Hi, I recently bought a 4gb clip+ and a 32gb Sandisk SDHC card. Over the last few nights I’ve been transferring music on to it, but although there’s plenty of space left on the card, I am stuck at 2,603 tracks. I can drag and drop them from my music folder to the card, and it tells me it’s copying, and the number of tracks goes up. But once I unplug it they are not on the player. When I plug it back in, I’m down to 2,603 tracks again. I’m not massively computer literate, if anyone has any suggestions why this is happening and what to do I’d really appreciate it! The USB setting was on auto, I tried MSC and the same thing happened every time.
Two things might be going on. One is that the additional files are in formats the Sansa can’t read, like m4a from Apple. It only shows the files it can play.
But if they are all mp3, wma, ogg or flac files, then you have run up against the limit on the size of the database in the Sansa, MTABLE.SYS .
It’s basically a text file made from Album, Artist, etc. The Sansa firmware was written before such giant microSD cards were available. Sadly, it can only handle a certain number of characters in MTABLE.SYS. So the songs are there but it doesn’t show them in the lists of Album, Artist, etc.
You could try going down Music to Folders and see if the missing songs show up there. I don’t know if they will.
There is alternative firmware, Rockbox, that doesn’t have a limit on the database.
It’s open-source firmware, so it’s a little geeky, but if you follow its directions exactly you should be able to use it or to uninstall it if you don’t like it.
Thanks, the character limit makes sense. Although I wouldn’t have thought it would stop the tracks appearing / staying on the memory card. I could live with them being there but not having the track / artist name displayed as I only want to keep it on shuffle anyway, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I installed Rockbox which didn’t seem to solve the problem, and I don’t seem to be able to remove it now either…
Have you tested the card to confirm it is not defective or counterfeit?
I didn’t realize the files weren’t on the card–I just thought you couldn’t see them. As Tapeworm suggests, you may have a counterfeit card–a small one gimmicked to read as larger to your computer. The computer thinks it’s transferring the files but they have no place to land.
Meanwhile, on the Rockbox front:
Rockbox installs alongside the Sansa firmware and there should be a button you can hold while turning it on to get to the Sansa firmware.According to the manual online, it’s the LEFT button on the Clip+.
http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/rockbox-sansaclipplus/rockbox-buildch3.html#x5-280003.1.3
There are also uninstall instructions there in section 2, Installation. Go step by step and follow them exactly.
If there’s a problem, you can also brute-force uninstall Rockbox by loading the Sansa firmware and formatting on the Sansa (Settings/System Settings/Format). That will erase everything you have added on the internal memory, so make sure you have copies first.
