I don’t fully understand why, but copying files to an iRiver MP3 player using OS X’s Finder results in large numbers of files being created with names beginning with ‘._’ It’s not the end of the world – they’re extremely small files in the grand scheme of things – but it’s an annoyance because they’re unplayable, and cause a pause if you’re using shuffle mode while the player works out that it can’t play them and skips on to the next track.
I’ve tried a few ways of getting rid of them (including one which resulted in wiping all the files off the iRiver completely, although there was a silver lining to this particular cloud as it’s significantly reduced the boot-up time of the player) with varying degrees of success. However, the sure-fire way of doing it is to spend €7 on TinkerTool System, a rather nifty utility programette from Marcel Bresink.
In the ‘Clean Up’ screen there are two tabs – ‘Remove Finder Info’ which gets rid of the ‘.DS_Store’ files, and ‘Remove Emulated Forks’, which removes the ‘._’ files. If you’ve mounted the iRiver as a disk, you can select its root, click ‘delete’, and the file annoyances will disappear.
