I’m having an issue with my Fuze and haven’t found any similar reports in the forums.
I have a new Fuze with the latest firmware installed. I have a 32gb SD card and 20gb of mp3s on it. Replay Gain is disabled on the player .
My problem is that there is a lag of about 5-8 seconds when selecting a track from the music list, or when advancing to the next track. The player does nothing, and I have to wait until the track plays.
Anyone know what the problem might be? Is it a known issue with the Sansa firmware? I tried Rockbox and had no problems at all with lagging, but I’d rather use Sansa’s UI.
The lag is probably caused by tags. Seems like something Rockbox can handle but the Fuze firmware can’t.
Get mp3tag.
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
During install, let it add itself to context menus.
Under Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg set Write to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1
Open your problem album (right-click on folder, mp3tag from the list). Highlight the files.
If there are Comments, delete them. Some people try to stick an encyclopedia in there. If any other field is filled with odd stuff, do something about it.
Under View, look at Extended Tags. Highlight again. Do you see an album cover? Someone may have imbedded giant album art in each file. Clicking the floppy disc icon on the right should extract an album cover as folder.jpg, which is all the Fuze needs. Then click the X to un-imbed the art. See if that helps with the lag.
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All of my files were tagged with Mp3tag with those specs. But they do contain embedded cover art at 250x250 pixels.
Since the majority of my collection is singles, I’d like to avoid well over 1,000 subfolders with only a single mp3 inside. I’d also like to keep the art embedded for my other devices that rely on it.
I’ll try loading the player with files without embedded art to confirm the problem. If that’s what it is, I’ll rethink my options.
After playing around with this, I realized that removing the cover art from the tag isn’t a good option. I need the embedded art for my PC mp3 player as well as my home theater media player unless I create seperate files for each device. Plus, I don’t want over a 1,000 nested folders.
It’s more work than it’s worth for only one device that can’t handle ID3tags.
I’d be returning this to Amazon if it weren’t for Rockbox. I’m just going to reinstall that and be done with it.
Did you try the experiment? Those don’t sound like excessively large album art. What’s the format of the embedded art? A little jpg like that shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t know about png, bmp, etc. But do try the experiment, because it might not be the art at all. All I can tell you is that when the Fuze firmware gets stuck chewing on something it’s usually something in the tags.
It seems this lag is related to the number of files you have on the memory card. My girlfriend has the identical Fuze (we bought two). She has 6gb on the internal memory and 3gb on a SD card (total: 1,100 files). It’s filled with mp3s that I tagged myself the same way as mine with one exception: Her cover art is larger at 500x500 with file sizes averaging around 100kb. Hers lags too, but it’s only 2-3 seconds.
Mine has 20gb all on the SD card (total: 2,095 files) and has a much longer lag time.
If the lag was caused by the size of the cover art, her lag should be longer than mine. It’s not. The difference is the number of files we have on the player.
I didn’t get around to trying this with no cover art because the card takes two hours to fill, and because I believe I have already discovered the cause.
Yes, it sounds like you have found the cause. But I wasn’t expecting you to strip all the cover art–just an album’s worth!
As you say, those are small files, even the 500 x 500 (someone has suggested that the Fuze is happiest with 300 x 300, but 500 x 500 isn’t significantly bigger). You’re sensible. Some people try to jam full-size, high-res art into their files.
Just curious about two things:
What is the class of the 32GB card? I don’t know if a faster one would help, or if the speed of the slot is the problem–though if Rockbox can handle it better, maybe it has a different driver for the slot.
And I wonder if putting part of that 20GB of music into the internal memory would speed things up. I’ve got 1329 songs, about 2/3 of it on an 8GB card, and I don’t have any lag.
I’m not sure of the class. Amazon lists it as a Class 2, but the first review suggests it may be a Class 4, so I’m not sure.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003OA8T92/
I’d like to keep all the tunes on the memory card. That way, I can easily transfer between players. Plus, I’d like to save the internal memory space for video I plan to add.
I might be able to reduce the lag time a bit by splitting it up, but I still think it would be a little worse than what’s on my girfriend’s player and I don’t care for it. It’s odd though that you have a setup similar to hers, but with no lag. Maybe the cover art does have something to do with it. What about bitrate? All of ours are either v0 vbr or 320.
I just reinstalled Rockbox and restored my original mp3 collection with 500x500 art (I’d previously reduced them to 250x250 with Sanse Mp3 Art Sizer just for the Fuze). No lag time at all.
I generally use 256 or 320 kbps bitrates. I don’t think that the bitrate matters (except for folks who are using very low bitrates and find that the Fuze database doesn’t list all their files).
To my understanding, the lag is the Fuze digesting the tag to display it.
People have had trouble with Unicode tags (which you don’t, since you’re using ISO-8859-1), with foreign characters in the tags, with large Comments and with embedded art. Anything the Fuze has to read that it’s not expecting. There’s also some kind of character limit that classical-music listeners sometimes run into if they’ve listed composer-work-orchestra-conductor-soloist-etc. in their tags.
So yes, the Fuze firmware is way too finicky about tags.
Rockbox must take a different, more tolerant approach to reading the tags. Too band SanDisk never caught up. Anyway, maybe someone will come up with a Rockbox skin you like.
If you’re curious, you might ask over at www.rockbox.org about the different behavior between Rockbox and the original firmware. Those guys have figured out a lot.
I actually like the look of Rockbox. It’s the button assignments that will take a while to get used to. I’d been using a Clip for years, and aside from the scroll wheel, the Fuze is set up the same way. I was pretty used to it.
If Sansa ever updates the firmware to eliminate my lag problem, and fixes the problem with some cover art not displaying (half of them didn’t at 500x500 <200kb), I might go back.
Thanks for your input on this.
@madrabbit wrote:
I actually like the look of Rockbox. It’s the button assignments that will take a while to get used to. I’d been using a Clip for years, and aside from the scroll wheel, the Fuze is set up the same way. I was pretty used to it.
If Sansa ever updates the firmware to eliminate my lag problem, and fixes the problem with some cover art not displaying (half of them didn’t at 500x500 <200kb), I might go back.
Thanks for your input on this.
I doubt there will be any more updates from SanDisk to the Fuze. And to be honest, the last couple Fuzes I had, I only used with Rockbox…it made them much better players, just like the Clip+.
The Clip Zip, on the other hand, is too new to know for sure. As far as using it with the SanDisk firmware, it is my favorite Sansa player ever…and there are surely improvements to come, both from SanDisk and from Rockbox. The future is looking good!
That’s one cool looking cat.
@marvin_martian wrote:
The Clip Zip, on the other hand, is too new to know for sure. As far as using it with the SanDisk firmware, it is my favorite Sansa player ever…and there are surely improvements to come, both from SanDisk and from Rockbox. The future is looking good!
I almost went with the Clip Zip, but I read that it didn’t display the track’s time and position. I wanted something that did.
@madrabbit wrote:
@marvin_martian wrote:
The Clip Zip, on the other hand, is too new to know for sure. As far as using it with the SanDisk firmware, it is my favorite Sansa player ever…and there are surely improvements to come, both from SanDisk and from Rockbox. The future is looking good!
I almost went with the Clip Zip, but I read that it didn’t display the track’s time and position. I wanted something that did.
At the moment, in its native form, it does not…it is capable of doing so, however.
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Zip/Rockbox-on-the-Zip/td-p/250654
