I have had some troublesome experiences before with Sansa Express, but most of them went away when I started doing this:
Many threads help us how to configure Sansa Express as a USB Drive using something called MSC mode. In my experience this doesn’t work too well. MTP mode works really well, meaning which Sansa Express behaves as expected after the operations.
I use MSC mode only for firmware upgrades, as directed.
For every other operation I use MTP mode. Infact after I started using MTP mode older problems viz. funny characters and sudden freezing/crashing seemed to go away. The database built is good, in the sense that the indexes are built correctly.
So the best thing might be this:
-
Upgrade to the latest firmware version in MSC mode. This works for most of the people. Use existing help threads in this forum on steps regarding how to go about this. Recent firmware upgrades seem to be good in the sense that they don’t erase the existing music. But be safe and back up.
-
After firmware upgrade, backup and delete the indexes that you have. Remove entire music stuff from the player. Connect it using MTP mode and copy back all the music. Remember that Sansa Express supports only ID3v1 tags. Mp3Tag is a good software to help with this.
-
Now switch on the player and it must build the databases correctly. I don’t have any folders in music. The indexing is very good that I can find the songs I want easily. Also I use the playlists created in Windows on the player. These are .pla files and you can find help in creating them in this forum.
The following are not-so-confident work-arounds:
- If you find that your player crashes when you use “play previous”, restart the player again and do something that is non-music. Play the radio or just to a dummy voice record. These generally don’t fail and you can use your player after that like before.
A very strange observation
- My Sansa Express is automatically playing the last song when I switch it on. Previously it used to show the song that was played last and I had to “Play” it. And further, it is playing the song after skipping a minute. Looks like sansa can indeed seek and play. This might be good to have feature. (I have two songs in repeat mode “all”. When I turned off and turned it back on, I observed this strange behavior.)
Finally a kudos for all the help that I got in this forum. I really enjoy my Sansa Express. It comes that cheap, can play radio and record voice in addition to being an MP3 player.
