Sansa Fuze+ Firmware 02.38.06

I was just checking rockbox status over at http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,26284.0.html and figured that I might as well stop here.  This is an amazing release list… it could well make this device usable for a large collection (16+32) for the first time!  

Edit:

Thank you for this release. It is rough & quirky, but functional… exactly what I expected 10 months ago in September 2010 when I bought your 16 GB Fuze+ with a 32 GB Sansa microSD for $213 the day that it was shipped. You can now legitimately sell a product that matches your advertised specifications.   Yes, the menu is still quirky and jumpy, it certainly does not approach Apple devices in terms of interface, but it is cheaper for fucntionality and finally… it is now at least usable.  After 10 months, I will actually be able to use this Fuze+.

I had been waiting for a 45 to 50 GB solid state player with recordable radio for 6 years as I made do with a RockBoxed iRiver iHP-140 hard disk player.  I could have waited as long as the iRiver was still ticking.  But I sold it for $185, purchased your offering and have been without a functional player ever since.  I would have saved $75 bucks and hundreds of hours of time by waiting until today, but hey… now I have it.

I am what Marketing literature refers to as an “opinion leader” and have purchased and/or recommended slews of your previous players to family, friends and coworkers.  I personally never owned one because I was waiting for your supported capacities to reach my requirements, but after they did and I purchased I steered many, many people to the Apple products.   What you need to understand is that people like me are who your potential customers speak with before purchase.  We are not brand loyal so much as functionality and quality loyal. 

I’m going to finally be able to use this device, but I’m a long way from recommending it. 

Anyone else having trouble with the menu looping? I haven’t tried every menu and sub-menu, but it seems that the only thing that actually loops is the photo menu.

yes, gwk1967…Apparently, this firmware update didn’t fix it 

after the firmware upgrade, nothing has really changed…the capasitive touch control is still troublesome. At times it lags greatly, other times it’s too sensitive. You know, I was psyched a few months ago when I bought this player…after having it this long, I’m really greatly disappointed in this player. I very much feel ripped off. I read ALL the comments on here & I’m not the only one disappointed. Fuze+ was promising but…I’m afraid it has failed. I’m not even sure if they can fix the touch control sensitivity by firmware upgrade alone…It may be a mechanical thing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they scrapped the Fuze+ & discontinue make them & maybe start on a whole new line. My Insignia Pilot MP3 player from Best Buy was discontinueed in a matter of months.

“Anyone else having trouble with the menu looping? I haven’t tried every menu and sub-menu, but it seems that the only thing that actually loops is the photo menu.”

All of my menus loop.  But I don’t really care… the only real reason that menu looping was required was that the Artist and Song list were nonfunctinal at high capacties and looping would have allowed a left move that looped around to the right to make to genres.  With 48 GB of music there was no simply way to make it through songs to genres. 

“after the firmware upgrade, nothing has really changed…the capasitive touch control is still troublesome. At times it lags greatly, other times it’s too sensitive. … I’m not even sure if they can fix the touch control sensitivity by firmware upgrade alone…It may be a mechanical thing.”

Yes, still not satisfying when compared to a responsive and well designed UI such as Apple, but the truth is that we finally have what an old software engineer like myself would consider to be an alpha or even beta release, and what a product manager would call 1.0.  There can be no doubt that Sansa released this product about a year before it was ready and failed to test at reasonable capacities, but still… this is a MAJOR release.  As a developer I can assure you that the touch control sensitivity is 100% related to poor software design, not to hardware (“a mechanical thing”).  Hardware simply cannot to be too sensitive or granular… it is poor time slicing in the software that handles the interupts and/or the need to do file system access because of an inefficient indexing strategy  (which we have seen repeatedly over the past 8 months).   This issue pales in significance to the complete failure of the UI when loaded anywhere over 40% of rated capacity that has finally been addressed.  Further fixes in the responsiveness of the UI should be relatively trivial in comparision. 

“You know, I was psyched a few months ago when I bought this player…after having it this long, I’m really greatly disappointed in this player. I very much feel ripped off. I read ALL the comments on here & I’m not the only one disappointed. Fuze+ was promising but…I’m afraid it has failed.”

Yep, me too.  I sold a GREAT player to buy this and then spent over a hundred hours retagging my collection in a vain attempt to swap genres into artists, combine artists, etc just to get to a collection into a form which I could get some minimal usage from the menus.  Sadly, it never did became even minimally functional (until now).  So for me this has been a completely unusable purchase that I haul out of a desk drawer every few months or so for a firmware update after checking the Rockbox site and afterwards, a quick curse at Sansa and a new story for my audiophile friends (who tell their friends). 

I’m not very picky; all that I ever wanted was basic usability in a small form factor for a large collection.  But I really do take offense when I trust a company and get completely ripped off.  Sansa has burned quite a bit of trust with me and I am now hesitant to recommend them.  I really do appreciate the fact that someone at Sansa heard us.  I joined solely because the previous complaints here were way too vague to be actionable and I’m fairly certain that my rather detailed complaints have directly led to this release.  I have to admit that the complete lack of feedback from Sansa made me doubt that this was filtering through to the product managers.

Either way, my job here is done… we finally have the minimum for which we paid and that’s fair enough for me.

ok…if you done the update & finding out that the menu looping isn’t working…here’s why…simply go into the settings, then customize menu…the option to turn it on/off lies in there.

Thanks for the upgrades. Now we need an option to keep the display on all the time when connected to external power or for the display to turn on at the end of a song and at the beginning of a song. Also it would be nice to have a play all option for albums that would play all albums one album after another and not all songs. Selecting shuffle all and then turning off shuffle and scrolling to the first song is a workaround but a real pain in the #%$. The original Fuze had the play all option. Thanks

is it just me or when you turn it on after the logo it just blanks out instead of going to the menu? You need to touch the touch pad in order to get the menu.

backlight: 30 secs

firmware: 02.38.06

The previous firmware separated audibles from non-drm audiobooks (in the “audiobooks” section).  The audiobooks section still does not have folders, making it useless if you are keeping multiple audiobooks on the device.  It also seems to sort titles in that section alphabetically by title, instead of by track #.

Does anyone know if this will change later?  I have to untag the genre of my audiobooks and listen to them in the music section, or not listen to them at all.

@alienkid10 wrote:

is it just me or when you turn it on after the logo it just blanks out instead of going to the menu? You need to touch the touch pad in order to get the menu.

 

I noticed that once or twice, but obviously not a show stopper.

@j_locklear wrote:

ok…if you done the update & finding out that the menu looping isn’t working…here’s why…simply go into the settings, then customize menu…the option to turn it on/off lies in there.

Yes, there seems to be many of us who have not been able to activate looped menus (or maybe it’s just me. :wink:) . Thanks for clearing that up. This is something that I’m excited about.

Also, it seems that my little player to starts up a little faster, now. I’m sure that it has something to do with that so-called “Content library handling improvement”. I have noticed in the past that my device starts up a little faster without the memory card, and that it refreshes the internal memory faster. In fact, the internal memory seems to do everything faster. So, I’m going to assume that there is less activity going on with the internal/external memory, making everything faster. That’s freaking awesome!!! :smileyvery-happy:

I can browse by folder! Excellent! Now my only big complaint with the fuze+ is how awful the touchpad is.

Just to let people know: when trying to browse by folder, my internal memory initially read as empty. Once I added a new folder though, everything showed up. So if you’re having a similar problem, see if that fixes things for you.

I figured out the backlight problem. Despite me setting it at 30 and it looking like it’s at 30 it times out at 15. I’ll expiriment with other settings latter weird bug. Also when you turn the device on for a minute+ and set the time then turn it off a few minues later and come back to turn it on then the time is reset to what you last set it to.

I have problem with flac format. If I have more albums for one artist, display me only one album - ,RTIST=*name of artist*". (When I have only one album for one artist, sometimes display this too). Have anyone same problem?

Sorry for my really bad english :) 

@zuzle93 wrote:

I have problem with flac format. If I have more albums for one artist, display me only one album - ,RTIST=*name of artist*". (When I have only one album for one artist, sometimes display this too).  Have anyone same problem?

 

Not since the orginal firmware. Have you updated it?

I have version 02.38.06 A. I updated it yesterday.

Honestly I wish they added a real useful feature: navigation by letter in some way not that you have to scroll everything :neutral_face:

did they fix the sluggishness with sd + internal memory?

@_sandro wrote:

Honestly I wish they added a real useful feature: navigation by letter in some way not that you have to scroll everything :neutral_face:

did they fix the sluggishness with sd + internal memory?

You should try it for yourself, but I think that’s what is meant by

Enhancements

Music content browsing by folder

Menu looping feature added

Audiobook sort order improvement

Low battery state early warning message added

Content library handling improvement

Let us know if things are better now. :wink:

@_sandro wrote:

Honestly I wish they added a real useful feature: navigation by letter in some way not that you have to scroll everything :neutral_face:

did they fix the sluggishness with sd + internal memory?

Could be a pain for SANSA to get the firmware to add an alpha search without a QWERTY keyboard…???

Would be better (for me anyway) if the PLAYLIST’s worked, then at least you could separate a large database of tracks into various smaller LISTS of music, then the scrolling within each LIST would take less time…

The Startup still takes AGES to load my 6.4k tracks…but other updates in 02.38.06 were most welcome, especially with the ‘touch pad’ response, maybe the sensitivity could have an option in SETTINGS??

The folder browsing doesn’t appear to work that well at least for me. As far as I can tell it only browses things in the ‘music’ folder, I can’t get it to browse podcasts or audiobooks on other folders.

Also anything that get’s indexed via the genre tag into another section like audiobooks and podcasts doesn’t show up via folder browsing even if it’s placed in the ‘music’ folder.

Maybe I’m doing something wrong but it doesn’t appear to be actual folder browsing since it is still reliant on tag data.