4gb Fuze with a 23gb memory card.. Best Bit rate to continue adding too..

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
1

Hello,

My wife has a 4gb Fuze with the latest Firmware “1.02.31A” in it…  We changed memory cards from a 4gb to a 32gb card and transferred some of her music that was on the old 4gb card to the mew 32gb card. Now what she would like to do is continue adding to her collection of 3860 song total…

Internal memory is 4gb: with 3+ gb used and  680mb free

External new 32gb card: about 4gb used at MP3 128 bit rate

she has 3860 songs in it now. How does she make the best use of her new 32gb card and leave her 3860 song that are in there alown? There are 3860 MP3 files at 128 bit rate in it now. How or what Microsoft Media player “Windows 7” type and bit rate should she use to get the same sound quality or better and still be able to make use of her new free space to get the best reasonable data base list size" " or should I say the most songs with out losing quality that her MP3 at 128 bit rate gives her" with leaving her old collection alown… as I understand it 8000 song is doable if we could keep what she has in it now and change the type of file and bit rate that would be great…

I hope this is understandable!!  thank you !!  George

2

You’ll run into the file limit in the Sandisk software before you run out of disk space, so it doesn’t really matter. WMP isn’t a great encoder though, so I’d probably use somewhat higher bitrate. 160k to 192k isn’t bad. Of course you can use 320k if you really want, you’ll still have space left over :slight_smile:

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So if there is no way to make use of the 32gb card aer you saying that my song limit is 8000 songs no matter of file or bit rate type? Or is it less then that? Thank you! George

4

@george_w wrote:

So if there is no way to make use of the 32gb card aer you saying that my song limit is 8000 songs no matter of file or bit rate type? Or is it less then that? Thank you! George

I think its usually a lot less than that.

5

You could try installing Rockbox, as it doesn’t have any real limit. Installation isn’t too hard if you use the Rockbox Utility. However, if you have any warranty on your device, Rockbox will probably void it.

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Rockbox is probably the best solution.

But if you’re uncomfortable with that, keep in mind that the database limit is the number of characters, not the number of files–which is why everyone hits a different number of files when they overwhelm the database.

You can squeeze more songs into the database by keeping down the amount of information in each tag and filename. For instance if your filenames are 01-Artist-Album-Title you could take out Artist and Album from the filename. If you have art embedded in the tags, or Comments, or anything but Artist, Album and Song Title (or Genre if you must) you can delete everything else in the tags.

You can do bulk tagging (and un-tagging) with mp3tag, which is free. http://www.mp3tag.de/en/  Use its Convert Tag to Filename to make filenames with just Track-Title, blank out comments, etc.

Incidentally, 128kbps is not considered particulary high quality. 192 is the minimum for that, and personally I always use 320. Want to hear the difference? Encode two different songs and listen to the cymbals from the drum kit.

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Thanks, I’ll have to read about Rock Box and decide…  I know it would take some time and I would be more comfortable to edit the tags maybe even bulk edit as you say. But will that really be worthwhile to do ? will I or should I say my wife be able to make use of that much more room with the tag editing teknic? My wife don’t mind th e128 bit mp3’s sound…  So that’s why she went with it… almost all out music is saved in that format on a backup drive…  I know I know…  There are better programs to rip your CD’s too and then upload to the Fuze at any lower bit rate you want…  I just don’t know the best free program to use for it and we would have to re rip all our CD’s again… not sure just how many that is, about 800+ would not be to far off…  i have the music I like on my fuze ripped to mp3’s also but at the 192 bit rate and you right for me it’s night and day… For my Fuze I will be getting her 16gb card to be  used in my 8gb fuze I guess I should re rip my music that i ONLY LISEN TOO IN MY LAPTOP at a much higher rate… I’m sure i would be happy with well under 4000 songs in my Fuze… 

Black-Rectangle, Could you give me more info knowing what  I intend to do with our music if I intend to re rip it all to a more usable make any file from cd quality to low bit rate mp’s and have it all saved in that format on a back up hard  drive? What’s the best way Program “Free Program’s” to do this with? Thank you for your help ! George

8

There are a lot of ripping programs around. 

You could rip with  Windows Media Player–insert a CD, click Burn and look for the Rip Settings tab at the top center; change it from Windows Media Audio to mp3 at a good bitrate.

You could also use iTunes. You have to poke around Edit/Preferences/Settings/Advanced and change it from ripping to mp4 (iPod) to mp3 and choose a bitrate–you can set it as a new default. It also helps, after you rip something in iTunes, to run it through mp3tag to make it friendlier for Fuze. 

A good thing about iTunes and WMP is that they download the most accurate tags, using the (commercial) CDDB database. Other rippers  often use the user-generated FreeDB, which can be less accurate.  However, they all have their goofy aspects. 

For instance, iTunes makes artist folders with album subfolders.  And CDDB’s tags go haywire with hip-hop albums: Kanye West featuring Jay-Z is one artist folder, Kanye West featuring Chief Keef is another artist folder, etc. Rip a hip-hop album and you get a bunch of artist folders with the album title as a subfolder–and one song in each.

Meanwhile, the true sound connoisseurs like Foobar2000; it uses a tag database called Musicbrainz, which is also user-generated.

http://www.foobar2000.org/ 

The best way to tag is as a two-step process with mp3tag. Rip with iTunes/WMP/Foobar  and then fix it for the Fuze with mp3tag.

Install mp3tag.  When you install, let it add itself to context menus (an option while installing).

Open mp3tag and in Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg make the Write option ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. 

(iTunes, at least my older version, makes ID3v2.2. I forget what version WMP uses. ISO-8859-1 is Windows character encoding–Apple uses UTF characters, less Fuze-friendly.)

Anyway, rip the CD. Right-click on the resulting folder, open it with mp3tag, make sure the tracks are displayed 1-whatever from top to bottom (you can click the Track column header). Highlight them and click Tools, Auto-numbering Wizard, and choose leading zeroes–which makes the track numbers 01, 02, 03 instead of iTunes’s 1/12, 2/12 etc.  It will rewrite the tags in the ID3 version you chose.

And if you have a hip-hop album that’s been scattered, you can highlight all the Kanye West and Kanye West featuring folders, have mp3tag open them all at once, and put the album back together again using the track number column header. Make the artist Kanye West, type the featuring in with the song title.