1: There is no printed manual. There is a section for the Touch in the
wiki, click on the community tab at the top of this page and go to the
wiki. Scroll down to the Hardware section and click on the Touch entry.
This gives a few general hints about using the Touch ibternal server. 

Its a little paranoid about bus powered drives. There are many bus
powered drives that will work fine when plugged direct into the Touch.
Some though actually draw more power than the USB spec allows and these
will have problems. Thus the recommendation to use a powered hub with
bus powered drives. The consensus here seems to be: try it direct first
and only resort to a powered hub if it doesn't work when connected
directly.

There is no detailed reference manual that goes into detail about every
menu option on the Touch. Your best bet is to spend some time and go
through all the setting options and get familiar with what is there.
There is a lot of stuff under the advanced settings menu. 

It sounds like most of your issues are related to server problems, I'll
cover a procedure I have found which seems to have a good probability of
success, its similar to the one in the wiki, with a few modifications.

First eject the drive (from home menu) then unplug the drive. Unplug
the power on the touch. Plug the drive into a PC or Mac and delete the
.squeezebox directory. On some OSes a name that starts with a '.' is
hidden so you should turn on hidden files. This deletes any existing
database on the disk. If you have a corrupted database on the disk from
a previous scan that didn't complete strange things can happen. 

Now plug in the power to the Touch. Wait a couple minutes so the
initialization is complete and things have settled down. Now plug in
the USB drive. You should get a popup saying the a USB device has been
recognized and the server is starting. You will get a message about
ejecting, at this point say you want to see the progress. From now on
do not do ANYTHING with the Touch. Don't touch the screen, don't try
and show pictures, don't try and look at the menus, don't try and play
internet radio. This is very important, the scan process takes a lot of
memory and anything else you do can use up enough memory that the scan
can crash. 

This starts a full scan of the disk. This can take a LONG time for
large collections of music. Yours is not too big so it shouldn't be too
bad. First it finds all files on the disk and determines which are audio
and cover art files. You will get a file count as it goes. When it has
visited all the files you will get a completed message.

Then it goes and reads every audio file it previously found and
extracts any tag information in the file. It builds a database of
information about each song. This can take a long time. When it is done
you get a completed message.

Now it goes and reads the cover art it found on the disk. At this point
it is cataloging and resizing the cover art. Large cover art can really
slow this down, and might even crash the server if the image size is
really large. Again when it is done you will get a completed message. 

You need to wait until you get all three completed messages before
continuing. At this point you can touch the Touch again. Here is where
I differ, at this point I recommend ejecting the USB device using the
home menu, physically unplug the drive cable, unplug the power to the
Touch. Plug the Touch back in, wait a couple minutes. Plug the USB
drive back in. At this point it will do a quick scan looking for any
new files it didn't see last time. If there was nothing new on the disk
it should complete this fairly quickly and NOW you are ready to play
music!

Many people don't wait long enough for the initial scan to complete and
thus leave a corrupted database on the disk. Thus the next time they
plug it in it goes and does a full scan. They then try and play music
while its still scanning, causing all kinds of problems.

One very important thing to note is that if the drive is plugged in
when the Touch boots, you get NO indication whatsoever that a scan is
happening!! Thus when you try and play music things are going to be
very slow and its quite easy to kill the server when trying to play
music while a scan is going on. This is why I highly recommend to get
in the habit of always plugging the drive in AFTER booting the Touch,
then you KNOW when the scan is done. 

If you try this procedure and you are still having the problems come
back with the details and we can try and work them out. 

John S.


-- 
JohnSwenson
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