From: Jos Laake <joslaake_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 12:11:09 -0700

First some background to this recording problem:
(Or "Why this issue is so important to me" ;-) )

Hi I'm Jos from Santa Cruz, California, USA.
I have an Archos FM Recorder running RockBox 2.0.
For the most part, I love it! But...

I'm a musician, and I use my unit primarily to
*record* my new music. Also, I work with a number
of other musicians not geographically located near me.
We record song ideas and track-pairs and send them
back and forth through the 'net as .mp3 files, and I've
been needing a good quality hand-held stereo digital
recorder, so I bought the Archos FM Recorder, discovered
this most-excellent RockBox software, and here I am.

Here's my problem:

So, I plug the analog record-out of my mixer to the
line-in of the RockBox, set record, push "go", play
my piece and then stop and save the file. I get an
mp3 file named something like 'R030418-015350.mp3'.
No problem. I select it and press 'play' and there
it is, what I just recorded, beautiful! (Or not,
depending on how well *I* play. ;-) ) So I'm happy
with the recording and I want to send it to my band
members who are all scattered in Wisconsin, Iowa,
California and Israel. Theoretically no problem, I
thought. I just plug the unit into USB, it shows up
as disk 'J:'. I navigate over and click on the file
'R030418-015350.mp3' that I just recorded. My Windose
dutifully calls up 'Media Player 9' and I get this
cryptic error message: 'Unable to initialize a file.'
When I ask for 'More Information' it says:

'0xC00D001F: Cannot find the file'
'Error ID = 0xC00D001F, Condition ID = 0x00000000'

Oddly enough, I checked it on another mp3 player I
had on another system and it played there. Also, it
*does* play on the unit running RockBox 2.0, and it
sounds great, so I'm assuming the encoded music part
of the file is okay.

Then I looked at the file using 'MP3Ext'. It gave
me this info:

Bitrate: 0K Time: 00:00
Mode: s Layer: -
Freq: 0 Frames: 0

----- No ID3Tag available -----

Hmmm, that doesn't look right. So I did some more
test recordings. *None* of the recordings I've made
so far will play on 'Media Player 9'.

Here's more info:

My recording settings are:
Quality: 7
Frequency: 48KHz
Source: 'Line in' or 'mic'
Channels: stereo

It's possible this is an issue with 'Media Player 9'
but, like it or not, it's what a lot of people use,
including all my musician friends. Although I may be
a dyed-in-the-wool Tux-lovin' Linux user and hacker,
I have no illusions about getting my definitely non-
geeky musical siblings to switch from what is working
for them, and they're the ones I gotta send this music
to, and they're all using 'Media Player 9'.

So, any thoughts on this one? Sounds kinda like a bug
to me. Should I file a bug report?

I'm gonna go do more tests, fiddle with the settings...

~Jos~
Received on 2003-04-18