Rockbox

After major experimenting, it appears that it is probably either a bug in the way tagcache reads the metadata, or the parser in rockbox. I'm still trying to find the exact cluprit. But I did a restore, and still had the problem. Removed all my music, and added two albums back on and it worked. Added half of my music back, and it didn't.

It's not caused by: AAC files, videos, etc. I removed all that and still had the problem.

I got more or less the same problem with my H300. The Tag database doesn't get built on "Force tag cashe update". No Tagcache directories are created in the .Rockbox directory! No error is displayed.

Data about my system:
Device: IRiver H300
CVS: 060413 (tried 060411 and 060409 as well)
Bootloader: H300 V5
IRiver BIOS: V130 (Europe)
Audio files: ~5000 tunes (~34 GB). → some 4GB free and not fragmented
Type of audio: MP3 only. Most ID3V1 only. Some are both ID3V1 and ID3V2.
Location of audio: All sorted in subfolders //GENRE/ARTIST/ALBUM/..
Playlists: All in Root directory
Checking on INFO-DEBUG-VIEW TAGCACHE INFO the info displayed is: -1%

It feels as if I did not even attempt to get the database build.

With CVS060409 the system did lock after starting the tag build and playing around with the settings menu. No action was possible except hard reset. Even the clock did lock. This does not happen any more with CVS060413!

Even including this essential bug Rockbox is WAY BETTER than the original firmware as for the first time the H300 can be really used. I was very close dumping the H300!

Note: I hope I posted my comment at the right place.

Well.. my problem has been fixed, sorta.

The problem was I had fairly large album art embedded into some of my files, and it was cuasing Rockbox's ID3 parser to have a buffer overrun (IIRC). They put together a half-patch, that'll basically just skip over files that cause that instead of crashing. So I have a few files missing from my library, but TagCache is working fine now. :)

Josh

It seems I have to correct myself.

After about 8 hours of playback (on battery) a few hundred files of the 5000 on the player are tagged. So it works but VERY slow.
Doing it overnight in idle mode with power on (what I did before twice) did not tag any of the files!
→ I'll try it with playback overnight with power… lets see if that's better.

Thomas

Does this bug still exist in newer CVS versions?
There has been some tagcache fixes and enhancements lately…

Summary first: No, it still does not work.

Thanks to the new status enties in the info area I know now the following.
1: The tagscan starts
2: It works pretty fast at start (~50 tags / second) and slows down later (~5 tags per second)
3: Using the info area I see that it will stop at some file with the tagging.
I've seen it counting to 300 entries in the time I need to navigate from the start tagging to the info screen. It will stop completely at 1958 which is a 20% progress by the indicator. The navigation still works, but I hear the HDD running without further progress for many minutes (>10 minutes).
4: I have about 6600 MP3 files on the player (not "just" 5500 as I thought).
5: On a first try it did stop tagging at a lower number (tag 517) as I plugged in power?!
6. All ID3 tags are created using the program MP3TAG
7. All the MP3 files were recognised without difficulty by WINAMP 5.21 and by ifish… but ifish reported some LONG tag entries which were cut.
8. Opening the Database navigagion while just 517 files are tagged it worked with the tagged files.
9. With 1958 tags the database seems to consist of 10 files (the indication of the bootup screen above the version indicator). Checking in the info area I'm told there are 0 tag entries. After a second boot the database is gone altogether. Not even the bootup screen indicates the presence of a tag database any more.
10. I tried it both: Database in RAM or on HDD

Does this make any sense?

Thomas

I believe I located the problem on my system (still with Version 060512).

Due to the power-on bug I always did the following:
- start the H300 without external power.
- start the tagging procedure.
- cheched the status of the tagging in the info.
- If NOW the external power is plugged in (expecting it to take longer) the tagging will stop!

If instead I do the following it works correctly:
- start the H300 without external power.
- plug in external power after completion of the boot procedure
- then start the tagging (and check as above in the info panel)

→ Pluggin in of the external power seems to mess something

Without fiddling with the power plug during the tagging I managed to complete tagging of meanwhile ~11000 files. The "commit step" counter did proceed to step 9 and then return to 0. After rebooting everything was well.
Note: I used the plain power supply without docking station

Thomas

Hi Thomas and Josh,

Please retest with a new build - there have been several fixes to tagcache recently (committing in particular).