The Fuze is picky about ID3 tags. Before you put a file on the Fuze run it through mp3tag. It takes about 5 seconds.
Install mp3tag (free program) and have it add itself to context menus. (checkbox during install)
Change the default under Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg to Write ID2v2.3 ISO-8859-1 .
Right-click on the folder that holds the song files, and choose mp3tag from the context menu that pops up.
Make sure the songs are listed, top to bottom, in track order. If the filenames don’t start with 01, 02, etc., click on the Track Number heading to line them up.
Highlight them all once they are in track order.
Under Tools, use the Auto-Numbering Wizard to Add leading zeros. Leading zeros will give you 01, 02, 03 as track numbers, which is how the Fuze likes them. And since you have set the Write default, the tags will be readable by the Fuze.
ID3v2.3 is the tag format. ISO-8859-1 just means basic Windows English language encoding for the characters. If you were using Windows Media Player to rip your music, that’s what you’d get anyway, and the Fuze was made to work with WMP. But every different software generates a different kind of tag by default–iTunes, for instance, gives ID3v2.2 and Unicode (not Windows) for the characters.
While it would be better if the Fuze were less finicky, it’s not.