Missing tracks

[irbr...@gmail.com]

Hello

I have just loaded an album onto my Brennan B2. However, when I come to update the Music Library on my Sonos system many tracks (of this album) are missing and therefore cannot be played. I have previously loaded many albums (300+) and this has not been an issue.

Regards

Ian Briscoe

[Nick B-T]

Hi, Ian,

There are several things that cause a Brennan not to load tracks. 

• The length of the track name (=artist name+album name+track name) - there's a limit, and for safety, keep below about 150 characters combined.
  
• "Non-standard" characters upset it considerably. Sometimes they work, sometimes not. I have just run a new backup and discovered that artist or folder names which contain accented characters don't get backed up. (29th November). Furthermore, while I was debugging the backup, I came across an album I loaded last year, which has track names such as "15 - Penselstrøk.flac". Clearly I didn't check, as all the tracks with Scandinavian ø or å failed to load. The Scandinavians would have a legitimate grievance, as these are additional letters in their alphabets.
  
• Other characters can cause a fail when they're in specific places. For example, "Quel vecchio maledivami!.flac" from Rigoletto failed to load because it had an exclamation mark. Other tracks where the name ends in ! have loaded, but the ! has been replaced by the dreaded "".
  

I have found that the safest thing to do is to validate the track names elsewhere (I do mine on my laptop) and to make sure they adhere to all the above. It's a chore because what ends up on the Brennan display is not what the artist intended, nor what the user would like. A small silver lining is that if you use the music elsewhere and populate the ID3 tags, then you can keep the original format in those because (for the time being) they're not used by the Brennan (though I see some posts which indicate that there is an intention to use them - just so long as they're not altered from what many hard working individuals have hand coded over many dark evenings).

Nick

[Mark Fishman]

This forum has been archived and is not very active. For more (and more up to date) questions and responses, please use the new forum at thebrennanforum.com