Clip not reclaiming disk space?

I’m using a 2gb Clip running the 18A firmware with my Mac.  When I load 2gb of music onto it and then delete a folder, the space is not reclaimed.  It still says it is full even if I delete 100s of MB of mp3s.  Disconnecting it and going to System Info shows exactly the same thing: the song count has decreased but the disk space is still maxed out.  I looked for and deleted all the OSX hidden directories in the root of the drive and cleared the Trash with no effect.  How do I get the Clip to recognize the freed disk space?

Go to Settings on the Clip and choose “Format”.

This will erase all your music files but should also free your memory.

Yes, that works but isn’t terribly useful.

How exactly are you deleting music files?   I don’t think the Clip keeps music files in individual folders.   All the music files are in the same folder called MUSIC which is under the root directory.   If you can provide more detail on the problem then others might be able to provide better suggestions.

Try deleting the tracks individually and then the folder.

But you may still need to format for to recover memory when you deleted the folder first.

> How exactly are you deleting music files?   I don’t think the Clip keeps music files in individual folders.   All the music files are in the same folder called MUSIC which is
> under the root directory.   If you can provide more detail on the problem then others might be able to provide better suggestions.

I’m putting a folder of music onto the Clip by dragging an Artist directory in my iTunes library into the MUSIC folder, which contains a bunch of albums by that artist.  I’m deleting the songs in the same manner - deleting the Artist directory:

MUSIC
– Artist
---- Album 1
------ Song 1.mp3
---- Album 2
etc.

This is the typical way you manage MP3s on a USB mass storage device so I would be shocked to find that it does not work.

> How exactly are you deleting music files?   I don’t think the Clip keeps music files in individual folders.   All the music files are in the same folder called MUSIC
> which is under the root directory.   If you can provide more detail on the problem then others might be able to provide better suggestions.

Deleting individual files does not seem to work either - I deleted a 150MB mp3 and 0.7MB was recovered.  Putting MP3s into folders under MUSIC works just fine - they show up and play as normal.

I seem to recall having heard of something like this previously, with iTunes and non-iPod players.  You may want to try emptying your trashcan after deleting, to see if that does anything.  Also, perhaps try dragging the song to your desktop, and then moving it to the Clip rather than directly going from iTunes to the Clip.  iTunes seems to want to do things its way, even if that’s not what the user wants, and can try to “protect itself” from user intervention.

The issue is actually because of the way the Mac operates.  Basically once you delete a file, it stays on the device so you can retrieve it from your trash bin.  Once you eject it, those links are broken, but the space is still used up.

In the future, when you delete the files, just empty your trash BEFORE ejecting it, and you’ll be fine.  This applies to any removable device, mp3 player, flash drive, etc.