am thinking of getting the sansa fuze,but...

MP3 players Sansa Fuze
1

Am thinking of getting this player,because I love music :slight_smile:

But,i have a few questions:

will this work on linux?

do you really have to convert the photos and video because it won´t work or fit on the player?

does it have much problems i must know about?

thank you…

2

@kindblue wrote:

Am thinking of getting this player,because I love music :slight_smile:

 

But,i have a few questions:

 

will this work on linux?

do you really have to convert the photos and video because it won´t work or fit on the player?

does it have much problems i must know about?

 

thank you…

YES!

Kinda 

No!

Yes the Fuze will work on Lunix, Do a search on the board here, there has been alot of discussions about how it all works.

You do have to Convert photos and Videos, but you dont have to use the software Sansa Says (Im not sure you can), But all that should be covered in the discussions about the Fuze and Lunix.

No- there are no major problems. Most of the issues reported on here are matters of prefrence not actual problems on the player. The nice thing about Sansa’s are that if there is a bug or a major issue, they do regular firmwire upgrades and these fix the big issues as well as making the player better in general

3

There was a recent thread about someone who managed to convert video without Sansa’s software. I’ve used these same settings with other software and it didn’t work. Video is very iffy.

Photos are easy - there’s just a size limit, so they have to be resized.

You’ll have to learn some of the Fuze’s idiosyncrasies, like how to manually put the firmware on there and how to make playlists if you want them. Its all pretty easy, but you may have to spend five minutes reading to understand how.

4

Video conversion on linux is definately a problem. Sandisk promises improvements with a future firmware though. There is a 4000 song limit in the current firmware that will be raised to 8000 in the next firmware. Also if you plan to swap microSD cards often, prepare for some (search the forum for more exact times) minutes of database update each time. Other then that (and some minor annoyings) the Fuze is almost the perfect player, and has high chances of getting a rockbox port somewhere in 2009, which would even increase the feature list.

5

@kindblue wrote:

will this work on linux?

I use mine on Kubuntu 8.10.

I’m not very demanding - I put tracks on the Fuze and listen to them grouped as albums. I don’t hold with playlists - I come from a simpler age when you put the needle in the groove at the edge, and listened till it reached the middle, then turned the thing over :wink:

If you want playlists to work seemlessly, or want to watch videos, you might find problems.

USB MSC mode works most effectively.

MTP mode works OK if you don’t want to use the microSD card - libmtp supports external storage, but I have yet to find a music manager app that will use it in an effective manner.

If you search the forum for RhythmBox you should find a recent thread with blow by blow details. There’s also a current thread on how to hack playlists…

6

this has probably been said already, but I find converting pictures easily to  the Fuze (in Linux) can be done with a tool called
‘Phatch’ - you can output the resized images straight to the Fuzes internal memory so you’re not left with two sized images on your local computer.

Videos - that’s another (very sorry) story.

RhythmBox is pretty sweet for managing libraries.

ChimaI

8GB Sansa Fuze Black

2GB MicroSD Card

Intrepid Ibex (8.10)

7

The Fuze is a vey good player, but be aware that until fixed in a (promised) future firmware update, the Fuze can only cope with a maximum of 4000 (ish) tracks.

8

I’ve used mine on several Linux distros. The only problem I’ve had is having to manually mount it because most hardware detectors (including Hotplug) don’t update fstab (there is no partition number, as in sda1, assigned to the partition, it is simply sda).

If I recall correctly, the Fuze should work with JPGs considering that they are within the above-mentioned limit. A Linux friend of mine is currently working on a set of tools to convert videos and pictures to the correct format for the Fuze. I can provide these to you when they are finished (it shouldn’t be more than a month or two, but I’d chance a guess at no more than a couple weeks).

There aren’t many problems at all. In fact, I’ve yet to experience any problems with mine (other than the scroll wheel not turning unless I blow into it, but Sandisk is replacing it under warranty), not even the problems mentioned in the Firmware Update mentioned at the top of this forum.