Chirp on low bit rate tracks

I recently picked up the Fuze to replace my old Creative Zen Nano Plus. However, I experienced some issues including the unknown artist/album problem for some of my files with existing ID3 tags. When playing my spoken word tracks (48 kbps mono) I hear a sound distortion best described as a ‘chirp’ at the end of the track. If I play the same files on a PC or another MP3 player I do not hear the chirp. Updating the firmware to the latest version did not help. Formatting the device and reloading the files did not resolve the issues either.  To try and determine if it was just those few files with an encoding problem I ripped an audio CD to that exact bit rate and experienced the same results. Has anyone come across this problem and/or found a solution? While I like the new player and I should be able to fix the unknown ID3 tag issue, the ‘chirp’ is not something I want to live with.

May be the same problem as posted here:  http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=sansafuse&thread.id=979

Sansafix claims no fix, as his explanation puts the problem in hardware.:cry:

@joecool96 wrote:

I recently picked up the Fuze to replace my old Creative Zen Nano Plus. However, I experienced some issues including the unknown artist/album problem for some of my files with existing ID3 tags. When playing my spoken word tracks (48 kbps mono) I hear a sound distortion best described as a ‘chirp’ at the end of the track. If I play the same files on a PC or another MP3 player I do not hear the chirp. Updating the firmware to the latest version did not help. Formatting the device and reloading the files did not resolve the issues either.  To try and determine if it was just those few files with an encoding problem I ripped an audio CD to that exact bit rate and experienced the same results. Has anyone come across this problem and/or found a solution? While I like the new player and I should be able to fix the unknown ID3 tag issue, the ‘chirp’ is not something I want to live with.

I’m not sure about the Fuze, but the e200’s like ID3v2.3 ISO-8559-1 formatted ID3 tags.  Use a program like MP3TAG to set your ID3 tags to the format the Sansa expects.

For the chirping issue, have you tried converting the files to a higher bitrate?  A freeware program like AnyAudioConverter should be able to do this.  The files won’t sound any better (garbage in, garbage out, as the old saying goes), but if the chirping issue is only prevalent with 48kbps files, then re-encoding to a higher bitrate might be a suitable workaround.

@themarkster wrote:

I’m not sure about the Fuze, but the e200’s like ID3v2.3 ISO-8559-1 formatted ID3 tags.  Use a program like MP3TAG to set your ID3 tags to the format the Sansa expects.

 

For the chirping issue, have you tried converting the files to a higher bitrate?  A freeware program like AnyAudioConverter should be able to do this.  The files won’t sound any better (garbage in, garbage out, as the old saying goes), but if the chirping issue is only prevalent with 48kbps files, then re-encoding to a higher bitrate might be a suitable workaround.

Thanks for the information.  I retagged some of my files in the format you mentioned and they showed up correctly on the Fuze.  

As far as the chirping issue goes, its most likely the low bitrate, as the supported bitrate for mp3 files is 64-320kbps and wma is 64-256kbps. Anything exceeding those rates, may have playback issues