"
thinking that maybe it had something to do with the format of the sd card I tried adding a colon to a filename on my external hard drive and recived the same message. Win 2K is my OS(don't know if that would have anything to do with it...maybe some XP users can try adding one of the characters? ). Since when I ripped the Coheed cd the colon was added automatically I 'm pretty certain this was the problem with this cd (playback note--not one song would play from this folder it would dump me back to the main menu as soon as a track was selected and then the sd card would not show up, I'd have to take it out and put it back in.

On to the Smashing Pumpkins....since this is a double cd I left one folder in working fashion(no album title in the filename) and renamed all the tracks in the other folder with the album title. also I browsed all the songs to make sure none contained any of the special characters I was alerted of earlier(they didn't).
For reference this it what 1 songs file name would look like...
Smashing Pumpkins - 12-Lily (My One and Only)-Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Twilight to Stralight)-Alt Rock-1995
Sure enough this folder would give me problems....now it wasn't exactly the same as the Coheed as it would start a song sometimes and then dump to main menu after 4 or 5 seconds or it would even play longer but as soon as I tried skipping to the next track it'd boot me to the main menu(after any of this the sd card would not show up and I'd have to take it out and reinsert). for the record I moved these folders off the sd card and onto the main memory of the D2 and got the same results.

I then tried just having 1 song in in the large filename format in the folder and to my surprise it worked fine. The whole song played and I was able to skip around from track to track with no problems[blink]

This makes me think maybe it is not necessarily the filename length but maybe some sort of "cap" on how many characters there can be in any given folder[confused]. I'm just thinking out loud here I have no idea really.


I know this is pretty fluky because most people are not gonna use such large file names( I have no idea why I did makes no sense really) and not that many cd's have titles that are so long (out of the 125 cd's I ripped 3 were too big).

If nothing else this is a reference for someone who experiences any freezes or reboots to take a look at or as a cautionary tale that bigger is not always better[laugh]

[neoxerxes]

I did some testing today...

First I hooked up the D2 to the pc and browsed to the SD card(which is where all my music is) and manually tried adding a colon to the filename of a song. I got the message "a filename cannot contain any of the following characters / \ : * ? < >|"

In Windows (and I don't know in what other OSs too), it's not possible to have a semicolon in the filename as Windows gets confused with its directory structure. I thought you were referring to the ID3 tag, which shouldn't give any problems. Having large filenames is redundant in my opinion, just use folders if you want to avoid unnecessary hassles. If you have your songs nicely tagged, and from the looks of things it appears you do, then grab hold of an application such as The GodFather, which will automatically put your songs in folders according to a basic directory structure you choose. I did it, and have never looked back. Try it with a few albums that are giving you troubles.

[TimeConsumer]

Having large filenames is redundant in my opinion.

I agree 100%...Looking back I honestly can't say why I thought using so much information in the filename was a good idea[wacko]. I had my music in good structured folders to begin with...oh well live and learn.

Although shortening the filenames by removing the album name fixed the problems I was having, I'm just going to trans code again to ogg....this time only using artist-track #-song title for the filename so it looks a bit neater. I also wanted to compress my tracks a bit more anyways this is just the excuse I need...try to squeeze as much as I can on the 4gb Transcend card.[thumbsup]

Thanks everyone for the replies[smile]

[nrwilk]

In Windows (and I don't know in what other OSs too), it's not possible to have a semicolon in the filename as Windows gets confused with its directory structure.

It's a no-no in *nix systems as well. The semi-colon is used for separating multiple commands on the command line.

[mrsmr2]

Just had the rebooting problem with very long filenames. I ripped a classical CD and the titles seems to contain every band member* so the resulting names were around 220 characters.

The D2 (fw 2.21) simply rebooted as soon as I selected them to play.

I edited them down to around 120 characters and it's fine.

* not quite everyone, but the major names