8GB Clip Plus: problems with voice recording timer, and deletion of recorded files. Details in post

I got a refurbished black 8GB Clip Plus from Amazon, and it works fantastically. I suppose these peeves are somewhat cosmetic, but I’d still like to fix them if I could.

Once in a while the voice recorder won’t start recording until it hears something - I have to, for instance, breathe across the microphone-end for a second or two before speaking. There doesn’t seem to be a way to tell the mic to start capturing at full volume immediately, either. The timer doesn’t always increment the seconds in real time. And I usually need to delete recordings directly from the player’s menu, rather than doing so in my OS file-explorer utility - if I do it through Windows Explorer, there will still be an empty, unplayable, undeleteable ghost-file in the player’s recordings menu.

How can I fix these things? Will they be addressed in the next edition of the Clip Plus firmware?

Sorry to say it, but:  unlikely that there will be much, if anything, in the way of new Clip+ firmware, since the Clip Zip came out last Fall.