I’ve been loading my fuze player up with just music on the internal and external drives, one day I decided to use media monkey to analyze volume on all tracks on the external now I’m unable view any new music added to it. The card shows everything is okay and in order but nothing on the player. I’m trying to add some more music then re-analyze everything again to see what happens. I’m afraid to delete or add anything because the card seems to be in a state of limbo.
The Fuze reads ID3 tags to list the albums. I suppose it is possible that Media Monkey did something to the tags–erased them or changed them to a version (ID3 v.1) that the Fuze can’t read.
Get mp3tag. It’s free. http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
When you install it let it add itself to context menus, a choice during the install.
Open mp3tag and under Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg set Write to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.
Go to an album folder on the card, right-click on it and open it with mp3tag. You can see the tag version in one of the columns. Highlight all the files and Save. They’ll be saved as ID3v2.3. Disconnect and see if the Fuze now reads them.
If somehow the tags were erased, mp3tag has some useful functions like Convert /Filename to Tag that may help you restore them more quickly.
This is a very nice tool but has not helped anything. I’ve even downloaded a brand new album to put on the card and it’s still doing it that way.
Go down the Music menu, past the end of the first page, to Folders (and choose the external memory). Are the album folders listed there?
Yes all albums show up in folders while viewing them connected to the computer but no information on those albums on the player when disconnected
I meant the Folders view on the Fuze, at the end of the music menu, past Song, Artist, Album, etc. Folders was added in a firmware update, many versions ago, and it should be there unless you have a very old, never updated Fuze.
That works more or less like Windows explorer, listing the folders on the card. Apparently it also works from tags, but it’s closer to the computer view of the files, instead of the Albums/Artist/Songs lists, which are built by collecting information from the tags.
But if, really, there is no way to see the folders on the Fuze then either:
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They are not files the Fuze plays. That means that if your Fuze is full of .m4a or .m4p files from iTunes, it won’t show them because it can’t play them. The Fuze plays .mp3, .wma, .flac and .wav.
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They are not correctly tagged–they have ID3 v1 tags or ID3v2.4 tags that the Fuze doesn’t read. If they are folders full of mp3 files, then your best move is to empty the card and re-tag them on the computer with mp3tag, with the ID3v2.3 as default. Open the folder, highlight all the files, Save.
If they are .wav files, they won’t have tags–.wav files don’t–so you’d have to play them from Folders view.
Can the Fuze see and play albums in the internal memory? Is the problem only with the card?
You might also try reloading the Fuze firmware from this thread. Don’t bother with the Updater, just do the manual install.
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Fuze/Sansa-Fuze-Firmware-Update-01-02-31-amp-02-03-33/td-p/139175
But usually if the firmware is corrupt, it won’t work at all–it’s not going to selectively not detect albums and otherwise function normally.
Just out of curiosity, when the folders are visible on the card from the computer, can you play them on the computer?
The folders when viewable on the computer do play when selected to.
The missing albums are not viewable on the player through the folder section.
I will be trying to retag those files with media monkey while still on the card and I’ll try putting those same files on the internal memory to experiment with that.
I’ve added a ‘trouble’ folder to the internal memory and it showed up correctly.
Was “trouble” one of the albums affected by Media Monkey? Or is it a different copy?
I don’t use Replay Gain or other volume normalizers, but I know that Replay Gain writes information into the tag. It’s possible that Media Monkey retagged the albums it analyzed with ID3v2.4, which is too new for the Fuze to understand. Only a guess–looking at one of those albums in mp3tag would tel you.
The problem with just retagging albums on the card is that to save time while booting up, the Fuze only partly rebuilds its database–the Albums, Artists, Songs, etc. lists. So the database may still include the old bad tags.
You can try a couple of things.
MTABLE.SYS is the database. You can see it from the computer if (1) the Fuze is in MSC for its USB mode (Settings/System Settings/USB Mode) and (2) your Windows is set to see SYStem files. You may have to look in your Help files for directions to have your computer “Show hidden files and folders.” (Search that phrase in Help.)
You can delete MTABLE.SYS and when you disconnect the Fuze will rebuild it from scratch. “Refreshing Your Media” will take a while. (You can also go back to having Windows hide system files if you want.)
After that, if the albums still aren’t showing up on the card, I’d empty the card and reload it with albums that have been through mp3tag.
Are you putting the card in a separate reader to see the files on it? Or are you looking at it in Windows Explorer with the card in the Fuze, via the USB connection? Just to make sure the slot itself isn’t going bad…
Well I deleted the MTABLE.SYS and no changes happened. The “troubled” files were files that I’ve been attempting to get to work on the external, I downloaded a new album untampered from the same site as always and added it directly to the external and will not show up like usual, something changed with the external while trying to analyze the volume, hopefully I can correct this without having to erase 7000 songs. The only way I view the external is with the player while in msc mode.
@joshcody6 wrote:
Well I deleted the MTABLE.SYS and no changes happened. The “troubled” files were files that I’ve been attempting to get to work on the external, I downloaded a new album untampered from the same site as always and added it directly to the external and will not show up like usual, something changed with the external while trying to analyze the volume, hopefully I can correct this without having to erase 7000 songs. The only way I view the external is with the player while in msc mode.
This is your problem. You have exceeded the database limit in the firmware on the player. “Officially”, it is 8,000 tracks/files, but most people in the “real world” encounter it at around 5,000.
If this is the case why am I able to load these same folders to the internal and have them readable and playable?
Look, Tapeworm is right. I misread your original post thinking you weren’t seeing ANY albums, not just new albums.
When the Fuze was released, no one anticipated the amount of storage available on today’s microSD cards.
It’s simple: When the database is too big, albums stop showing up. It actualy just happened to me on a 16GB card because I added a few albums with a lot of short songs. I could still see them in Folders, though. Go figure.
Maybe Media Monkey added information to the tags that took you over the limit. Or maybe you just added too much stuff.
You don’t have to “erase” the songs. But since the card is the problem, and internal memory isn’t, the sensible thing to do is to copy the songs from the card onto other storage–your computer, a flash drive, a hard drive–and wipe it and reload it with well-tagged albums. A few at a time, maybe 10 or so. And if a problem happens, take off whatever you put on most recently.
While you’re looking at tags in Media Monkey, be ruthless. It’s all about the character count. Get rid of Comments (you can highlight a whole album and <blank> them). If the filenames are Track-Artist-Album-Song you can use Convert Tag to Filename to rename a whole album’s files just Tracknumber-Song. If there are other fields you don’t use, like Genre perhaps, you can blank them too.
Also, this might be useful. Some sites imbed the album cover image in every tag. That’s only a few hundred kb but when you multiply by 7000, it adds up.
In mp3tag, when you have the files highlighted, if you see the cover image on the lower left, do this: Go to View/Extended Tags. Hit the floppy-disc icon on the right to save that image as folder.jpg in the same folder as the album . (Hopefully it’s a .jpg, because if it’s png or bmp or tiff then mp3tag will give you folder.png, etc., but the Fuze won’t display it). Then hit the X to take the image out of the tags. It will buy you a lot of database space if that’s how all your albums were tagged.
By the way, have you checked Media Monkey’s forums as to whether its analyzer adds tag data?
