Music file cause Fuze to freeze

I have a Fuze with 4gb and a 4gb SD card thar works very well for me. I has the latest 2.0 firmware installed. On occasion I have run into a music file that will cause a total freeze of the player.Black screen and must force a restart (20 sec hold). The same file always causes the problem. Have had issue with both mp3 and flac files. The tracks in question all play well on the PC.

What is it about a track tha will cause a lock up? Is ther something I should look for before installing onto the Fuze to pevent this from happening?

Thanks for any thoughts

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.

Thanks for the reply. I should have noted in my original post that I use mp3tag all the time. Your comment about adding to context menu will make it even easier to use and is really apprciated. As you said I think I just had a finicky fileor two.

Thanks you very much again…:smiley:

Since you have mp3tag, look for foreign characters, giant Comments or huge embedded album art files with mp3tag. (I always blank out Comments before transferring.) And make sure its Write default has been set to  ISO-8859-1, not just ID3v2.3  UTF-8 or UTF-16 can make the Fuze unhappy.