The reason for including all the checking for free memory and error reporting, is simply due to their presence in all the examples I have seen. Much of "my" code is copying from these examples and my knowledge of what is required when reading an SD card is virtually zero. The most basic example Adafruit(brand of my shield) gives is playing all the wav files on the SD card in a loop and even that includes all this extra code. What is the simplest code necessary to read the SD card and then play a specific file? In the end I will need the program to compare analogValue to the thresholds during playback to determine whether or not the arduino should stop the current song and switch to a different one. Thank you for your input PaulS!