Help, yep another new member with a problem

[m13kyf]

Hi

Im sure there is a simple answer and someone is kind enough to help me. Recently bought a squeezebox touch, Spent ages ripping my cd collection onto u usb drive. Tested it first with just a few cd's and all worked ok. Finshed doing all of them at last. Now when I launch the squeezbox server with the usb drive connected to the back (not going across a network onto another computer) it starts to scan the drive (only music on the drive). It discovering over 9000 files, it completes then pops up a messages saying

Discovering Files: Complete
Scan new files
time left 12:45
Percent done: 0% (1/5924)

then pops up
Neither Logitech Media Server nor the scanner are runnig

I cant play or see any of the music on the usb drive, I've tried the wipe and rescan, still no joy. All the CDs have been ripped as wavs and have album artwork.


Please help and thanks for your replies. I hope I can get this working

[toby10]

Touch and USB / SD Troubleshooting & best practices for best performance

USB or SD card devices

- Check the formatting of the device, Touch supported formats: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3
- Touch can only see/use a single partition, format as a single partition, or use only the first partition for all relevant music files
- Remove any included USB/SD device “utilities” as these can cause issues
- Make sure there is at least 10% free space (20% even better)
- Remove any non-music related files (videos, documents, programs, pictures, data, etc…)
- Or, if removing such files is not an option, place a . (dot) in front of folders that are not music related (folders not containing music files, album art, playlists). A simple (dot) in front of a folder means that TinySBS will ignore these and (hopefully) greatly speed up scan times.
- Attach device directly to your computer and run basic maintenance utilities (disk cleanup, error checking, defrag)
- Storage unit must be writable (Touch’s server must install files and be able to write to these files)
- Quick Test: Place a small, single folder of music on the device for initial testing (why have it scanning for hours if it isn’t going to complete the scan)


USB HD

- Try an external USB power source, HD power supply or a powered USB hub. (Touch may not have enough bus power to power the USB HD)
- Try a different USB cable
- HD Sleep mode can cause issues (may have to completely rescan HD every time it “wakes”)
- If you turn OFF Touch or HD, or unplug HD, Touch must completely rescan the entire HD

Very useful tutorial & configuration ideas to get the most out of the very limited Touch inbuilt server:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82070

[Mnyb]

FLAC would have been better as it has better metadata support ?

How do you tag the WAV files ? ( what are you ripping with ) most rippers don't tag them at all afaik ,so you be left with file and folder names as only info source ( no metadata about artists and album and such things in the files themself ).
Do you use cue sheets ?

If you use the "music folder" meny can you see them now ? ( note won't work with cue sheets ).

[m13kyf]

Touch and USB / SD Troubleshooting & best practices for best performance

USB or SD card devices

- Check the formatting of the device, Touch supported formats: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3,
- Touch can only see/use a single partition, format as a single partition, or use only the first partition for all relevant music files
- Remove any included USB/SD device “utilities” as these can cause issues
- Make sure there is at least 10% free space (20% even better)
- Remove any non-music related files (videos, documents, programs, pictures, data, etc…)
- Or, if removing such files is not an option, place a . (dot) in front of folders that are not music related (folders not containing music files, album art, playlists). A simple (dot) in front of a folder means that TinySBS will ignore these and (hopefully) greatly speed up scan times.
- Attach device directly to your computer and run basic maintenance utilities (disk cleanup, error checking, defrag)
- Storage unit must be writable (Touch’s server must install files and be able to write to these files)
- Quick Test: Place a small, single folder of music on the device for initial testing (why have it scanning for hours if it isn’t going to complete the scan)


USB HD

- Try an external USB power source, HD power supply or a powered USB hub. (Touch may not have enough bus power to power the USB HD)
- Try a different USB cable
- HD Sleep mode can cause issues (may have to completely rescan HD every time it “wakes”)
- If you turn OFF Touch or HD, or unplug HD, Touch must completely rescan the entire HD

Very useful tutorial & configuration ideas to get the most out of the very limited Touch inbuilt server:
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82070

Hi thanks for your time in responding

- format is correct, like I said, I tested it after ripping a few cds to see if all working
- it its 1 partition
- no other devices or sound cards attached
- 600GB free out of a 1TB drive
- no videos, progs or docs on the drive.
- drive is being written to by Squeezebox as I can see a .squeezebox folder it has created and inside that are some files it has made
- did do a quick test when first started ripping some cds before going onto the entire collection


- usb drive is externally powered
- not sure why if it has sleep mode that this should be an issue during the intial scan, ie the drive is active and working during the scan. Even tried playing music while doing the scan which it does but when it reaches the error then the music ceases and server stops and no music available
- fully understand the re scan point and was aware of this beforehand. I did do some reading before buying the squeezebox

[m13kyf]

FLAC would have been better as it has better metadata support ?

How do you tag the WAV files ? ( what are you ripping with ) most rippers don't tag them at all afaik ,so you be left with file and folder names as only info source ( no metadata about artists and album and such things in the files themself ).
Do you use cue sheets ?

If you use the "music folder" meny can you see them now ? ( note won't work with cue sheets ).

HI thanks also to responding

Yes I did look at FLAC files but to my ears I thought WAVS sounded better.

I used windows media player to rip the cd's, it found most of the artwork and all of the tracklists. A small amount of cds I inserted Album artwork after within windows media player by going over the cd icon and paste album artwork

No I dont use cue sheets, Dont entirely understand by what you mean by "music folder" The cds are all at base level and not within a folder. Each artist has its won folder with there cds inside it as per the way windows media player has done it. Like i said, Tested earlier with about 30 cds from different artists and all worked ok.

[rayman1701]

I don't know if this is still the case, but when I first got my Touch and tried to use the USB one thing you had to do was, leave it totally alone possibly overnight to let it totally finish the scan. Yes it can take a few hours for it to actually finish, and during that time you don't want to do anything on the Touch, no listening to music, or mucking about, just let it sit. I bet this is especially true of WAV files, since it has to "guess tags" to fill in the database. But even then, using the TinyLMS in the Touch has always been hit or miss, since it just doesn't have the power or memory to really work consistently. I gave up on it very soon, started running the full LMS on a computer and actually started to enjoy the whole idea of having a music server system.

One other thing to try, plug the USB drive into the computer and delete the Database file manually. That way it will be forced to do a clean scan.

[Mnyb]

Afaik media player does not put in any data in the files besides the names, so artist or album or genre menu migth be empty .
(Unless this changed recently )

There is another menu under "my music" called "music folder" there you should be able to traverse the file and folder structure as it is and not using any tags.

All lossles formats are the same (including WAV ) it is myth that WAV sounds better than FLAC hopefully you are not an avid TAS reader ( then this is going to be uphill ). The only special with WAV is that it is an old format space inefficient and don't have that good meta data support,( it is not what's on the CD btw ) .
Ways around that ( except the obvious use a lossles file format with good tag support ).

I think tag&rename can tag WAV files .
Or use cue sheets , other better rippers like EAC or dBpower amp can produce them during rip and they are also secure rippers ( WMP is not ) . Able to compare the rip against a database to verify that you get perfect rip ( you would get perfect in 99% of the cases anyway, but WMP or iTunes would never tell and fudge it it in such cases)

[kidstypike]

I don't know if this is still the case, but when I first got my Touch and tried to use the USB one thing you had to do was, leave it totally alone possibly overnight to let it totally finish the scan. Yes it can take a few hours for it to actually finish, and during that time you don't want to do anything on the Touch, no listening to music, or mucking about, just let it sit. I bet this is especially true of WAV files, since it has to "guess tags" to fill in the database. But even then, using the TinyLMS in the Touch has always been hit or miss, since it just doesn't have the power or memory to really work consistently. I gave up on it very soon, started running the full LMS on a computer and actually started to enjoy the whole idea of having a music server system.

One other thing to try, plug the USB drive into the computer and delete the Database file manually. That way it will be forced to do a clean scan.

+1
I totally agree with everything written here.

[kidstypike]

I think tag&rename can tag WAV files .

Yes it can, I've just ripped an album to WAV with WMP, and tagged it with tag&rename.

[Mnyb]

Yes it can, I've just ripped an album to WAV with WMP, and tagged it with tag&rename.

Good, tag&renaname was a very good tagged last time I used it , seems like it still are .

The normally superb free ap mp3tag does not do WAV tags

[m13kyf]

I don't know if this is still the case, but when I first got my Touch and tried to use the USB one thing you had to do was, leave it totally alone possibly overnight to let it totally finish the scan. Yes it can take a few hours for it to actually finish, and during that time you don't want to do anything on the Touch, no listening to music, or mucking about, just let it sit. I bet this is especially true of WAV files, since it has to "guess tags" to fill in the database. But even then, using the TinyLMS in the Touch has always been hit or miss, since it just doesn't have the power or memory to really work consistently. I gave up on it very soon, started running the full LMS on a computer and actually started to enjoy the whole idea of having a music server system.

One other thing to try, plug the USB drive into the computer and delete the Database file manually. That way it will be forced to do a clean scan.

thanks

this is where I think the problem is, it scans the files then fails when it starts to make its database I can see it say 'percent done: 0% (1/5234)' after a sceond of this message it goes to 'Neither the Logitech Media Server nor the scanner are running' 'Start Logitech Media Server' or 'Wipe and Rescan'

have also removed the file via the computer, still no joy

[m13kyf]

Afaik media player does not put in any data in the files besides the names, so artist or album or genre menu migth be empty .
(Unless this changed recently )

There is another menu under "my music" called "music folder" there you should be able to traverse the file and folder structure as it is and not using any tags.

All lossles formats are the same (including WAV ) it is myth that WAV sounds better than FLAC hopefully you are not an avid TAS reader ( then this is going to be uphill ). The only special with WAV is that it is an old format space inefficient and don't have that good meta data support,( it is not what's on the CD btw ) .
Ways around that ( except the obvious use a lossles file format with good tag support ).

I think tag&rename can tag WAV files .
Or use cue sheets , other better rippers like EAC or dBpower amp can produce them during rip and they are also secure rippers ( WMP is not ) . Able to compare the rip against a database to verify that you get perfect rip ( you would get perfect in 99% of the cases anyway, but WMP or iTunes would never tell and fudge it it in such cases)

it is seeing the artist under my music before it crashes while scanning, I guess its using the part database its created. The whole best file format Im quite happy not to get into and is that the issue I m having anway. And it doesnt explain why it worked after a few cd's as suggested here in what to do before doing hte whole collection so you know all is working. Have I really go to re scan everything. Afterall I used a format it does support.

[rayman1701]

Does your hard drive have its own power supply? I know that bus powered drives can have more issues with TinyLMS, but I couldn't get it to work well even with a powered USB drive. And the reason it worked with fewer files, is it had to do less work, and the more work you make TinyLMS do the more problems seem to arise.

[JohnSwenson]

The problem here is that LMS is crashing when it starts to do the "deep scan". The scan is in several pieces, the first just looks in the directories for filenames and dates and builds a list of files that are new, this phase seems to work fine. Then it goes and scans the actual files looking for tags and embedded artwork. Then it looks for separate artwork files.


First lets check your directory structure: TinyLMS cannot handle a large number of files in the same directory, the best approach is a separate directory per album and then just the files for that album in the directory. This can be the audio files (*.wav in your case) and possibly a coverart file (cover.jpg). Is all this true?

Your problem seems to be that the scanner is crashing when doing the full scan on your first file. Probably about 75% of crashes with TinyLMS eventually turn out to be related to artwork. So lets first look at your artwork, what format is it in? JPEG (jpg) is the least likely to cause a problem. The pixel dimensions should not be large, 500 x 500 pixels is usually considered a good choice. Check to see that you don't have artwork embedded in the sound files (I'm not sure you caneven do that in WAV) . LMS can handle embedded artwork, BUT due to memory limitations on the Touch a separate image for each track can really cause problems, for TinyLMS it's best to just use a separate cover.jpg and not use embeded artwork.

John S.

[kidstypike]

The problem here is that LMS is crashing when it starts to do the "deep scan". The scan is in several pieces, the first just looks in the directories for filenames and dates and builds a list of files that are new, this phase seems to work fine. Then it goes and scans the actual files looking for tags and embedded artwork. Then it looks for separate artwork files.


First lets check your directory structure: TinyLMS cannot handle a large number of files in the same directory, the best approach is a separate directory per album and then just the files for that album in the directory. This can be the audio files (*.wav in your case) and possibly a coverart file (cover.jpg). Is all this true?

Your problem seems to be that the scanner is crashing when doing the full scan on your first file. Probably about 75% of crashes with TinyLMS eventually turn out to be related to artwork. So lets first look at your artwork, what format is it in? JPEG (jpg) is the least likely to cause a problem. The pixel dimensions should not be large, 500 x 500 pixels is usually considered a good choice. Check to see that you don't have artwork embedded in the sound files (I'm not sure you caneven do that in WAV) . LMS can handle embedded artwork, BUT due to memory limitations on the Touch a separate image for each track can really cause problems, for TinyLMS it's best to just use a separate cover.jpg and not use embeded artwork.

John S.

John

Tag&Rename can embed artwork .jpegs into .WAV files, these work without problem on TinyLMS.

However, the OP has indicated that he has ripped and tagged using Windows Media Player, this does not embed the artwork, but puts four hidden artwork .jpegs in the album folder. (attached screen shot). I had no problem scanning and playing this album using TinyLMS.

I don't know what type of tagging WMP uses for .WAV files, but when I opened this same album in Tag&Rename the WMP tags do not show up at all, just the file name.