Tracker Mini - Missing folders or empty folders showing ?/ - NOT A BUG (I think) but a tip

After seeing some users having missing files or folders - which does appear to be a bug, but not one I’ve experienced yet on either the Tracker + or the mini, I did encounter a problem which might affect others.

My issue was that inside the Samples folder, I have created a bunch of folders for different sounds, such as a Splice Vocals one, Zero G one etc.

Anyway, after creating folders inside the Splice Vocals folder, and filling some of them, the tracker mini couldn’t see or open them, and the folder names were all ?/

I realised my mistake. Inside the Splice Vocals folder, I had created folders named like this - Vocals A min/C Maj, Vocals F Maj/D Min etc and inside each folder were all samples in those respective keys.

The mini doesn’t like folders containing the forward slash / character. After putting the card in my Mac card reader, I renamed those folders with a dash - eg Amin - C Maj and all my other folders I did the same, removing the forward slash to a dash and it all works. The mini now shows all the folders with the corrected names, and, more importantly, I can open those folders to access the samples. Before, not only were the folder names replaced with a ?/ but I couldn’t open those folders.

So just a tip - avoid using the slash in file or folder names. Just because a Mac can recognise it, the tracker can’t.

It seems to me that the tracker doesn’t like the bandcamp samples either.
I’ve changed the name, checked that they are in 24bits, but nothing works.

Historically you should avoid the following characters with FAT32 formatted drives:

\ / : * ? " < > |

This is not Tracker specific but a limitation of the FAT32 file system.

1 Like