BB1 - playing music directly from hard disc back-up

[Tim]

Hi, I have been trying to play music directly from my B2 external hard disc.  This contains a back up of 2000 plus albums, 164 artists.  However, when I attach the external hard disc to the BB1 it only shows 12 artists and 500 odd albums from the hard disc?  Is there a way of seeing all of the artists and albums on the hard disc or is it only possible to see a certain amount.  Do I have to download the albums to play first?

Thanks

Tim

[Tim]

Also, when you attach an external HDD to the BB1 it does not seem to show the contents of the B2 back-up in alphabetical and numerical order, it all seems random.  When you attach the external drive to a computer it shows the artists alphabetically and the albums which I have numbered in numeric order.  Am I doing something wrong?

Tim

[Mark Fishman]

When you connect a disk to a computer, what you see depends mostly on what operating system you use to look at that disk. Most versions of MS-Windows show you a sorted list of what is in a directory. (If you use a command window to look at the directory of a FAT32 disk using the "dir" command, you will probably see the actual order of entries on the disk, NOT sorted.)

Brennan use a version of Linux, and that might show you the actual order of the directory entries on your backup disk, simply because they aren't sorting the directory before displaying it. If they look "scrambled", that's probably the sequence in which they were actually copied to the disk.

[PMB]

Hi Tim,

Just tried a B2 backup HDD and it shows more than 12 Artists - there are shown in blue - you have to use 'Artists' or 'Albums' option to play them - not 'Browse USB' (that's for importing). Took a minute or two to scan the backup HDD.

Currently the BB1 doesn't 'sort' music on an external device - it is on the wish list.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Tim]

Thanks Paul, I will try that tonight.  Should all of the artists and albums on the USB be accessible this way please?

The ability for BB1 to "sort" music on an external device would be ideal.  As soon as you have a large number of artists and albums on the external disc, no "sorting" produces a very random result.

Thanks

Tim

[Tim]

Hi Paul

I tried again.  I attach a screen shot of the BB1 UI with the external hard disc attached.  As mentioned, I have over 150 artists on the external hard disc with over 2000 albums.  However, I can only see the first 12 artists on the UI with the 500 albums in those artist folders.  When you look in the USB tab you can see all of the artists and albums but I can only play the albums in the first 12 artists.  This is also what happens on the B2 UI.  I have tried all the tabs and searches but can only play or see these 12 artists.  Am I doing something wrong?

Best

Tim

[Dennis Lefebvre]

Do you have any Album, Artist or Track names longer than about 170 characters?

[Tim]

I have no Artist longer than about 170 characters, possibly Album and tracks longer than 170 characters

[Dennis Lefebvre]

This could be a problem, see for example this thread:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/brennanb2/wYIZpJaw5eM/w1uv8-x7CQAJ

[PMB]

Hi Tim,

This maybe a naming issue as Dennis suggests, especially as you have the same issue on the B2. So worth checking.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Tim]

Thanks Dennis.

I looked at the thread.  I am not sure that I have that problem.  My B2 and BB1 displays the UI really clearly and properly on my Mac, iPhone etc.

My issues is this - when I plug my hard disc B2 back up into the B2 and/or BB1, I can only see the first 12 of over 160 artists on the back up.  See screenshot above.  They show in orange and are the first 12 artists downloaded from the B2 to the external hard disc.  It does not seem to relate to the number of characters, it is just the first 12 artists.  Also, only the 500 or so albums from the hard disc which go with those 12 artists are accessible - there are about 2000 albums in total.  None of the other 160 artists or albums are accessible, so at the moment I could not play anything other than the albums associated with these 12 artists on the BB1.  However, it is possible to download any album from any of the 160 artists on the BB1 using the USB tab, but I thought I was supposed to be able to play anything from the attached external hard drive on the BB1 without having to download first.

The UI for my B2 and BB1 is otherwise fine and working.

I suppose my basic question is this - should it be possible to connect an external hard disc to a BB1 or B2 (for that matter) and see all the artists and albums on the external disc in orange (not displayed in alphabetical order but in the order they appear on the external disc) and be able to play them without downloading them?  Or is there a limit to the number?  I am sensing the B2 and BB1 is imposing a limit on the amount which it will display.

Paul - shall I email you separately?

Best

Tim

[Daniel Taylor]

Tim,

As an experiment, create on a USB stick a list of 15 artists with album and track names that are shorter than 170 characters.  See if you can see all 15 on the UI.

[Tim]

Thanks Dennis, I might try that.

I do very little track re-naming, essentially keeping what the CDDB comes up.  Is the implication of this thread, that of the remaining 150 odd artists with 1,500 albums 30,000 odd tracks on my external back up that if some of those have longer than 170 characters in the name they will not show on the UI when an external disc is attached to the BB1 and are therefore un-playable unless they are (a) re-named or (b) downloaded do you think?

That is a mighty scary prospect!

Best

Tim

[Daniel Taylor]

One problem that can be encountered in software programming is that, when a string of characters exceeds the available amount of space allowed for it, it will go out of bounds and overwrite whatever happens to be there in memory.  This can have very strange and varied effects - it depends on what happened to be overwritten.  So, since we know that the B2 (and possibly the BB1) has a limit on what it can handle gracefully, the work-around is to make sure that all Artist, Album, and Track names do not exceed that number.  I don't recall the exact number, but keeping names under 170 should be safe.

I'm not saying that is the problem here, but it could be, or could be a contributing factor.

[Dennis Lefebvre]

It's not simply that long titles will prevent the Brennan from accessing those items, it's that when it encounters one it may stop reading the disk. My conjecture is that you are seeing a truncated display because it has encountered a long title. See, for example, THIS thread. 

[Tim]

Thanks, this is all really helpful.

How would I identify the problem artist/track/album.  Pretty sure none of the artists exceed 170/200 characters

[Dennis Lefebvre]

I would connect a USB stick to the B2's UBC-C port, and use the command: Settings > Maintenance > b2db to USB C . This copies the B2's music index to the stick. You should be able to open this file on a computer in a text editor (or word processor). If you set the editor to display with a monospaced font you should be able to identify the longest strings. I "think" you can edit the file directly, and copy it back to the B2, but I have no direct experience, and there are other ways to edit.

Have you enabled the B2's NAS (network attached storage feature?

[Tim]

Fantastic, thanks Dennis.  I have a feeling you are absolutely right.  The BB1/B2 has encountered a title that is too long and has stopped reading the external back up disc.  I will try your suggestion and then manually amend the back-up disc and see what happens - I will report back.

Paul - is it possibly for the BB1/BB2 to read more than 170/200 characters in the future do you think please?

Tim

[Daniel Taylor]

Dennis,

That's a good idea about looking in the b2db file.  Much quicker than checking all the filenames one at a time.

However, I'm a bit concerned about editing the names in the file.  Wouldn't that have to coincide exactly with editing the name on the file itself?

And without editing the actual file's name, running the Scan Disk command would put the original filename back in the b2db file.

[Dennis Lefebvre]

On Thursday, October 24, 2019 at 1:50:23 PM UTC-4, Daniel Taylor wrote:

....concerned about editing the names in the file.  Wouldn't that have to coincide exactly with editing the name on the file itself?

I do not know enough about how the Brennan stores files, but I agree that editing the b2db is likely not the best course. Better to edit using NAS, after identifying the problems. 

[PMB]

Hi Tim,

Truncating long titles is on the wish list - not sure when it may be available - doesn't come up very often but is clearly an issue when it does.

There is a 'b2db to USB C' and a 'load b2db' so would think you can edit the b2db externally and import it - will check and confirm.

BTW I have found that 'one' long title can stop the UI displaying further Atists/Albums/Tracks. Perhaps the 13th Artist/Album is a clue where to look.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Tim]

So, I ended up spending most of yesterday evening trying to solve the problem.  I used a second external disc back-up to experiment with.  In the end it was relatively straightforward to identify the troublesome album.  When you connect the external disc to the B2 it scans the contents of the disc then stops at the troublesome album.  As the contents of the disc displays on the UI in the order it appears on the disc you can then see the last album.  The troublesome album was a Mozart album, no apparent reasons.  No name longer than 170 characters, not the artist, album or any of the track names. 

I deleted the album from the back up and tried again.  Low and behold, the B2 was able to read past it and got stuck on another album in another artist.  I managed to get some 50 artists of the 160 to display but then gave up.  The next troublesome album did not have an artists, album or track name which was longer than 170 characters.

Any thoughts?

Tim

[Daniel Taylor]

Glad to hear you're making progress.

I've read here that the Brennan has trouble with some special characters.  I don't know exactly which ones.  But I'd expect them to be more likely to come up on classical or foreign albums.  Just another thought.  Good luck.

[Tim]

Thank you everyone for your collective help.  This has been an interesting and useful experience.  I think I will undertake a re-naming exercise and see where that gets me.  I quite enjoy having another B2 "challenge"

Tim

[Mark Fishman]

>  Brennan has trouble with some special characters.  I don't know exactly which ones.  But I'd expect them to be more likely to come up on classical or foreign albums.

I know that people who speak languages other than American English will have some difficulties with this -- Unicode has been around long enough that there's little excuse for not supporting UTF16 on everything newer than, say, 5 years old -- but my own experience has taught me that the only safe option for universal interoperability is ASCII.

Yes, it's more than 50 years old. Yes, it's (originally) intended to control printers. Yes, it lacks typographic subtlety. Yes, it barely works for English. Yes, it's a 7-bit code (only 127 possible values, of which one is forbidden -- NUL, or 0 -- and 31 are reserved for control characters). But those 127 values are the bedrock of pretty nearly every other character mapping, on every device and operating system, so they display the same way and are properly interpreted everywhere.

Do not use accented characters. Do not use "curly" quotes (stick to typewriter-like ' and "). Do not use true dashes (stick to hyphens). And, in filenames, avoid wildcard characters (*, ?, !).

No superiority is implied or intended. This is an experiential commentary on the stupidity of much software that still runs the world. Recognizing it has saved me much grief.