4gb Sansa Clip+ has trouble playing audio.

I’ve been having some problems with playing audio on my sansa clip+ where it either takes a very long time to load the songs and play them or it gives a quick crackle and then skips through the song to the next until it cycles through the entire album. On one occasion, it even played one of my albums I had synced to it in slo-mo.

Has anyone else been having these problems and is there a firmware update that fixes this?

It’s not the player, it’s your files (or ID3 tags). What format are they (.mp3, .wma, .ogg, .flac) and where did they come from (ripped from CD’s, bought from legit source, downloaded from illegal file-sharing site, etc.)?

All of my music is ripped from CDs in 320kbs mp3s.

Is it possible they have become corrupted somehow? You can use ChkDsk to see (and maybe even repair).

Or, how are your ID3 tags? The most trouble-free format is ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.

What program did you use to rip your CD’s?

Windows Media Player. It does not happen to every CD and the CDs do play on both my computer and my stereo fine.

You might try reapplying the firmware (see the firmware upgrade sticky at the top of the forum)–perhaps (hopefully) it’s just a software corruption issue.

I’ll give that a try. Thanks for the help.

@buffalo wrote:

Windows Media Player. It does not happen to every CD and the CDs do play on both my computer and my stereo fine.

WMP is convenient and fairly easy to use. Plus it comes already installed on Windows machines. Given that however, it is not the best choice when it comes to ripping CD’s and converting them to .mp3 format.

Long ago, when I got my 1st mp3 player (Sansa 200 series), I too used WMP as I really didn’t know at that point what the heck I was doing with all this new-fangled foreign (to me) technology. Occasionally, I would hear ‘drop-outs’. Yes, the files played fine in WMP but these ‘drop-outs’ in sound would show themselves when playing the files on my new toy.

Re-ripping those tracks seemed to help. I just chalked it up to a bad ‘rip’ (it happens). Eventually though, I encountered what you have; the player skipping over tracks, or displaying the message “Bad Track” & moving on. These files had somehow become corrupted. Nothing obvious seemed to be the answer; they weren’t transferred to-and-frow or anything. They were just sitting in the player’s memory waiting to be played.

Long story short(er), I stopped using WMP and started using other aternate ripping programs and low-and-behold, I haven’t had one corrupted file or playing problem since. Not saying that this is the answer for you, but I’d spend a few minutes downloading a different program (there are many free and good ones out there) and re-ripping some of those problems tracks to see it the problem continues or is now trouble-free.

If it works, great. If it doesn’t all you’ve wasted is a little time.