I’ve played from the Zip hardrive on the desktop and there appears to be nothing wrong. I then replaced an old file whose bit rate was medium (about 100) and put in instead a 140-160 bit rate file and it works fine. Can Sandisk uprate the players performance through software?
redford said, “I think I have solved the problem. The problem is bitrate. The Zip works off very high quality bitrate. If a file is anything less than a set rate it will protest by blips and skips. To “Splat”, if you have downloaded material for podcast, it may be of inferior quality and that is the reason its failing.”
That’s great news!
I just downloaded a freeware app called Mobile Media Converter that can increase the bitrate. I’ll give that a try and hopefully it will solve my problem.
Thanks redford.
Are these AAC/MP4/M4A files? The Zip’s firmware is well known to be buggy when playing longer AAC files.
not at all. pure mp3. will Sandisk fix this slight niggle of a problem? and turn a good mp3 player to a brillaint outstanding player?
my pleasure. if it works for you it will mean my pillock brain and curiosuty did something right for a change. having just fixed a china made portable Doss speaker so badly designed and made, i feel slightly DIY rather than normal DOP:grumpycat:
redford wrote:
not at all. pure mp3. will Sandisk fix this slight niggle of a problem? and turn a good mp3 player to a brillaint outstanding player?
I doubt it. That said, I think their decoder is fairly robust, so its likely something odd about your files.
You can of course try rockbox which uses a different mp3 decoder and may tolerate your files better (or may not if they’re actually broken).
my pleasure, splat. if it works for you i feel less than dopey. having just fixed an awful china made Doss speaker I am feeling DIY rather than DOP:grumpycat:
there could be an element of truth that my files maybe odd. but since all the files perform sparkling on my old Creative Zen Mosiac I cannot see why it should not do the same on a modern Sandisk. as I have said, anything below 110 kbps and it will croak.
Surely I can listen to Elgar with some respect?
saratoga said, " I think their decoder is fairly robust, so its likely something odd about your files.
You can of course try rockbox which uses a different mp3 decoder and may tolerate your files better (or may not if they’re actually broken)"
After having this ‘blip/skip’ problem for weeks I looked through these forums and found out about rockbox. I switched to rockbox - I’m still running it - but the problem remained.
I took redford’s advice and increased the bitrate from 128 to 192 kbps on the podcasts I listed to today and had no blips or skips. So, knock on wood, I think he nailed it.
Thanks redford.
good news. but it looks like Sandisk gurus think this issue is tiny so my requests are just being binned. if old players can handle low bit rate then why not high tech new ones? surely saving memory is a good thing.
well well, what do you know surprise surprise. i tried to edit the music files on a tablet and the internal memory got erased. this cheapo gadget never ceases to surprise me. also, the sd card is another niggle. its spring loaded. if dropped, the card will pop out. try finding that in the middle of a field. best to fix some cellotape over it or a elastic band.
@redford wrote:
good news. but it looks like Sandisk gurus think this issue is tiny so my requests are just being binned. if old players can handle low bit rate then why not high tech new ones? surely saving memory is a good thing.
There is one member here, JK98, that listens to a lot of low-bitrate files…and I mean well under 100kbps…on various Sansa players (including the Zip). So my guess is there is something up with your files, whether it is the tags or not, I couldn’t be sure.
Hi guys. It’s a convention this afternoon!
I’ve had few problems with the low bit rates (using 64kb on some podcasts) but it is interesting to see reported issues below the 128 threshold.
Same here, I’m interested in what happened with lost files. You could try running chkdsk on the device (MSC mode) and see if there was a FAT corruption- that would make files appear “invisible”.
Bob 
