1 gig = wishful thinking?

May 26, 2005 3:58 AM

Based on excellent advice from this thread, I settled on a Creative Muvo 1 gig mp3 player. I've been happily adding tracks, but when I hit the 532 mb mark, it won't let me add anything else. Everything in there so far are mp3s with a handful of wmas, and I'm stumped as to why I can't have a gig of files on a gig drive. Ideas?
posted by moonbird to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Oh, and the error I get is this: Cannot copy (file name): The directory or file cannot be created. Thanks in advance...
posted by moonbird at 4:38 AM on May 26, 2005

Any chance you have a duplicate file name trying to go into the same directory on the device?
posted by Goofyy at 5:06 AM on May 26, 2005

Try reformatting the device?
posted by effugas at 5:17 AM on May 26, 2005

I have the same player, bought right before going on vacation. Tried loading it up with music and blam, same problem. Since I was in a rush, the solution I stumbled on was to create folders on the player and split the files up.

Seems to work fine and shuffles between folders as well.
posted by SteveInMaine at 5:33 AM on May 26, 2005

Ah, sounds like it is limiting the number of files that can occupy a folder. Haven't seen that limitation in some years! IIRC, DOS did that.
posted by Goofyy at 5:50 AM on May 26, 2005

Chances are the player is showing up as a FAT16 volume which has some pretty severe limits on the number of files you can have in a folder--512 in any given folder. Here's a page with the various dos/windows file systems and their limitations.

Most USB storage devices use fat16 because it's simple(r) to implement.
posted by plinth at 5:56 AM on May 26, 2005

I suspect plinth is correct. I didn't bother formatting my Muvo when I got it, just deleted the sample files and copied the new stuff on. The docs say this player supports FAT, FAT16 or FAT32 but not NTFS, so I'll bet it comes out of the factory at either FAT or FAT16.
posted by SteveInMaine at 7:36 AM on May 26, 2005

In Explorer, right-click the drive, go to FORMAT, select the file system as FAT32. Be sure to back everything up beforehand.

As everyone has alluded to.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:01 AM on May 26, 2005

You guys are great... hadn't thought of any of these. I'll check it out when I get home.
posted by moonbird at 10:18 AM on May 26, 2005

The FAT32 reformat did the trick. Cheers! (Now I've got a playlist from heaven for almost 24 hours of plane travel)
posted by moonbird at 4:46 PM on May 26, 2005