Fuze+ Feedback and Feature Request Thread

See the following

Something that I am hoping for is maybe the ability to change background colors, use whichever colors you want.  I disable a number of menu options simply because I don’t ever use them, but doing so actually changes the background color of the UI, so I’d like the ability to pick whichever color you want.  

Also, it seems that when I have all my music on the micro sd card, the background album art collage does not work.  I hope that could be fixed.  

one more Idea:

In order to improve scrolling artist list

I noticed that in the Artist menu, down and up botton can only be use with simple click (while ■■■■ is most of the time presice enough to make selection). Would it be possible to implement a double click on these bottons that would jump directly to the next alphabetic letter? I think this could increase dramaticaly the usability of large library…

And again one more idea:

If we keep the goal trying to implement some alphabetic selection…

I noticed that while playing a song one can keep the center botton pressed in order to add another song to playlist.

This input method (keeping center botton pressed) remain free in the artist selection. It could be used in order to activate the flick from letter to letter. The inconvenient might be then that one keep on waiting 2 second to actived it all the time. This issue could then be solved by a linked option in the properties menu in order to decide wether or not alphabetic selection should be always on when one enter the artist menu.

And right another one:

If some material restriction are making impossible to have locking  fonction on the power button, you may consider the possibility to implement it when both volume botton are pressed together (the goal should be to transfert from the “too sensitive” pad to the 3 remaining botton the locking-unlocking fonction

Just got this today, and here are some suggestions, mostly a couple of things that have already been mentioned:

Change behaviour of the touch controls/locking

Change it so that it continuously scrolls, and that the speed at which it scrolls at is proportional to the distance from the centre (already suggested). Make it so that you press the power to lock/unlock, or at least get rid of the swipe-to-unlock UI feature – with the sluggish UI, it’s hard to determine whether this swipe was performed successfully or not. Hitting the play/pause button in a menu should not play the selected song, it should play/pause appropriately.

Menus should wrap instead of bounce back

Pretty self-explanatory. It’s annoying to have to go all the way left instead of just wrapping to the other end.

Variable font sizes

Allowing us to change the sizes of the font (even just in typical intervals such as “Small”, “Medium”, and "Large) would greatly benefit those of us that like seeing more info, and those of us that want to see more songs listed at once.

Menu options

Allow us to put a menu like Songs on the main menu, and have left-right scrolling scroll through the alphabet. I, for one, rarely use Artists/Albums, and would rather have an easy way to access the Songs menu to browse through all my songs.

Support album art transparency

White stripes are ugly.

Speed up UI

I know this is categorized as a known issue, but I can’t stress how slow the UI is right now. Trying to scroll through a small 300-song list takes forever, and the framerate seems rather low. The font smoothing is kind of awkward and seems slow. Do whatever it takes to boost the FPS of the UI up to par.

Modify current playing UI

The touch controls right now are simply too sensitive for regular use. I skip tracks by accident way too much. Make the track skipping be based on swipes rather than taps, and that’ll be a great first step. Centre the text displayed, and have everything scroll, or do what the iPod Nano used to do, which is display track/artist then change to track/album. At least, make the track title larger to make it a little nicer to look at.

I know I made a lot of suggestions, but I really do think this is a rig with tremendous capacity for improvement, and I have trust in you guys, knowing what was done with the Clip/+.

I also agree with the Idea of having the possibility to navigate through directories. For exemple, now that the musics and videos from cards are automaticaly add to the general library, why not converting the card menu into directories search, with an extra directory for internal memory?

@metaphysicien wrote:

I also agree with the Idea of having the possibility to navigate through directories. For exemple, now that the musics and videos from cards are automaticaly add to the general library, why not converting the card menu into directories search, with an extra directory for internal memory?

That would require folder/file navigation, something that was added in a firmware update to the original Fuze and came standard with the Clip+ model. The Fuze+ does not have this feature currently, but SanDisk may be working on adding it in the future.

Currently, it only sorts, organizes and displays the information gleaned from the ID3 tags of the files.

I also kind of wish the Fuze+ would handle id3v2.4 tags. The current version of EasyTag found in the Ubuntu Software Centre doesn’t use id3v2.3 tags any more, and when I first tried tagging the files they just ended up not being recognized. Only afterwards did I realize what happened did I install the repository version that allowed the 2.3/2.4 change.

For those of you that are not happy with the key lock feature on the Fuze+ there is a poll on the forum main page.  go vote now or forever hold your peace :slight_smile:

Make it sort the song filename/ title in ascending instead of descending order when the song do not have a track number

I have three requests in order of I want most to what I want least. And they have all probably been mentioned before, but, it’s here as follows:

  1. Accelerated Scrolling/Wrap-Around Menus. I remember the days when my old Fuze didn’t have accelerated scrolling and when you have 2000+ songs and want to listen to anything that started with “E” or after, I cried and hoped that the playlist shuffle gods would be nice today
  2. One touch scrolling so you don’t have to keep swiping a finger across to scroll
  3. Resuming music where you left off. Either it doesn’t do this or mine hates me =(

Wrap-around scrolling, in addition to faster scrolling overall

My list so far (in no particular order)

Folder view especially for external cards and podcasts. Old Time Radio and podcasts are not always tagged correctly. Relying on the tags means that they are often in the “unknown” category.

Sleep timer good – but it would be useful if the display showed the amount of time remaining.

Sleep timer is too fiddly to set. It’s easy to get the wrong time. Also it’s not flexible enough

Some form of Pause/Unpause while locked. Locking is great but being able to pause the device without having to unlock it would be great e.g. so you can pause it while you buy a paper etc.

Variable sensitivity on the touchpad. It can be too sensitive.

Increase the font size on the display

Increase the size of the display string which shows the currently playing – it truncates long artists and album names.

Ditto when displaying individual albums and artwork.

Automatically hide slot/card when no card is present.

Remember where you are in lists e.g. Song list, Album list – with over 600 albums and 10,000 tracks it is difficult to scroll through the lists when you start at the top every time.

Some fast access mode for jumping around the lists e.g. an A-Z mode whereby you can jump to a point in the list (600 albums and 10,000 tracks)

Add date/time to the file names for the Voice/Radio recordings. Makes it easier to find the one you want.

24 Hour Option, once more

Folder view, once more

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My own addition, parsing m3u & m3u8’s relative to the file.  This in itself, might simply be something that’s fixed with folder view.

On my Fuze.v.1. I put an m3u list on my microSD card and list a few files from the MUSIC/whatever/artist/ folder and the playlist shows up, enumerates, and plays. This same microSD card inserted into my Fuze+  shows the playlist, enumerates it, and then sits there with a songlist that’s as blank as the face of a kid in a school room corner with a dunce cap on his head.

It would be nice if, not only did playlist reading do the same thing it did on the fuze.v.1, but the same thing it does on all my other microsd reading devices that play music.

Feature requests from me:

  1. Folder navigation

  2. Folder navigation

  3. Folder navigation

  4. Folder navigation

  5. Better scrolling (as suggested before)

  6. Menus wrapping

I think it’s been suggested before but my wife was hoping for an option to use the powe button as a lock of some sort.

Somthing like the following might not be awful.

Pressed when off - turns unit on

Pressed when on-turns screen off

Pressed when on (screen off) - turns screen on

Press and hold 3 seconds  -  locks controls

Press and hold 3 seconds (when locked) unlocks controls

Press and hold 8 seconds -  turns off unit

As for the reason she wants the lock, apperantly something in the lining of her jacket fools the capacity sensor. Even with nothing in her inside pocket the unit unlocked itself 4 times on a 15 minute walk to work.

Add folder view to the Fuze+, this the one thing I miss from my old Fuze.

hkmix, are you converting video using ubuntu, and if so how? i have no clue how to get video podcasts (or any video) onto my fuse+ w/ ubuntu 10.4.

better linux/ubuntu documentation would be the #1 improvement for me. followed by everything else already suggested.

Silverdisk I have used video4fuze in Ubuntu 10.10 to get video on my Fuze+, it might suit your needs. It handles photos and playlist as well. You will need to download two packages from there fuzemux and video4fuze, good luck.

The main thing  I’d like to see implemented right now is a huge improvement in the unlocking & locking mechanism. I just opened the package, and after doing a quickaround of the features, I have to say, my biggest problem lies with not the touch sensors - I personally think they’re a great idea, they just require a user to adjust to them (but they are a little… awkward? in that aside from a response in the interface, there’s no physical response (like, even a slight click) - but with the locking mechanism. It just astounds me that such an idea survived the design process.


First off, a play/pause button should not integrate a third feature. Although functionality-wise, it isn’t impractical, I just think it’s a bad idea. Secondly, the locking mechanism - and this is with just five minutes of testing, I’m sorry to say - evidently does not do what a locking mechanism intends to do. I can both lock and unlock the Fuze through the sleeve, and very easily - I can only just imagine the trouble I’d face leaving it in my pocket. I’ve looked around reviews, and many people have also complained about it.


In the next generation of the Fuze, I definitely hope this is addressed (and possibly, the old locking switch is returned, because that was definitely effective). The creation of a volume switch that is still functional even when locked is a good idea, although it may be advisable to add a setting in which users can opt to allow for functional volume controls when locked, or to disallow it.


But, back to what this post should be focusing on: the locking mechanism. Now, obviously, a firmware update can’t integrate a new lock slider. However, I think that there are indeed a number of viable alternatives to the locking mechanism (again, adding a setting to choose the locking method may be more effective).


  • Tapping the play/pause & back buttons while sliding down top to bottom. It’s essentially tapping the buttons with your ring and pointer fingers, while your middle finger slides down the center.
  • Holding down both volume buttons while tapping some sort of key combination (simultaneous taps, not successive).

An alternative could also be to slide two fingers from the center to the left and right (or top and bottom) tap points. The problem with this is that as effective and responsive the interface is, most teenagers’ and adults’ fingers are too big for such an approach to be effective.


In summary, the Fuze+ seems to be a great product so far, but its locking mechanism is horrendous, and is in dire need of improvement. (If at all possible, could a separate thread or even sub-thread be established for such suggestions?).