16Gb Fuze+ (+32Gb uSDHC) collapses when loaded up

MP3 players All other MP3 players
21

Marvin_Martian wrote: 

Think long and hard about that one. The Zune players are even more locked down than iPods. The only way to add or remove content is with the Zune software…at least with iPods there are a few apps besides iTunes that you can use.

 

Well, I’m doing exactly that: thinking long and hard about it, also factoring in rumors of a new Zune device appearing in a few months (if I has a phone or even more “features” I’m not interested).

If the Zune software tie is the only limitation, I’m more than fine with that; I want to load up my 800+ WMA-ripped CDs, once, and be done with it.  (So far, I’ve loaded almost 10,000 songs to my Fuze+ twice and it still doesn’t work).   I don’t subscribe to services, I don’t share, I don’t steal, I don’t “mix” and I don’t care at all what others are listening to.  I just want to listen to my stuff and I’ve got more than enough to keep me happy forever. 

But I do want fast, efficient access.  The Zune permits alpha character entry to find songs; with almost 10k of them that could be a very handy feature.  What I can’t find out yet is how well the Zune HD 64 performs when it is loaded to the gills with songs; all the reviews I’ve found so far only gloss over the surface features and don’t address living with it in the real world.

Any other Zune drawbacks I need to be aware of?  I know it has a proprietary connector, but all Sansas up till now have as well so I can live with that.  I don’t own a Mac or any Apple products and never will, so as long as the Zune software runs well in Win7 I’m ok with it.

I’ve loved the several Sansa players I’ve owned so far and have patiently waited for the 40+Gb capacity I need.  Now that it’s claimed to be here, it really doesn’t work.  At least not yet.  If Sandisk identifies a problem I can fix, I’ll fix it; if they find a bug I can wait a while for a patch.  But I’m not getting any younger.  :wink:

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Have you tried using the fuze+ without the card?  How does it work if you just removed the card?

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@ptjim wrote:

 

Marvin_Martian wrote: 

Think long and hard about that one. The Zune players are even more locked down than iPods. The only way to add or remove content is with the Zune software…at least with iPods there are a few apps besides iTunes that you can use.

 

 

Well, I’m doing exactly that: thinking long and hard about it, also factoring in rumors of a new Zune device appearing in a few months (if I has a phone or even more “features” I’m not interested).

 

If the Zune software tie is the only limitation, I’m more than fine with that; I want to load up my 800+ WMA-ripped CDs, once, and be done with it.  (So far, I’ve loaded almost 10,000 songs to my Fuze+ twice and it still doesn’t work).   I don’t subscribe to services, I don’t share, I don’t steal, I don’t “mix” and I don’t care at all what others are listening to.  I just want to listen to my stuff and I’ve got more than enough to keep me happy forever. 

 

But I do want fast, efficient access.  The Zune permits alpha character entry to find songs; with almost 10k of them that could be a very handy feature.  What I can’t find out yet is how well the Zune HD 64 performs when it is loaded to the gills with songs; all the reviews I’ve found so far only gloss over the surface features and don’t address living with it in the real world.

 

Any other Zune drawbacks I need to be aware of?  I know it has a proprietary connector, but all Sansas up till now have as well so I can live with that.  I don’t own a Mac or any Apple products and never will, so as long as the Zune software runs well in Win7 I’m ok with it.

 

I’ve loved the several Sansa players I’ve owned so far and have patiently waited for the 40+Gb capacity I need.  Now that it’s claimed to be here, it really doesn’t work.  At least not yet.  If Sandisk identifies a problem I can fix, I’ll fix it; if they find a bug I can wait a while for a patch.  But I’m not getting any younger.  :wink:

 

The only other one, which may not bother you, is the lack of a customizable EQ…it just has some presets. But if you have a decent set of earphones, you may not need the custom EQ.

I haven’t  heard any impressions from anyone with a Z:HD 64 yet, so no telling how one would work with that many songs on it. I would  think WMA would play nice with it, being Microsoft’s own format. People with the smaller capacity models ( 16GB and 32GB ) either love it, or complain that it doesn’t have of thousands of apps like the iPod Touch…and you’re clearly not interested in apps. 

You can actually download the Zune software beforehand and try it out…might be worth considering if you can’t straighten things out with the Fuze+.

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@mags1230 wrote:

Have you tried using the fuze+ without the card?  How does it work if you just removed the card?

Yes I have, several times.  In fact, I just popped out the card again now to re-check. 

It’s much more responsive, maybe even up to spec (but it’s not instantaneous).

Once in Songs, it’s tedious to progress through the list (with “only” 2871 songs onboard) since it won’t wrap around backwards.  It starts at A and if I want to go to “Symphony No. xxxx” it’s a looooong trip down.  strokestrokestrokestroke x 20 and I’m still in the A’s, even stroking as fast as possible.  Sigh.  Without alphabetical lookup this might be hopeless even if it speeds up.

Also noticed that if I’m in songs and find two identical titles (same song, two different artists or live/studio versions) I stroke right to see if there’s more info because I can’t tell them apart.  Nope, it takes me to Genres.  Swiping back again takes me to THE TOP OF THE ALPHABET!   All the previous strokestrokestroke to get to the song title has been wasted!

I hate to seem like a constant complainer, but this is getting more unlikeable by the day - if you have a large, or even medium-large, song collection the Sansa interface seems ridiculous for actually finding something, no matter the advertised capacity, because it has no search or jump-to capacity at all as far as I can tell.

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@marvin_martian wrote:

 

The only other one, which may not bother you, is the lack of a customizable EQ…it just has some presets. But if you have a decent set of earphones, you may not need the custom EQ.

 

I haven’t  heard any impressions from anyone with a Z:HD 64 yet, so no telling how one would work with that many songs on it. I would  think WMA would play nice with it, being Microsoft’s own format. People with the smaller capacity models ( 16GB and 32GB ) either love it, or complain that it doesn’t have of thousands of apps like the iPod Touch…and you’re clearly not interested in apps. 

 

You can actually download the Zune software beforehand and try it out…might be worth considering if you can’t straighten things out with the Fuze+.

Thanks, Marv.  No, lack of custom EQ doesn’t bother me much; I’ve tried the various settings in my several Sansa players and always come back to Normal; the others just sound odd.  I was fortunate to get a $450 pair of Ultimate Ears 'phones on a flash Amazon sale for $100, so I’m fixed for good earbuds.  (those things are great; I don’t have the cash to spend at list price but they’re incredible for a hundred bucks)

I don’t care about apps, as you said, and may try out the Zune software for the heck of it.  One thing that does bother me about the Zune design (and which may make me wait to see if they announce a new device) is the lack of a dedicated volume control - you have to adjust via the touchscreen.  That’s pretty lame and I don’t understand why they’d choose to do that on a high-end device; what I don’t know is if I could get along with it or not in the long run since it’s handy to adjust volume without looking at the screen.

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@ptjim wrote:

 

Thanks, Marv.  No, lack of custom EQ doesn’t bother me much; I’ve tried the various settings in my several Sansa players and always come back to Normal; the others just sound odd.  I was fortunate to get a $450 pair of Ultimate Ears 'phones on a flash Amazon sale for $100, so I’m fixed for good earbuds.  (those things are great; I don’t have the cash to spend at list price but they’re incredible for a hundred bucks)

I don’t care about apps, as you said, and may try out the Zune software for the heck of it.  One thing that does bother me about the Zune design (and which may make me wait to see if they announce a new device) is the lack of a dedicated volume control - you have to adjust via the touchscreen.  That’s pretty lame and I don’t understand why they’d choose to do that on a high-end device; what I don’t know is if I could get along with it or not in the long run since it’s handy to adjust volume without looking at the screen.

 

I’m with you on wanting a volume button…in fact, it is one of the reasons I use my two Clip+ players more than my FuzeV1. I like that separate volume rocker on the side. I wanted the replacement for the Fuze to have Clip+ style controls, not these silly touch controls, which I had and did not like on a Samsung player (in fact, they were the main reason I ended up selling it) . 

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First of all, reloading the music on the Fuze+ won’t help unless you are reloading it differently.Did you take my suggestion and simplify the file structure(less levels of nesting)? Did you eliminate all comments from the tags, and try shortening very long tags?

I do expect firmware improvements for the Fuze+ soon, although I still think the Fuze is a better choice than the Fuze+. Even with the Fuze though people have reported the player being overwhelmed with as little as 6,000 or fewer songs if the songs are heavily nested, and/or filenames, and/or tags are very long.

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@jk98 wrote:

Did you take my suggestion and simplify the file structure(less levels of nesting)? Did you eliminate all comments from the tags, and try shortening very long tags?

I replied to your initial query in post #4; here’s the relevent paragraphs:

Is there a “tag cleaner” that can inspect my PC’s hard disk to tell me if there are tagging issues?  I’ve downloaded MP3Tag (I think that’s the name; the one most people use) but haven’t gotten very far into it - haven’t had time to figure out its operation; doesn’t seem intuitive to me.  Would love to know of an app that can simply inspect my collection and point out any files with issues.

By “heavily nested”, do you mean many levels of nested folders?  If so, no; I use a basic Music>Artist>Album>.WMAs (sometimes Music>Album>.WMAs) arrangement for everything.  As for “long” file/tag names, I use the defaults that come up when ripping with Windows Media Player v10 or v11; I only change them for clarity or to correct errors - have never explored any “long” options.

Additionally, I have never added a comment to any file tag, so that should’t be a problem.

I’m not sure how it’s possible to simplify my file structure any further without wiping out folder organization by artist.  And some long filenames are important, especially in the Classical genre.  (Speaking of that, I’m reminded that Zune owners are complaining about this; it seems that the Zune won’t display more than about 15 chars of a song title, and it doesn’t scroll the name for more info - again, a problem with Classical tracks.)

Thanks a lot  for your feedback.

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@ptjim wrote:

 

Once in Songs, it’s tedious to progress through the list (with “only” 2871 songs onboard) since it won’t wrap around backwards.  It starts at A and if I want to go to “Symphony No. xxxx” it’s a looooong trip down.  strokestrokestrokestroke x 20 and I’m still in the A’s, even stroking as fast as possible.  Sigh.  Without alphabetical lookup this might be hopeless even if it speeds up.

 

(edit  . . . if you have a large, or even medium-large, song collection the Sansa interface seems ridiculous for actually finding something, no matter the advertised capacity, because it has no search or jump-to capacity at all as far as I can tell.

 

That scenario is why folder view is so useful to have.  Without a search feature by alphabet, it can take a long time to scroll through the listings, as you experienced.  With folder navigation, the library can be divided up by the first letter of the album’s name.  Say, one folder that holds all the albums that start with A to E, another that holds F to J, and so forth.  Not a complete solution, but a good alternative.

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A quick followup for the benefit of anybody who may be tracking this thread…

I’ve communicated with Sandisk tech support via email through 2 or 3 iterations and have included all the details of my music library and observed performance as outlined in this topic thread. 

I just received another email from them stating that my issue has been escalated to high-level tech support and engineering team to see if they can duplicate my observations and possibly address the issue.

No guarantee that anything will come of this, but at least they claim to be taking it seriously and investigating what I’m observing.  I suppose it’s possible that they haven’t tried actually loading it up to max capacity prior to this; I think anybody who tries doing so will experience results similar to mine.

I’ll post another followup if anything comes of this.

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@ptjim wrote:

 I suppose it’s possible that they haven’t tried actually loading it up to max capacity prior to this; I think anybody who tries doing so will experience results similar to mine.

 

 

That’s a good point.  Or if Sandisk did, which they should have done during the QA process, imho, it was only filled with 128 kbps mp3s.

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@mags1230 wrote:

@ptjim wrote:

 I suppose it’s possible that they haven’t tried actually loading it up to max capacity prior to this; I think anybody who tries doing so will experience results similar to mine.

 

 

That’s a good point.  Or if Sandisk did, which they should have done during the QA process, imho, it was only filled with 128 kbps mp3s.

PTJim is using 128kbps files too…just wma instead of mp3. But that shouldn’t make a difference…SanDisk obviously works well with Microsoft…just look at the How-to videos page. Instructions for using WMP12, Silverlight required to watch the videos, etc. And I never have had any issues with wma files on my Sansas.

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@marvin_martian wrote:

 

@mags1230 wrote:

@ptjim wrote:

 I suppose it’s possible that they haven’t tried actually loading it up to max capacity prior to this; I think anybody who tries doing so will experience results similar to mine.

 

 

That’s a good point.  Or if Sandisk did, which they should have done during the QA process, imho, it was only filled with 128 kbps mp3s.

PTJim is using 128kbps files too…just wma instead of mp3. But that shouldn’t make a difference…SanDisk obviously works well with Microsoft…just look at the How-to videos page. Instructions for using WMP12, Silverlight required to watch the videos, etc. And I never have had any issues with wma files on my Sansas.

 

Well…it’s not that wma isn’t being well supported by the fuze+.  I read somewhere that mp3 is easier to decode than wma. (correct me if I’m wrong about this).  Perhaps with such an extensive library, the player gets glitchy and can’t handle so many wma files as well as if all those files were mp3.  Just a possibility.

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@mags1230 wrote:

Well…it’s not that wma isn’t being well supported by the fuze+.  I read somewhere that mp3 is easier to decode than wma. (correct me if I’m wrong about this).  Perhaps with such an extensive library, the player gets glitchy and can’t handle so many wma files as well as if all those files were mp3.  Just a possibility.

this is true

35

@drlucky wrote:

 

@mags1230 wrote:

Well…it’s not that wma isn’t being well supported by the fuze+.  I read somewhere that mp3 is easier to decode than wma. (correct me if I’m wrong about this).  Perhaps with such an extensive library, the player gets glitchy and can’t handle so many wma files as well as if all those files were mp3.  Just a possibility.

this is true

 

Thanks for confirming that.

36

Do WMA tags take up more space than mp3 tags? If so, then that would explain what you are experiencing.

I have never tried putting many wma files on a player.

37

That’s odd.  I have mostly wma files on my device, and refresh time has never been an issue.  I would assume that the embedded mp3 images and tag data should be handled the same for wma or mp3, as the only difference is the playback codec employed.

Bob  :wink:

38

I wish I had seen this thread sooner before I made my own post complaining about it.  I barely have 5 of the 7.3 internal GB filled up and this is occurring.  Or, it wasn’t occurring until I applied the latest firmware upgrade.  And I have a grand total of 2 WMA files on the device.

I, too, have an external card but once this problem began to appear I removed it and haven’t put it back in since.  I’ve had this Fuze+ for only a week and I’m already starting to regret it, which is a shame because I’ve been happy with their mp3 players up to this point.

I’m going to go through and remove any lengthy tag info I can find on my mp3’s but I won’t be holding my breath for that solution.  I never had to make any sort of concession such as that for my Fuze.

For the OP the tag editor I’m using is mp3Tag.

BTW - For all of the Sandisk technical support and developers who might be reading this thread, this problem is a showstopper.  This product has only been out how long now and two users are already at your forums about it, imagine how many customers have simply returned them because of these problems without providing any feedback.  Get on top of this before you’re screwed.

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One more (perhaps final) update.

I have yet to hear back from Sandisk’s tech-support or engineering folks after a week or so - but that doesn’t bug me too much; a real investigation into the problem will likely take a while, if they’re sincere about looking into it.

But, after playing with the Fuze+ a bit more (with no SDHC card inserted, just the internal memory so that it performs fairly normally) I’ve decided this is probably not the player for me, even if they manage to find a fix for my problems.  The reason is simple and not Sandisk’s problem: with almost 10,000 tracks in my collection it’s finally dawned on me that managing it is impossible without a better, more interactive, UI.

If all I ever did was Play All, it’d be fine (and much of the time I do just that, in Random mode) but trying to locate a specific Artist, Album or Song is frustrating as hell when the only option is to scrollscrollscrollscrollscrollscroll through the database.  With this many tracks, I *must* have alphabetical input capability - there’s just no option.

I mentioned above that I was considering the Zune HD, but the lack of physical buttons for control is just a show-stopper for me.  Additionally, I have no interest in videos, apps (beyond maybe a clock) and subscription services.  Plus, like most players, the Zune’s UI is locked down.

So, what to do?  I won’t tease this out; I just ordered a 32Gb Cowon J3.  Combined with my 32Gb Sandisk SDHC card that’ll give me plenty of capacity.

A couple years ago I was checking out their D2 model but it just wasn’t right for me (and that stupid little stylus looks like a problem factor).  However, everyone (and I mean pretty much *everyone*, without exception) raves about Cowon’s audio quality and broad compatibility for audio formats.  But I sort of lost track of the company after the D2 and just a couple days ago went back after hearing about the J3.

It’s small, very light and yes it has a touch-screen interface.  But the kicker for me is that it also has 6 physical buttons for Power/Hold, Play/Pause, Forward/Back and Volume Up/Down - these may be used instead of or in addition to the touchscreen controls.  Additionally, the UI is sort of open; users can modify the layout onscreen and can also develop alternative UIs and upload them to the player.  That might be very handy.

Bingo!  All other specs seem to be right for me too.  But be advised, there’s no Wifi (although it has Bluetooth for wireless headphones), no App Store, no Web browsing and no subscriptions.  Perfect; I don’t need or want those.  Apparently it’s video handling is exemplary, handling everything but h264 (again, don’t really care personally).  One small downside - a proprietary cable, sigh.  But it DOES have a claimed 64-hour audio playback battery life!  That’s astounding; even 50hrs is far more than I need, so it’ll be very nice to have.

So that’s where I’m heading; it should be here in about 3 days.  If anybody’s interested in my experience with it just ping a reply here; I don’t want to drag this thread off-topic and especially not for a non-Sandisk product.

I’ve owned four Sandisk players now and really can’t fault the company or their products for the terrific low-cost, medium-range players.  But trying to finally manage my entire music collection just forces me to go upscale a bit.

I’ll let you know if I hear anything more from the company, but I’m inclined to return it to them for a refund.  Again, no hard feelings (but I did waste a fair amount of time trying to get it working to spec) - the UI just isn’t right for a large collection IMHO.

Thanks again to all who participated and offered suggestions in this thread.  I’ll keep an eye on it.

40

PTJim, as far as I have heard, the database limitation of the J3 is 8000 internal, 8000 external…so good luck!:smiley: