After reformatting, Sansa won't stop writing

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1

Okay so I had what seems to be a common problem with the Sansa e260 - can’t delete files from the computer, and noticed a bunch of strangely labelled folders under the MUSIC folder. I also couldn’t choose songs - ie when I selected a song from the sansa’s list, it would start playing whatever tune is six songs after the selected one!

I went to the Sansa website and followed their instructions to reformat. Here’s what I did:

  • backed up all my music to PC

  • selected MSC under USB mode on the sansa, then connected it to my computer

  • Under Format, I selected FAT32 (default) and reformatted. It went through fine.

  • checked for errors under check disk options

  • put all my music back on, in a file labelled MUSIC.

Here’s where we took a turn for the worse.

  • unplugged the sansa and it went through a system restart and refresh database

  • I was able to choose the correct song - but my “Billie Jean” had the picture of Eminem’s album cover…same deal with all the other songs! Some songs were also labelled incorrectly. I figured that would be easy to delete, so I plugged the sansa back in.

  • THERE IS NO MUSIC FOLDER. Just photos, videos, a folder called tmp and a file called VERSION.

- Checked the available space and I’m using more than 1G, meaning the songs I copied are definitely there…somewhere.

-  The sansa is still ‘writing’. I’m afraid to unplug it because it has been writing for more than half an hour now.

I’d appreciate any help you guys can give me. Very unfortunate since my sansa has been working great the past four years.

Message Edited by sidewalkchalk on 07-04-2009 01:35 AM

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Un-Hide the MUSIC folder and just do a ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ in your system tray (lower right-hand corner of your computer screen).

The ‘labeling’ & album art issues most likely are ID3 tag-related.

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Thanks for your info!

To change the ID3 tags I’ve just been right-clicking Properties on each song. The picture does not show up here. How do I delete the incorrect pictures? Is there a way to do it with Windows Media Player? When I open up the device in WMP it tells me there are no files on the device…:frowning: Any more help you can provide?

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I use the method of adding an ‘album art.jpg’ file to each Album folder, but sometimes there ae some really stubborn ones that insist on displaying the wrong album cover.

MP3TAG is a free, dedicated tagging program that is used & recommended by many here. You can edit or correct more fields of your ID3 tags with this than with the ‘Properties’ or WMP, and correct the format of the tags too (if they’re wrong) ‘en masse’. You can also embed the album art into the tag itself, so this may help with those pesky files.