So after working through the customer service chain being guided to reformat my disk, re install the app, load the music in small chunks - none of which solved anything, I got this message from Customer service.
"Dear John,
I appreciate your time and patience. We are aware of this issue that you are facing. Loading large amount of music files results in the database taking an extremely long time to complete. We would like to thank you for your feedback and we will pass this to the development team. We are currently working on this issue and will release a fix in future. However, we do not have any specific date or timeline when the update will be released. As a work around I would recommend you to use folder view to browse by folder to play music. We understand and acknowledge that this is not ideal, however currently this is the only work around we can offer. In the current implementation, genre sorts on song but album."
It’s pretty clear to me that they shipped a product they never tested.
It’s curious that the music can be played from files but not when you launch the music player. The music player seems to get lost formating audio files and formating thumbnails. Why does it need to format audio files for the music player but not when you play music from the file system? And if processing thumbnails is what is taking all the processing time then they should just add a switch to disable thumbnails - until they figure out a better solution.
The really sad thing is that SanDisk doesn’t bother to post a bug description and a guide to how one can work around it. That would save a lot of time and effort for everyone!
Here’s what I suggest for someone trying to work with a large music data base that is composed mostly of traditional “albums”.
Create a file for each genre. Add another file within each genre for each artist. Within each artist file add a file for each album.
For the most part, iTunes created a file for each artist and within that a file for each album already for me so it was mostly a matter of moving the artist file to the correct genre file that I created. Complication albums required a bit more work. Forget about using artwork.
For a large music library that was created by iTunes this can be a fair amout of work but I found that it made my SanDisk library managable. And it does seem to work - just don’t launch the buggy and ill-conceived music player, i.e. the music buttion. Find the album you want through the file system and play that. Yes, this is lame for an IOS music player in 2017. And the SanDisk app was certainly a lame attempt at developing and TESTING an app. If there’s anyone in the company that really cares about any of this I’ve yet to find them.
