Samsung Alias (u740) won't recognize some of the mp3s

[bjrick]

I recently got Samsung Alias (formerly u740) and a 2GB microSD (Kingston) to go with it. I put 368 MP3s on the 2GB card but when I try to play it from the phone, only 193 of them are recognized (ie. the player indicates there are only 193 songs). I tried adding and removing MP3 tags from the files; I tried changing the bitrate to 128kbps; and I tried renaming the files to something simple (BTW, the files that are recognized have spaces in the name, so it doesn't look like the space-in-the-filename issue). No matter what I do, I can't get these files to be recognized. Does anybody have any idea why this may be?

[bjrick]

I found out what the problem was. The software does not seem to recognize any mp3 file that has a name of more than 40 characters before the extension (ie. .mp3). Also, for files with names that are between 30 and 40 characters, the name gets truncated to 30 characters.

The reason why the files, of which names I simplified/shortened, did not show up initially was because the library database had to be "reinitialized" (by going to option and choosing "Reinitialize library database") after names of the songs were changed to shorter names (less than 40 chracters).

I suspect that this is a limitation with the Verizon software, not a hardware issue, in which case the same would happen with other hardware that has the same Verizon software.

This kind of limitation should be documented in Verizon manual somewhere, but I am not able to find such a documentation if it is indeed documented, that is.

I hope this helps someone out there experiencing the same thing....