Extra Characters Added to Folder Name when Adding Audiobooks to Fuze

I was just able to pick up a new 4GB Fuze off Craigslist for $40, which included a couple of uSD cards.

The first thing I did when I got home with my new Fuze was Format it to get rid of all the factory-loaded media.

The second thing I did was flash the firmware. It’s now running V02.02.26A.

Next, I loaded some audiobooks onto the 4GB uSDHC card while the card was in the Fuze. I did this via drag and drop with Windows Explorer. The audiobooks are on my hard drive in C:\Music\Audiobooks\name of audiobook folders. I dragged an audiobook’s folder to Sansa Fuze 4GB\External uSD Card\AUDIOBOOKS. USB Mode on the Fuze is set to MTP. All audiobooks are in unprotected MP3.

Somehow, the process added 8 characters at the beginning of each folder name. Each audiobook’s folder on the Fuze looks something like 3C0C0000_name of audiobook. The first 4 characters are different for each folder, but each one ends in 0000_ – I have done this for 8 audiobooks and it has happened for each one.

I like to use the Fuze’s folder navigation function to access my media. I can get to each audiobook by drilling down to the appropriate folder, but again, each folder begins with those extraneous characters. Once the book is selected to play, it plays fine.

Why are these extra characters being added to the beginning of each audiobook folder name? How can I prevent this from happening?

Update: This evening I decided to delete all of the audiobooks from the uSDHC card, change USB Mode to MSC, then transfer the audiobooks back onto the uSDHC card. After doing this, all audiobook folders showed up properly both in Windows Explorer and on the Fuze itself. I’d still like to know why the extra characters are added to the folder names in MTP mode?

Thanks for any insight.

MTP is made to control the Fuze through Windows Media Player. It makes the Fuze a virtual drive instead of a plain old disc drive, which is what MSC does. The weird filenames are a side effect.

The default setting is MTP (or Auto Detect, which goes to MTP when it detects Windows Media Player) because SanDisk thought that people would like to have a music library PC/Sansa interface like iTunes/Ipod.  Unfortunately, WMP is no iTunes (and if you ask me, iTunes is a weird bloated tyrannical software too). 

WMP and MTP mode are necessary for subscription services and their DRM garbage. If you don’t have a subscription service, just leave it in MSC. 

 Playlisting, synching and the other non-DRM functions of Windows Media Player can be done by Media Monkey and Winamp in MSC mode.