Gramophone issues

[frau kaleun]

Coming back to this thread because I'm still completely baffled by my Gramophone.

Is anyone using "numbered" files in the Gram folder to create a playlist and having any luck getting them to play in the order in which you've set them up to play? Because I can NOT get this to work. I'm not having problems with crashes or lags any more, I'm pretty sure I figured out what was causing that and took care of it.

But it's still skipping tracks. And after experimenting over the last couple of patrols, what I've found is this: it's not particular tracks that are getting skipped, it's particular spots in the rotation.

I had the filenames all numbered as 001.ogg, then 002, 003, you get the idea. When I started the gramophone it played only the odd numbered tracks, regardless of which actual files were involved (I tried shuffling tracks around to test this).

So I tried just numbering them as 1.ogg, then 2, 3, etc. It played track 1 first, then 2, then 21, then went back to 3, 4, 5, etc. (I only had 21 tracks in the folder at the time, so after it got 2 & 21 out of the way the rest played fine.) This was about what I expected, given the way numbers at the beginning of filenames are usually sorted, but I thought it was worth a try.

Then I tried the sequence 101, 102, 103, and it starts at 101 but is back to playing only the odd numbered tracks.

I know I could just randomise the tracks, but I really don't want to do that since I have a lot of classical music in there where an entire piece is split across multiple tracks and I want to listen to those in order when they come up.

So - if you've gotten your Gram tracks to play in a specified order, please, for the love of all things holy, how did you manage it? Lol. I know it's a small issue, but the fact that I can't figure it out is making me crazy!

Edit: Okay, I just doublechecked. The last time I tried, it played played the first, third, and fifth tracks. Then it played the sixth track, eighth, and tenth tracks. So it's not playing just the odd numbered tracks. This is weird.

[frau kaleun]

Hmm... just for the heck of it I tried putting only mp3 files in the folder. For whatever reason, the game plays those in whatever order I set up without a problem, except for a couple tracks for which I found it will play the ogg version in the designated spot but skip over the mp3 if I use it instead.

What's also odd now is that there's at least one ogg file that would play fine before, but now gets skipped even though the same version of it is still in there.

So far I've only got about 10% of the files I have actually in the folder... but it looks like it's gonna be a trial and error thing, seeing as how there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the way it's doing it.

*shrugs*

[Jimbuna]

Looking at your posts it would appear you are mixing ogg and MP3 files....that has always been taboo

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by jimbuna

Looking at your posts it would appear you are mixing ogg and MP3 files....that has always been taboo

Nope, not originally when I first noticed the problem. I started out with nothing but ogg files, and the game would skip files, lag in between files while it (I assume) looked for the next one to play, and sometimes crash entirely.

By trimming the folder down to a couple dozen files and experimenting, I determined that it was always skipping or having trouble with specific spots in the sequence (second, fourth, seventh, ninth, etc.) no matter which files were in those spots. No matter what I played with as far as renaming the files, or with taking some tracks out and putting in others, the same pattern occurred.

When I took all those files out of the folder and dropped in a bunch of mp3s from My Music folder, none of which I'd used in the game before (no Hendrix on a uboat, lol), they all played in the proper order by filename. Alphabetically at first, then numerically when I renamed all the files 001, 002, and so on.

So I cleared those out and put mp3 versions of about 30 of my SH3 tracks in there, including all the ones I'd been trying the play before as ogg files. Except for two that I didn't have in mp3, which I put back in as ogg since I'd never had problems with them playing in that format and I figured if I still had problems I'd just convert them over.

The first time through, the game didn't play one of the mp3s, which I then put back in as ogg and then it played fine.

The only other thing that didn't play was one of the other ogg files (Radio Deutschland), which had always played fine before even when I was having problems with half of the other tracks in an all ogg folder.

But there were no lags, no other skips, and no crashes, even with a mixed bag of mp3 and ogg, it's working far better than it ever did before.

I'd still like to stick with one format or the other, but right now I'll take whatever seems to work.

[Jimbuna]

Yeah I understand...it just seems strange that I've never heard or read of anyone experiencing similar phenomena

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by jimbuna

Yeah I understand...it just seems strange that I've never heard or read of anyone experiencing similar phenomena

I know, and it's just about got me stumped. When there's clearly nothing wrong with the files, why they'd get skipped only when put in a particular spot in the order is just plain weird. And the game would actually freeze momentarily at the end of a track before it decided which one to play next. With the mp3s I don't notice that.

I tried variations on numbered filenames, too, like taking out the leading zeros, stuff like that... made no difference. The only thing I didn't try was something like naming them AAA, AAB, AAC, to try and create an alphabetical sequence instead, since having track title filenames didn't seem to work right either.

Why it was an issue with ogg and not mp3 - especially when ogg is supposedly more stable for most people - can't figure that out at all.

Don't really care any more, if I can just get it to work one way or the other.