Questions regarding large database playback
 

Hey all,

I got my Sansa Clip zip yesterday in the mail along with a sandisk class 10 64 Gb micro sd card.

I currently got 7308 songs on the micro sd card after some trouble but it all seems to work well now. I also installed Rockbox. I'm dealing with two things that bother me though:

1) Whenever I select a song to play from the list of 7308 songs, (I often just shuffle all my songs) it takes ages for it to actually play. (about 10 seconds) It gives a screen saying "Searching... xxxx found (press power off to abort)" I guess this is because it's creating some kind of playlist. Is there a way to just make it play the song I want to listen to instantly?

2) Is there a way to scroll faster through my list of 7000+ songs? It takes ages to go to the letter P for example...

Thanks in advance!

Don't put all your songs in a single directory (ew!). Put all songs from an album into their own album directory, and put all album directories from one artist into their own artist directory. E.g "/artist/album/01. track title.mp3". As for the database, make sure your files are properly tagged!

Hi, thanks for your answer!

I have synced the songs using Media Monkey and the songs are in seperate directories. Like this:

/U2-joshua-tree/song.mp3
/U2-All that you cant leave behind/song2.mp3

That should be fine, right?

Properly tagged? Some of these mp3's are very old an may contain excess data, how can I remove that? (so that the tags only contain song name, number, album, artist etc. ?)

But is it normal that rockbox displays the searching message when playing all tracks?

Is the load database to ram option enabled?

It is, but I still get the 'searching' message..

If you are starting playback-all tracks in the database with shuffle engaged, then I don't think 10 seconds is unreasonable with over 7,000 tracks...the device is indexing the list, and as I'm sure you can guess, there's very little RAM and a less-than-epic little CPU in there.

If you are more impatient and can't wait that long, then instead of "all tracks" narrow down your shuffle. Shuffle by artist, or by genre, would result is a shorter list and therefore quicker access.

use the database search option. this is a great feature which is often overlooked. just type out a few characters and long-select to submit the search.

If you want to shuffle all songs I'd make a playlist from all of then and play that. The response should be much quicker and you wouldn't have to worry about your tags.

If you do decide to clean your tatg Mp3Tag is very good at that. Just load the folders where you have your files, select all the songs and view them in the Extended Tags pane. You'll see all the tags and can eliminate the ones you don't want.

I don't think that will eliminate the searching message. It may cut down on the amount of time it takes.