Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata System
Several "primitive but common" flash-based non-Apple USB MP3 players (e.g. AIPTEK MP-1003, SEG MP53-256) will horribly keel over if used in connection with Tiger and/or 10.3.9. They may display two songs for one, or even crash outright when skipping forward or moving on to a second song.

The reason lies in Apple's recently introduced new metadata. On data volumes not supporting metadata, this "data about data" will be stored in the form of separate files with a fileanme syntax of ._xyz.abc -- so for a file named mysong.mp3, there would be a metadata file called ._mysong.mp3.

This actually is the case with 10.3.9 already (not just with Tiger), so it seems Apple has introduced the metadata capabilities via a recent update. Since the old FAT partition format which these flash-based players use cannot cater for metadata, these dot-underscore files get created -- pretty much for every file you're dragging onto the USB volume. Most cheap MP3 players, however, have very primitive firmware (embedded stripped-down DOS, probably), and they will get horribly confused over the notion of these extra metadata files (which have extensions of .mp3, but are not MP3 files).

The solution? Delete the hidden dot-underscore files (eg. from Terminal), and do not browse to the USB volume before unmounting it (or the metadata files will be back). I'm sure people can come up with scripts and all sorts of solutions to conveniently get rid of all the dot- and dot-underscore files on these volumes...
    •    
  • Currently 1.00 / 5
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  (1 vote cast)
 
[8,549 views]  

Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata | 11 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: kowe on Jun 23, '05 01:11:50PM
In fact, we talked about this over three years ago, and people provided scripts in the comments of my original hint:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20020217094739452

[ Reply to This | # ]

Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: webbix on Jun 23, '05 03:35:53PM

'FinderCleaner' <http://www.boswortels.tk/> is a nice little utility to manage this easily. Agreed that this has been going on for a while. I burned an MP3 cd and putting it in a DVD player I say the normally unseen '._' files. My player works okay but it is a pain to have double the files to scroll through.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: trekvogel on Jun 23, '05 07:16:45PM

Thank you for mentioning my app. It was made to solve this problem.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: fracai on Jun 23, '05 03:40:06PM
as requested :)

find ./ -iname "._*" -exec rm -rf -- {} \;

this will find anything that starts with ._ and remove it, folders and files.

as a side note: ._ files have been around for years (as noted in the previous post). in fact, you might as well also remove all the .DS_Store files as well.

the following will just cut to the chase and remove anything that starts with a . this will cover the ._, .DS, etc files as well as any other invisible unix files. just change ./ to the path of the Volume or cd to the Volume first. you definitely don't want to do this at the root of your computer or your home folder.

find is recursive. user beware of course. don't use this if you don't understand it.

find ./ -iname ".*" -exec rm -rf -- {} \;

---
i am jack's amusing sig file

[ Reply to This | # ]

Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: Hanji on Jun 23, '05 09:38:54PM
This is better, works with spaces, quotes, etc. in filenames:
find . -name "._*" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

[ Reply to This | # ]
Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: LC on Jun 24, '05 12:24:29PM
Instead of those -exec directives, why not just use find's -delete ? Larry.

[ Reply to This | # ]
MuVo Helper for Creative MuVo's
Authored by: CreativeOne on Jun 23, '05 06:48:32PM

You can use this utility with the Creative MuVo MP3 players.

http://homepage.mac.com/creativemail/



[ Reply to This | # ]
Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: Frungi on Jun 24, '05 09:00:47PM

The "recently introduced" metadata was introduced with OS X...



[ Reply to This | # ]
Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: tocoolcjs on Jun 24, '05 11:32:26PM
As I previously posted here...
WinFSCleanser Version 2.0
by Chris Shull

Deletes those pesky '._' resource fork files found on some filesystems the user defines. Can delete '.DS_Store' files too.

Caution: removes colored labels and custom icons (and probably more).
Current list of file types that can lose this resource fork are listed as defaults.


[ Reply to This | # ]
Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: taxi on Jun 25, '05 12:36:06AM

I have an NSLU2 where I store all of my Music, and this device also shares it with a PC and an Xbox, so having these dot-underscore files is a pain in the arse for me too.

I have a cronjob which removes them, using the find command, but I do have one question.

I understand this is where OSX stores all of it's meta-data - if I delete these files will this remove the ability to use Spotlight to search these files?

(I'm not running Tiger yet anyway, but might be nice to know).



[ Reply to This | # ]
Older flash-based MP3 players and OS X metadata
Authored by: osxpounder on Jun 25, '05 02:21:31AM

Good question! I've got Tiger on a 2nd drive -- I'm not quite ready to run it full-time yet -- and I'll try to remember to test this out with some files when I boot to Tiger.

---
--
osxpounder



[ Reply to This | # ]