Android Bug: App loops if directory has a ':' in the name

[ccandreva]

Some people have reported the Android app causing a large server load, and I may have figured out why.

I've found that if you try to load files where there is a ":" (colon) character somewhere in the path, the app never downloads anything, but goes into a loop starting many connections to the server. This is the cause of the load.

This seems to only be an issue in the Android app, as the same files play with the same transcoders fine through the jukebox and web players.

[nullchar]

Like you suspected, this is a limitation of the FAT filesystem that Android uses. See the character exclusions here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Directory_table

It is a bummer the colon ":" character can't be used as it exists in many of my podcast directories and filenames. I wonder how difficult it would be for the android app to replace ":" with "-" when it write the file to disk cache.

[sanods]

It is a bummer the colon ":" character can't be used as it exists in many of my podcast directories and filenames. I wonder how difficult it would be for the android app to replace ":" with "-" when it write the file to disk cache.

That would be the proper solution and should be pretty easy, its a matter of always converting the filename in the same way when reading from the disk.

[nullchar]

My patch was accepted and this issue is fixed! (The full FAT exclusions were applied.)

I can now stream music from my linux box with ":" in the path to my android phone.

(This enables me to stream a lot of NPR podcasts, as they often have colons in the path, at least when podcasted from Rhythmbox.)