I just purchased a 4GB Clip+ that’s to be a father’s day gift.
With all the research I’ve done, I had come to the conclusion 32GB cards work with this player (I see the occasional mention by people using them + the fact 32GB is within the SDHC standard), but to my dismay i open up the user leaflet in the box and I see the words “The Sansa Clip+ plays (slotcards, etc.) or your own content on a microSDHC card (up to 16GB)”.
Not a word was stated in the .PDF User manual I had downloaded from the site here about size limits of cards.
Is this a misprint or am I going to have to take back the 32GB card I just bought and exchange it for a pair of 16s?? (I’ve got about 25GB of music I was going to preload onto it from my dad’s CD collection).
Not to worry . . . The 32GB cards work just fine. Most likely the paperwork you received was printed before the 32GB card was released, when 16GB was the largest available.
When I saw “16GB” I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a hardware limitation or something that I had missed somewhere…
Greatly appreciate the info.
64GB cards I bet are right around the corner now too, though I think they are SDXC or something like that… Rather than start a new post, I’ll just ask here… Would anyone know if these will work too? (through a future firmware update maybe)?
Yeah, 64GB is part of the microSDXC spec. I’m (reasonably) certain that a firmware update won’t be enough to let XC cards work with any of the current Sansa players.
No price announced, of course…but as stated before, who knows if even a firmware update would allow these cards to work in a Clip+? And imagine the epic database refresh times!
No price announced, of course…but as stated before, who knows if even a firmware update would allow these cards to work in a Clip+? And imagine the epic database refresh times!
Well, that was gonna be my next question… How long is this dang thing supposed to take to refresh it’s data???
I just got done loading about 6500 tracks on it (all .mp3 files + some .m3u playlists) and it just sat there “Refreshing your Media” for an hour and I couldn’t wait anymore, so I forced a shutdown by holding the power button and haven’t tried yet again.
WHen it first started, the little bar at the bottom progressed all the way to the last pixel or so within about 20 seconds, but then just sat there (I know it can’t refresh 6500 tracks that fast so I figured bargraph error, but I don’t know).
I had 8000 or so tracks on an '04-vintage Creative HD player and IIRC it only took about 15 minutes for it to index that many tracks one time I had to do a hard-reset on it.
I just got done loading about 6500 tracks on it (all .mp3 files + some .m3u playlists) and it just sat there “Refreshing your Media” for an hour and I couldn’t wait anymore, so I forced a shutdown by holding the power button and haven’t tried yet again.
WHOA! Big
People wonder how files on their player (or the firmware) gets corrupted causing them all kinds of frustration and/or grief?
FWIW i’ve forced a shut down while its refreshing the database hundreds of times. I don’t think theres any risk in doing so. As far as I can tell it doesn’t actually write anything to the disk until afterwards, so theres no real effect to doing it.
I hoped all that would happen is it would simply have to start over again, which appears to be the case.
So is over an HOUR normal on this thing??
I don’t think this is gonna fly if so, as it does this each time I disconnect it from the USB.
I’m trying it again now that I have some hours available to waste… the bar quickly goes up to about under the tail of the “Y” in 'your", then slows down slower than the pace of molasses flowing at the South Pole. In the last 10 minutes I think the bar has advanced two display pixels (at least the bar is actually showing something this time).
I learned very early on about keeping ID3 tags plain & simple with my own player… They are all quite small, having an average size of 130 bytes on the V2 tag (that’s where Winamp tells me the MP3 header is within the file anyway), so there shouldn’t be an issue with bloated tags…
Files themselves are all .mp3 averaging ~128KBPS VBR (about 4MB average size).
Anyone have any other suggestions to speed this up at all if possible?
Edit:
Over an hour later and it’s barely reached halfway under the ‘M’ of ‘media’. This is crazy.
I just got done loading about 6500 tracks on it (all .mp3 files + some .m3u playlists) and it just sat there “Refreshing your Media” for an hour and I couldn’t wait anymore, so I forced a shutdown by holding the power button and haven’t tried yet again.
WHOA! Big
People wonder how files on their player (or the firmware) gets corrupted causing them all kinds of frustration and/or grief?
This is one way how.
I’ve done it with my Rockboxed Clip+ and it had no adverse effects whatsoever. Of course, all my tunes are set to “read-only” before I load my players.
I can’t imagine that’s normal–with my 16GB card, it’s under 10 minutes.
The Sansa db refresh time is more related to total number of files than the amount of space they take up. So his 128kbps file size probably means he has a lot more files-per-GB than you do…certainly more than me. The last time I timed mine, it was under 5 minutes…but my tags are quite streamlined.
I started just before 4:00PM today… At 10:50PM I noticed the Refreshing screen finally went off…
Now I see what appears to be a 1000 file cap on playlists.
Could this all be from loading so many new files all at once? Does it go faster the 2nd & later times around maybe? (by storing data from the last refresh?) I’m actually afraid to connect it to my PC again now to split those playlists up smaller (maybe after the weekend I’ll try it again).
I really appreciate you bearing with me here guys lol (and thanks for the support too. It’s not like I physically ejected the card while it was refreshing lol)
P.S., Finally able to check it, I already have v1.02.15A firmware on it, which appears to be the current version :-/
I started just before 4:00PM today… At 10:50PM I noticed the Refreshing screen finally went off…
Now I see what appears to be a 1000 file cap on playlists.
Could this all be from loading so many new files all at once? Does it go faster the 2nd & later times around maybe? (by storing data from the last refresh?) I’m actually afraid to connect it to my PC again now to split those playlists up smaller (maybe after the weekend I’ll try it again).
I really appreciate you bearing with me here guys lol (and thanks for the support too. It’s not like I physically ejected the card while it was refreshing lol)
P.S., Finally able to check it, I already have v1.02.15A firmware on it, which appears to be the current version :-/
I don’t think loading all that at one time should be a problem. I have loaded my 8GB with 16GB card installed from empty to full in one installment before. You mention playlists though…I can’t offer any assistance there, as I don’t use them. But I do not think it should have taken nearly seven hours to refresh.
Here is another area where the Rockbox firmware would certainly work better. Upon disconnect from the computer with Rockbox installed, you can force the shutdown, then you start the player up in Rockbox mode, and if you choose to use the database in Rockbox, then it will refresh it in the background, while allowing you to listen to something in folder browse mode if you so desire.
I can’t imagine that’s normal–with my 16GB card, it’s under 10 minutes.
The Sansa db refresh time is more related to total number of files than the amount of space they take up. So his 128kbps file size probably means he has a lot more files-per-GB than you do…certainly more than me. The last time I timed mine, it was under 5 minutes…but my tags are quite streamlined.
Regardless of having 128 kbps files as opposed to files with a higher bitrate, the transfer time certainly seems excessive.
The refresh is indeed an excessively long time…no one is disputing that!
Seven hours is more than excessive, it’s an overnight refresh time. This cannot be normal. Even if the normal refresh time was an hour or more for a huge library, there would have been more posts about it.
@ the OP, what version are the tags? Are they ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1? Or ID3v2.4?
Seven hours is more than excessive, it’s an overnight refresh time. This cannot be normal. Even if the normal refresh time was an hour or more for a huge library, there would have been more posts about it.
@ the OP, what version are the tags? Are they ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1? Or ID3v2.4?
The files are tagged with both a v1.1 and v2.3 tags. Only fields filled are Artist, Album, Title & #, Year and Genre. All other fields are completely blank (no extraneous junk text left in there from programs such as iTunes, etc.).
I don’t know if it’s a ISO-8859-1 though… How would I check that? I use a program called MP3-Library to tag them, which just says “ID3 V 2.3.0” for the v2 tag.
As for Rockbox, I looked at that. If it were for my own use, I’d immediately be all over it. It’s for my dad though, and he has literally no computer skill whatsoever (just surfing the web & using email is occasionally a challenge for him lol). Technical terms and even navigating of menus at times isn’t always easy for him.
He wants something that all he needs to do is push the power button and it’ll start playing albums as if listening to CDs. Push power again to shut it off… Then when turned on again, have it resume from where it was (sortof like a little radio that pauses when you turn it off). Reason for so many files is to have at least 2-3 weeks use before it starts repeating over again (I hope he won’t have issues loading 7 different playlists on it because I couldn’t put everything all on one list).
He also typically has no preference for particular albums, whatever is playing is usually fine for him as long as it’s within his perferred genre (classic rock, etc.)
Do you think RB would be better for this type of use? Or should I leave the original FW on it?
The files are tagged with both a v1.1 and v2.3 tags. Only fields filled are Artist, Album, Title & #, Year and Genre. All other fields are completely blank (no extraneous junk text left in there from programs such as iTunes, etc.).
I don’t know if it’s a ISO-8859-1 though… How would I check that? I use a program called MP3-Library to tag them, which just says “ID3 V 2.3.0” for the v2 tag.
An excellent, free, dedicated tagging program that’s often recommended here is MP3Tag. It has a column that shows you what type of tags your files have. If you want to rewrite your tag version with MP3Tag, you can go intoTools/Options/Tags/Mpegs and set “Write” to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. Then highlight the files you want to change and click on “Save”. This is the type of tag that works the best with the player.
I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that it may be the v1.1 tags that’s causing the super long refresh since you have good, clean, uncluttered tags.
I’ve seen mp3tag mentioned a few times here so I downloaded it right after my last post above. I found the setting for ISO 8859-1 though it didn’t tell me if my tags were already that standard or not. So I forced a re-write of every tag by adding a bit of text to the comment field and then going back and deleting it (simply clicking Save with everything highlighted didn’t appear to change much of anything within the tags. Maybe this wasn’t actually necessary though I didn’t want to find out by having to wait another seven freaking hours lol).
I tried reloading about 350 files (or about 5% of what I have) onto the player just to test it and it did it’s refresh in about 2 minutes, so I’ve got my fingers crossed it’ll be much faster (I hadn’t stripped the v1 tags off those 350 files yet either so seems they weren’t affecting anything).
I’m now loading the whole ~6500 files back onto the player again (now also sans v1 tags). I’ll post back when it finishes.
Anyone have any input for my Q about Rockbox being appropriate at all for a non-tech-savvy user?
(I’ve got about 25GB of music I was going to preload onto it from my dad’s CD collection).
