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?
@mags1230 wrote:
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?
@jim234567 wrote:
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.
Thanks for the reply.
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?
.
Well, looks like no dice on this…
It’s been over two hours since I unplugged it from the USB, and the little progress bar on the Refreshing your media screen has just barely gotten past the halfway point.
So what do I do now? I guess Rockbox is the only way to get around this?
With all the other threads here complaining of this same issue, why hasn’t Sandisk come out with any updates to solve this? Do the Sansa developers come on the forum here much?
???
I don’t recall any other threads or people complaining of this same issue, and speaking only for myself of course I have no problems whatsoever with my 32GB card. And in looking back through this thread, others have replied similarly (no problems or excessively long refresh times), so there must be something either with your files or tags that’s causing the snail’s pace during refresh.
What is is I don’t know; it seems like you’ve covered your bases. Strange . . . very strange. You don’t have humongous album art embedded or in the folders for all these files, do you?
I don’t recall any other threads or people complaining of this same issue, and speaking only for myself of course I have no problems whatsoever with my 32GB card. And in looking back through this thread, others have replied similarly (no problems or excessively long refresh times), so there must be something either with your files or tags that’s causing the snail’s pace during refresh.
What it is I don’t know; it seems like you’ve covered your bases. Strange . . . very strange. You don’t have humongous album art embedded or in the folders for all these files, do you?
Hey, I wonder if this would help: how about formatting the microSD card with the SD Association’s SD Formatter?
@miikerman wrote:
Hey, I wonder if this would help: how about formatting the microSD card with the SD Association’s SD Formatter?
I tried that on one of my 16GB cards that I wanted to clear out. It took like 2 hours and then wouldn’t accept any files to it. I re-formatted with Windows . . . 10 secs. and it’s perfect. Go figure.
@jim234567 wrote:
Well, looks like no dice on this…
It’s been over two hours since I unplugged it from the USB, and the little progress bar on the Refreshing your media screen has just barely gotten past the halfway point.
So what do I do now? I guess Rockbox is the only way to get around this?
With all the other threads here complaining of this same issue, why hasn’t Sandisk come out with any updates to solve this? Do the Sansa developers come on the forum here much?
???
With the clip+, I consider the refresh time to be okay. I just reloaded my 32gb card with 2506 songs, mostly mp3s and a small amount of FLAC, with no playlists. I don’t use playlists. The refresh time was 5 minutes at the most.
@tapeworm wrote:
@miikerman wrote:
Hey, I wonder if this would help: how about formatting the microSD card with the SD Association’s SD Formatter?
http://www.sdcard.org/consumers/formatter_3/
I tried that on one of my 16GB cards that I wanted to clear out. It took like 2 hours and then wouldn’t accept any files to it. I re-formatted with Windows . . . 10 secs. and it’s perfect. Go figure.
I have the version 2.0 of that formatter…it clears a 16GB card for me in seconds. I suspect you had the settings set wrong if it took 2 hours.
@tapeworm wrote:
I don’t recall any other threads or people complaining of this same issue, and speaking only for myself of course I have no problems whatsoever with my 32GB card. And in looking back through this thread, others have replied similarly (no problems or excessively long refresh times), so there must be something either with your files or tags that’s causing the snail’s pace during refresh.
What it is I don’t know; it seems like you’ve covered your bases. Strange . . . very strange. You don’t have humongous album art embedded or in the folders for all these files, do you?
Right here currently on the first page are two threads (which you posted in too) that someone recently bumped up:
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/Refreshing-your-media-still-a-problem/td-p/228246
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/SLOW-at-quot-Refreshing-your-media-quot/td-p/211388
These are also related to this issue:
(people gripe about this over on the Rockbox forum as well because the Sansa FW apparently loads right as you pull it off the USB cable)
Seems like the pattern here is some people have the issue (some apparently worse than others), while others don’t, and those that don’t assume those that do have bad tags with too much bloat, or some other user error, meanwhile no solution to the problem has ever been established.
I certainly am willing to email someone a couple of my files if they wish to examine my tags… There literally is nothing in the tags besides what I already mentioned (artist/album/track/#/year/genre). No album art files, no garbage text, no replaygain stuff, no nothing (though mp3tag did put a LOT of unused padding space in the v2 tags which I see no setting to change that, though I don’t think this would be a reason for it to be slow… Before mp3tag they had no padding at all and hardly anything’s changed).
This last refresh lasted 6 hours, 35 minutes, so a savings of a whopping 15-25 minutes or so.
My 7-year-old Creative Zen Xtra player with over 1½ times this many files on it (even with much less tidy tags) has never had a hint of an issue like this whatsoever.
It’s looking more & more like the best solution here is to exchange this Clip+ for some other player.
I liked the clip+ because of it’s size and ease of clipping it to a shirt or jean pocket (and the display text has incredible contrast too, which as small as it is, i was afraid it might be hard to read), however I don’t think it’s worth the seven hour wait every freakin time I disconnect it from a computer… Even without adding a file or changing a playlist it still does this Refreshing ■■■■ (which complicates charging the battery unless I go buy an aftermarket charging adapter or cable that doesn’t have a data connection).
I still think the issue here is at least partly the massive number of files on the card, since it does seem like all the bases are being covered…the one X-factor that I have no experience with is the playlists…like mags1230 I don’t use them.
The SanDisk class 2 32GB SDHC card in my Cowon D2 has 4,000 files on it, with 80-something MB free…the Sansa players are known to take longer to refresh in relation to the number of files present, so 6,500 is indeed quite a lot. Does anyone else here have 6,500 on a microsdhc , so they could compare refresh times?
@jim234567 wrote:
It’s looking more & more like the best solution here is to exchange this Clip+ for some other player.
I liked the clip+ because of it’s size and ease of clipping it to a shirt or jean pocket (and the display text has incredible contrast too, which as small as it is, i was afraid it might be hard to read), however I don’t think it’s worth the seven hour wait every freakin time I disconnect it from a computer… Even without adding a file or changing a playlist it still does this Refreshing ■■■■ (which complicates charging the battery unless I go buy an aftermarket charging adapter or cable that doesn’t have a data connection).
Unfortunately, you’ve having a terrible experience with the clip+ and it can be very frustrating indeed.
For what it’s worth, there should not be a refresh every time you unplug the player from the computer when nothing has been changed.
@jim234567 wrote:
Right here currently on the first page are two threads (which you posted in too) that someone recently bumped up:
Thanks for the ‘memory refresh’. :smileyvery-happy:
There does indeed to be a few people that have issues such as yours, and since tags account for the majority of slow database refresh problems (as well as others), it would make sense that this would be the assumed and suggested cause by those who do not have the problem to those that do.
If you can upload a few of the files to a free file-hosting site and then post the link here, I for one would be glad to look at them to see if I can find anything out of the ordinary. Slotmonsta, the Admin of this forum (who works for SanDisk) may also be interested and could get the files to the development team so they might test them as well. You may want to PM him in case he has not been monitoring this thread.
It also could be related to the sheer volume of the filles as suggested too, but then we’ve had people post here claiming 8 & 10,000 files before with no mention of this.
Another thought, and something to look at is you mention several playlist files. What is the format of these files and how many tracks are typically in each one?
The playlists are .m3u files I made using Winamp. I created them within the same directory my files are in, and then dumped everything together into the “MUSIC” folder the player created on my card.
I initially had 5 playlists, 4 containing about 1700-1800 files, the 5th about 150 files.
Upon discovering this 1000-file cap, I then split the 4 up into 7 lists so each was under the cap, and then waited the same exact 7 hours all over again.
And yes, the player DOES refresh with absolutely nothing more than plugging in the USB cable, letting it boot, then unplugging it.
Any time that player sees an actual computer, it’s seven hours before I can even access the data on the player, forget about playing music (the USB simply refuses to reconnect again until the refresh completes, and I can’t seem to get any of the SD cardreaders I have on hand here to recognize a SDHC card, even with it’s little adapter, so I’m also unable to manipulate the files externally). All this waiting is really burning me out.
I would be content if this refresh thing can be gotten down to even one hour (still way long), but seven is just absurd no matter how many files are on the thing.
Do you have a suggestion for a good easy-to-use site I could UL some files to? Otherwise seems it would be easier to email them to whoever wants them (PM me an email addy if you don’t want to post it). The files are mostly around 3-5MB each so I don’t see a size issue emailing them (or I could just pick a bunch of smaller ones and .zip them up or something).
I will also PM Slotmonsta (thanks for the suggestion)
???
I would’ve figured someone would be curious about my file tags being that this is apparently such an unusual occurrance… 
I guess I just have to assume this issue infact does not have a solution at the moment.
Well, it doesn’t matter so much now… I went and took the plunge over this last weekend and dumped Rockbox onto it. RB took an amazing 10 minutes to index the same 6500 files into it’s database that Sansa needs 7 long hours to do (who knows… It could’ve even been less than 10 minutes… I set the player down on the desk after starting the initialization, 10 minutes later I picked it up and RB’s disk-access indicator was off showing it had already finished 
)
This seems to tell me the issue is fully within the Sansa firmware that it cannot process the files in a timely manner, and has nothing to do with the file tags or the player’s hardware or whatever.
It still would be nice if others could turn off this Refreshing thing completely though. With the proper hiearchy, the folders view can work just as well for most people.
Anyway, I appreciate all the help.
Now to try to get this Rockbox screen theme setup in such away that it doesn’t bewilder my dad when he turns it on for the first time lol.
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