I have a SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8 GB MP3 Player. I haven’t had any problems with my player up until yestersday. Playing it while driving to work, I noticed that it was skipping around a lot. Like it would stop on a song, freeze for a few seconds, skip 3-4 songs, stop on one and finally play a song about 10 seconds later. Sometimes it would move on fine to the next song and sometimes it would do the skip and freeze thing again. I thought maybe my player was too full, although my computer tells me I still have 542 MB left on my player. This morning I hooked it up to my computer and went into the folder to delete some songs to see if that will help. However it won’t allow me to do that either. The screen on my player says it is connected to the PC but when I try to delete a song, my PC tells me my player isn’t connected or the player is unresponsive and wont delete the song. What can I do?
EDIT* Just went back in and now my music folder is completely empty. I wasn’t attempting to delete anything out of my regular music folder. I was trying to delete songs from my playlist folder. I went back into a playlist I had in there and it still has most of those songs but also has 20-30 icons before the list of songs that say they are local disks? I don’t understand.
It may be a bad cord. Do you have another one? It is a standard miniUSB (not microUSB) connection.
Once you get a connection, go to Settings/System Settings/USB Mode and try both MSC and MTP to see if you can see your music. Music goes over by either MTP or MSC, and your computer can only see music sent over by one mode at a time.
If it’s gone, it was probably in MTP mode, which expects Windows Media Player to control the player, and some Sync business went crazy.
I suggest updating the firmware in case it went crazy. Settings/System Settings/USB Mode MSC. Near the top of the first forum page is a software update sticky thread. Use the Manual method: download the .zip file, unzip it, and drag it onto the SANSA CLIP driveletter. It will update when you disconnect without changing the files you have put on.
After that the easiest thing may be to just start over. Settings/System Settings/Format will empty the player of your files. Then pick a USB Mode (instead of Auto): WMP if you want to use Windows Media Player for playlists etc., MSC if you want it to just work like another drive on your computer (actually two drives: the internal memory and the card) for drag-and-drop. Put your music back on the player and card and hope for the best.
Okay…so I did switch the setting. The player was still acting up. My husband was able to copy all of my songs in the folder to an outside folder on the desktop so I can delete the ones in my player. I already deleted them, but it still won’t let me delete the playlist. It tells me “The Playlists cannot be deleted. The device has either stopped responding or has been disconnected”. That is what I don’t get. If it wasn’t connected, I wouldn’t be able to access the folder itself and why did it let me delete all of my songs in the regular music folder and not the playlist? It won’t even let me delete the folder itself. I will try reloading my music back into my player and see if is back to playing normally or if it’s still being crazy.
I just reformatted my player so it is completely empty now. I had mentioned that I moved the songs from the folder on my player to a desktop folder on my pc. However probably about 70% of the songs are corrupted. And what I mean by that is when I go to play it in WMP, it will play like the last 2 seconds of a previous song over and over and that is it or it will play nothing at all (yet the bar still moves like it is playing). I didn’t want to have to manually reload because my songs aren’t all in the same folder. There’s some in one or another and I have to search for them. But of that is what I have to do then I guess I have no choice.
Sorry about the problems. WMP sometimes just does wacky things, unfortunately.
In case it’s the Sansa, do a firmware fix before you reload it.
Put the unit in MSC Mode (Settings/System Settings/USB Mode-MSC)
Download from the Manual Firmware Update link in this thread.
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Clip-Sansa-Clip/Sansa-Clip-Firmware-Update-01-02-18/td-p/280756
Connect the Clip.
Unzip it and drag the unzipped folder or file onto the SANSA CLIP driveletter.
It will load the firmware when you disconnect. Then reset the USB mode to MTP for Windows Media Player.
I did a firmware update yesterday and that didn’thelp. Would it be any different if I did it again since I formatted it?
Thanks for all of your help! 
Try it. It can’t hurt.
Formatting gets rid of anything you (or screwy Windows Media Player) might have added to make it freak out. That’s in a separate partition from the firmware. Updating the firmware fixes the other (hidden) partition. So basically you will have completely taken it back to zero if you both format and update the firmware.
