Thanks for the help. I had not found the setting for the music path, as when I looked at the dialog I had just seen the "simple" side and had not checked the advanced side. Now it works, but I have to change folders to hear different songs.

Everything on the drive is arranged by artist, and there are many sub-folders. Many of the folders have jpg images to go along with the albums/cds the music is found on. I have to manually select the next track in the Play menu to make it move to the next file when it lands on an image file.

Is there any chance you could add functionality to allow the music selection routine to look in all sub-folders and skip the non-music files?

Edit:

I found that Sokoban is not keeping the setting for the music path. Every time I launch the game it reverts back to the default path. Is this normal? Would you consider changing it to preserve the path I set?

The external drive is always connected, and comes online when I start the computer. I did not click the default settings button, even by accident. The only change I make is to what folder I want to hear music from. Each time I start Sokoban, the path is reset back to the Sokoban 3/Music folder. I finally stopped trying and just left it at the default.

The drive is a Toshiba Portable External Hard Drive, Model #HDDR200E02X USB powered USB 2.0.

What would be helpful is if I could put shortcuts to the music files I want to listen to in the default Music folder. That would bypass the problem of having to constantly change folders, and would allow me to add or remove songs at my leisure, simply by adding or removing shortcuts (not to mention the space savings on my internal HD).

To the non-music files issue, I am not sure what to say. All I know is that the image files in the folders on the USB drive seem to make the music halt until I select next track from the Play menu, and if there are more than one image in a row, I have to select next track until it finds a music file.

After the last post, I tried setting the path again. This time, it stayed and has not changed. I don't know why or what changed. However, I still have to click next track in the Play menu about 13 times before the first track plays. I know there are image files that show up in the list before the music files, so I am assuming this is what I am having to skip past. I will use the function you named to see if it helps with this. I still don't understand what made Sokoban not keep my path selection the first few times I changed it.

Edit:

I did as you asked, and the report was sent. A strange thing happened after I closed the Report a Problem dialog. A sokoban window title appeared in the task bar that was titled Introduction. I've never seen this window title in the task bar before, even when the Information window is open at program startup. When I clicked it to bring the window forward, it did nothing. When I right-clicked and selected Close, the whole program quit. Restarting revealed that the music was not going to play until I went through the Next Track selection 11 times (or more, this time took 13 times).

dir F:\Rock\Petty, Tom\*.mp3

I had to put quotes around the path due to the space character in "Petty, Tom", and it listed all of the mp3 files in the folder. There are no midi files in the folder, so the second command returned "File not found".

Without the file specification, the command returns the complete listing for all files in the folder, except for the jpeg images. There are 10 of them, and they have filenames like:

AlbumArt_{15B173D5-1511-471C-B0A3-A645F92683B8}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{15B173D5-1511-471C-B0A3-A645F92683B8}_Small.jpg

Each pair of them are a _Large version and a _Small version. The cmd.exe dir command does not list these files, and when I try to do a specific path, like dir "F:\Rock\Petty, Tom\*.jpg" I get File not found.

One inconsistency I found is that there are 40 music files in the folder, and the dir command listed them all, but only reported 39 files in the directory. The 10 jpg images were not included in the count.

Edit: 03 August, 2014

Today is my regular system maintenance day. Today I use my registry cleaner to get the registry in shape, and defrag the internal HD. After performing these operations, I ran Sokoban to see if the cleaning had any effect on the music.

Low and behold, the music started playing, but not at the splash screen as usual. Because of the jpg files, the current level was displayed for about 10 seconds before the music began. I then switched the path to another folder, and sure enough, the music changed almost instantaneously. I believe this shows that the problem was more due to my system needing maintenance, and not so much an issue with Sokoban.

It's good to know that Sokoban 3.3.1 is very stable. All I could wish for would be either shortcuts in the music folder, or the ability to create a music list that would allow me to specify which files in which folders, in order for sequential play.

Lesson for the day: Remember to clean your system regularly to rid yourself of pesky slow-downs and intermittent problems. Works for more than just Sokoban.