I have a Sandisk Sansa 8 gb clip +. My current firmware verison is V01.02.18A. As far as I know that is the latests one can get for this because Sandisk nolong makes this device. I’m a little sad because it appears to have a 6,933 something song limit. I’m running my songs at 128kbps with an expansion card 32 gb. I read in the forums, here, that some say it has a 8000 song limit. That does not seem to be true for me. What is sad is how I got plenty more space for a whole lot more songs and yet the player can’t access them. Is there any tricks to solving this?
I don’t know much about ID3 tags. I’m trying to figure out what extra info I could get rid of.
I’ve always used a program for windows called Mp3tag.
The Following Fields is what I fill out.
Title:
Artist:
Album:
Year:
Track:
Genre:
Album Artist:
Composer:
I’ve been thinking that I could probably clear Album Artist and Composer. Then maybe the year. I always clear Comment already. Thats saying as long as the tag program doesn’t count a blank as a bit or something… Does it?
What do you clear out of yours?
My folders/directories are as simple as simple can be I think. Here is how mine is set up.
Music\Artist\Album*.mp3 song
The Music Folder is put on the player by default. The artist folder is usually created by Windows Media Player. The folder under that one is also created by the Windows Media Player. I just copy the Artist and the sub folder Album over to the Music folder on the player. Am I correct in saying that is only 3 deep? Perhaps 4 deep if you include the actual Mp3 files.
I got an awful lot of music to process. I already have all my mp3s backed up to two external hard drives. *One external hard drive is a back up for the other. I also have all the music backed up to three 8.5 gig dvds and one 4.7 gig dvd labeled that only 706 meg is used up. I made them just incase both of my hard drives either goes down or gets messed up. The problem is I can’t go back and change the tags on the DVDs. I think I probably got to either go back over what is on the external hard drives or cut and past the music from the player into a back up folder and change the tags and copy it all back. This is will be hours of work as well as an hour or so for the player to refresh. I’m not sure why SanDisk didn’t repair it’s firmware for a simple mistake like this. You only find out years down the road after you reach the 6,000 song something limit. I’m sorry If I missed any of this information the documentation. I don’t recall seeing a warning about this small and yet significant issue.
I have been thinking about supergluing my old player to my new player back to back. The clip on my old player broke off when I caught my head phone cord on something once.
I decided to give rockbox a try. I downloaded both the Windows installer and the Linux Installer. I used the Linux Installer since that is the computer I’m running right now. The installation seemed to go smoothly. I don’t know what it sounds like yet… The fonts are very small. I’m not sure if they can be made bigger or not. I was looking around to see if it would give me song count like the orignal firmware did. If it does have that informaton I haven’t found it yet. Sooner or later I’ll be joining the rockbox forums and looking over the manual. I wish I could of found an option for song count. That number would of been interesting to report.
gregorylock wrote:
I decided to give rockbox a try. I downloaded both the Windows installer and the Linux Installer. I used the Linux Installer since that is the computer I’m running right now. The installation seemed to go smoothly. I don’t know what it sounds like yet… _ The fonts are very small. I’m not sure if they can be made bigger or not. _
Go to the Themes page (for your player) on Rockbox’s site and download some different themes. This will change the appearance (and font size) to something more visually appealing than the standard one. You can have as many as you like and switch between them at will. 
There are a lot of themes to choose from.
http://themes.rockbox.org/index.php?target=sansaclipplus
I got to admit that the player seems to sound better. I can hear the vocals better and the stereo effects sound better to me. I kinda miss the spectrum analyzer bar graph that came stock with the old firmware.
I joined the rockbox forums today. But if you happen to know off the top of your head if there is a way of bringing up or installing one of these graphs it would be nice to know. I’m also looking over the manual but haven’t gotten very far with it yet. Thanks.
I’ve continued to test rockbox for a week or so now.
rockbox stable release (version 3.12) seems to be flaky when it comes to interfacing with a PC. I noticed it first on Windows 7 the driver had difficulty loading. I did a google search and found that someone else also reported this issues. I also experienced it with Windows Vista. The driver didn’t load at all and I didn’t have time to research if there is a work around or not. Tonight I tried to interface it with the same PC I installed the rockbox with. It’s currently running Linux Lite 2.8 64 bit. It’s based on Ubuntu 14.04. The device didn’t want to mount. Froze up several times, and after reconnecting and holding down the power button etc. several times I managed to get it to mount. I wonder if the development version does any better?
I haven’t played with any of my players that have Rockbox in quite a while so things may have changed, but plugging into a computer with Rockbox loaded was always sketchy. I always booted into the OF before connecting to the computer.
It appears that someone filed a bug report about this.
I don’t know what OF is. Can you please tell me how to do this so I can try?
OF = Original (AKA SanDisk) Firmware
Did you uninstall rockbox or is there a way to bypass it?
You should be able to boot into the original firmware by holding down << as you turn on the Sansa. Rockbox was smart that way.
By the way…your original problem with the song limit…arises because the Sansa firmware puts all the information from the ID3 tags into a database. Think of it as a giant text file. There’s a limit on the size of that file–a certain number of characters–and SanDisk set it too low for the giant microSD cards you can get nowadays. Since Rockbox figured out how to get around that limitation, it’s a shame SanDIsk never fixed it.
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@black_rectangle wrote:
You should be able to boot into the original firmware by holding down << as you turn on the Sansa. Rockbox was smart that way.
That’s one of the nice things about Rockbox. It doesn’t replace the OF; it merely sits alongside so you can boot into either firmware at will.
