Freezing on Refreshing Your Media

Tapeworm — I just now was able to check out the link you sent me.   It is a very interesting article.   I need to “digest” all of this information.  First of all I am going to check out the KopyMac link that is mentioned in that article and see if I can download it from that link as it is different than the first one I saw.  If not I will probably just give up and use my husband’s PC and see how that goes.  I really appreciate the info I have gotten from you and Miikerman.   I didn’t realize all of the complexities of having an MP3 player.  One of my sons’ and his boys have them and I see them at the gym and I decided I wanted one also.  : )   :slight_smile:   I am just stubborn enough not to give up on this!

Hmmm–I went to the http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/10987 link as mentioned in http://guyscharf.wordpress.com/mp3-on-macintosh/ article and the first sentence I saw was KopyMac has been discontinued.   If that is the case, that is probably why the site of the developer is not available at this time.   

Hi everybody. I have the same problem with the Clip Zip freezing during the “Refreshing your media” process. I don’t synch using a Mac, so all this Apple talk isn’t relevant to me. 

I just recently purchased a SanDisk 32 GB micro SDHC card and the clip zip.

When I transfer music onto the card (I have a separate card reader) and place it in the Clip Zip, the refreshing process begins. 

The status bar makes it to about 50% when the Clip Zip completely shuts down. 

I have about 6G of music on the 32GB card. 

I get the impression that the Clip Zip cannot handle this much processing. 

Does anybody else have this issue?

Why not load the card while it’s in your Clip Zip?

And a freeze-up (or player shutdown) during the database refresh is almost always caused by the player not being able to read an ID3 tag of one or more files. This you can correct with a free tag-editor program like MP3Tag.

Thanks Tapeworm. I’ll look into the ID3 tag issue. I forgot to mention that the same issue happens when I load the card via the Clip Zip also.

I thought that it may have been an issue with having DRM .m4p files on the card (from Apple). But that was not the issue either. 

This only happens when I load music into the card. Not the internal memory. 

So I narrowed the problem down to one particular album, by process of elimination. Any tips on what could possibly be the issue within the ID3 tag??? 

Everything looks okay to me, but then again, I’m not sure what I’m looking for.

This also seems to be a widespread issue. Is there a sticky post I can refer to?

Ok. I think I fixed it. I downloaded the “Mp3tag” application  here . 

Start the application pointed to your music directoy (for me it was my Itunes directory).

Then, I found the album that was giving me the problem. 

Highlight all the songs of the album and right click. You’ll see a menu option titled “Extended Tags…”.

Under the “Metadata” menu, I deleted every tag except:

ALBUM

ALBUMARTIST

ARTIST

TITLE

TOTALTRACKS

TRACK

YEAR

The others, which seemed Itunes related, I’d deleted by hitting the red “X” next to the menu.

I’m hoping I can do this for my entire library.

Hope this helps anybody also having this issue.

Glad it seems to have worked for you, but was there something wrong with the direct link to the program I gave you?

Go into the Tools menu and set the Write default to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. This will insure the tags are in the format read easiest by the player. There are literally hundreds of posts, threads and/or discussions on Sansa players and ID3 tags here on the forum. Feel free to peruse some to get some tips.

And dont’ forget to click the SAVE icon after you’ve made your changes. :wink:

Hi foma18,

It is great to hear from you that you figured it out.

Milkerman - “I think many Mac products are great and thank Apple for desiging many nice products so that the PC side of the industry can follow.”

The real genius of Apple was to convince people that Mac’s aren’t PC’s. PC stands for “Personal Computer”. If Mac’s aren’t computers, what are they?

:wink: I’d rather call the remaining 90% of the computer industry the “PC side” rather than the “non-Apple side.” :wink:

So, my question is: how do you apply the mp3tag to a playlist that has already been built? The playlist is on Windows Media Player, all have been converted to mp3 instead of wva, but I still get the “sync is finished” then it starts on the refreshing your media and stops. I even left it overnight to see if it would finish. Um, nope.

Also, once it gets stuck on the “refresh” thing, you can’t even try to get to “settings” to correct anything.

What is even more strange is that I have the same music on an older Clip, but it is old enough it’s not real reliable, so I bought the new Clip Zip. Can’t figure out why there’s no problem with the tags on one, but are with the new and improved one. Go figure.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Now not only is it stuck on “refreshing your media”, but I can’t get it to do ANYTHING. I can’t reset it, can’t clear it. 

Does this sound like more than a refresh problem?

This does sound like an issue, but: how long are you holding the on button down, to reset the player? It can take 20-30 seconds or more–some people have reported even a minute. I’d just hold and hold, to see if something, then, will reset.

This is obviously too late a reply to help the original questioner, but someone else may wind up here looking for a solution.  If you check the specs for the clip, you will see a list of file types that it supports.  One file type that it does NOT support is mpeg, indicated by the file extension .m4a.  If there is an mpeg file in the mix of files you are trying to transfer onto the clip, the clip will choke, and get stuck building its database of files, indicating this with the “refreshing your media” message.  Then, it freezes, and then turns off.  Getting it started again requires holding the power button for about a minute.

To avoid this freeze, either remove files with the .m4a extension before transferring files from some source on your hard disk, or,as I have done on my Ubuntu machine, use a converter, which converts .m4a files to .ogg, which the clip handles just fine.

The converter i used left the old .m4a files, and stored the new .ogg files,so, you also have to search for all the .m4a’s and delete those before transferring files.

Hope this helps someone with this really frustrating problem.

I use “Folders” and don’t use annoing “Refreshing…” at all.

How to disable indexing completly?

@zerg wrote:

I use “Folders” and don’t use annoing “Refreshing…” at all.

How to disable indexing completly?

You can’t if you are using the player as is. If however, you install the 3rd party, open-source firmware Rockbox it does the database refresh in the background so you don’t have to wait for it every time you add or delete any files.

Rockbox is very feature-packed and has lots of options though, and can be a bit daunting and/or confusing for some.

@tapeworm wrote:
Rockbox it does the database refresh in the background

Is now Rockbox don’t require everytime manual actions to boot?

@zerg wrote:

Is now Rockbox don’t require everytime manual actions to boot?

Yes! Now Rockbox patching original firmware to boot. And now have ability to disable indexing at all. Gone to Rockbox…

Hi,

The  one I have is stuck on “refreshing your media”. I switched it off and on a couple of times, no use. My computer isnt recognizing it now either. Please help me.

Thanks.