Greetings!

Valid point about the partition sizing controls being publicly available. I forgot that it is not as much the builder kernel as much as the switches you feed into laying out the partitions in the first place.

In the early days (waaaay back when), disk space was more at a premium, so there was a need to minimize scratch and swap partition sizes. Now with 100GB drives near enough to be tempting *, combined with greater accessibility and acceptance of MP3 (and OGG and FLAC) technology, larger databases are much more common.

I do not think that it is a hardcoded limit in the player software as such. I am able to use the player with FIDs far higher than what was expected normally. The player app does not appear to complain (but I have never really tested while watching console out... hmmm...) and keeps going happily. Emplode crashes, but I am able to rebuild the database by running the player app from command line while the filesystems are read/write.

So, I suspect that emplode has an error checking condition and crashes. The player does not, and happily does the "right thing". I am sure that some error or problem is being generated, but I have not found it yet.

* - Disk size. 100GB. There was a thread about this somewhere where I said that I might wait. That is no longer the case. I have been through a major music acquisition phase, and I find that I need the 100GB drives as soon as possible. To quote Tom Lehrer - "More! More! I'm still not satisfied!"