So my Fuze + has worked “okay” since I got it a few weeks ago. I really want to like it, as this is my third Sansa mp3 player , the two previous being the E200 and the Fuze. Now when I first got this one, it would take quite some time to navigate through my albums or artists. I have over 4000 songs on it between the player itself and a 16 microsd card. But over the past few days it has been very unresponsive, especially when going to the music section in general. It works fine on Radio, Settings, Video, etc, but when I go to Music, it does nothing for several minutes then the screen goes black. The player does not turn off, but after about 5-10 minutes it goes back to the previous screen. It’s like a loop I can’t seem to get out of. It’s really frustrating. I’m considering sending it back. One thing I can’t understand is that while there are a lot of songs on it, it was tolerable to work with for the first few weeks, but over the last day or so, it’s just unusable, waiting 5 minutes plus just from one screen to the next, and I haven’t put anything new on it in over a week. Why the sudden change? I was thinking maybe the size of playlists. I’ve been adding to both the top rated and golist where they’re both pretty high up there. Any suggestions on what the problem could be?
I got this same problem an insane amount of times until I recognized what the problem was for me: big playlists.
First, you’ll have to plug it into your computer and go to the menu where you see the “internal memory” folder, right click and click reformat. If it doesn’t show up on your computer, you have to hold the volume button (i think… not sure…) but if your computer recognizes it this doesn’t matter. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have to reload all your music on there, which ■■■■■ but it happens.
To keep it from freezing again, I suggest not putting songs in playlists. After having this problem happen to me several times, I made the connection. Recently, I was loading up my playlists and saw it was getting more sluggish so I emptied my playlist, and voila! It works with hardly any wait time between menus. A few seconds at most.
One sansa person told me to get Mp3tag and make it so that all my files had the same tag (ID3v2.3 or whatever) but that takes FOREVER and is not humanly possible if you want to stay sane. Although it’s a powerful application that can be very useful for imbedding album art into songs, I’ve heard people say that doesn’t help their sluggishness and I couldn’t possibly do such a thing to all my music files folder by folder.
Hope the playlist trick works for you. Perhaps eventually we will get *looped*menus*AGHEMM* and that then the sluggishness will subside. Until then, best of luck.
That’s what I was thinking. Thanks for the response. I’ll try that.
It won’t take forever at all to change your tags from the old ones to 3v2.3. I did it in less than 20 minutes time. That is not inluding me going through files. It took me say 2 minutes at most to do the work. Just add the music directory to Mp3tag and it will add all your music to it and then you can set it up to remove the old tags and add the 3v2.3. I did it to all my music to make sure I don’t have tag issues. But sandisk has no excuse for the playlists making the device slow. I have the same issue and it happens when you load lots of music onto this device. It is firmware related and they have no excuse for this at all. The older fuze does not exhibit this weakness at all. I really want to love this fuze plus as well as the uploading of music is way faster than the older fuze plus the refresh time only takes a minute or two. But the boot up is not acceptable. It should only take a few seconds for the device to boot like the old fuze. If sandisk can get rid of these silly weaknesses they would have a very solid mp3 player on their hands. They would have been better of stkcing with the button style and having it auto scroll through alphabets when you move the scroller fast to improve access times and overall ease of use. It’s really not smart to try copy ipod. Not to mention all ipods ■■■■. Overpriced and horrible sound quality.
So I cleared my golist which had close to 300 songs and instantly the performance improved. Much better now. But I would still like having my golist. This is something that definitely needs to be fixed.
Yeah, it kind of ■■■■■. They’re supposed to be working on looped menus which should fix all this.
They said they’re still working on it and will have it next download update, but that’s probably a couple months or more away.
I’m not sure if that tag thing is really going to solve many if any of your slowness problems, but it is a worthwhile endeavor to try if you have a couple extra minutes, and learning to use that tool is cool/fun. If you download new music and the cover isn’t on it, mp3tag can probably fix that. As for slowness… I’ve seen people on here say they made them all ID3v2.3 and it that it did nothing.
Until the next update, you could always mess around with genres. Its nice to find one that lots of your music shares in common and just jam on multiple artists that have similar feel. For me this isn’t a problem because I’m so into music that pretty much my entire library is worthy of my golist so I just shuffle em all.
Same problem same solution, I own a 16gb version and it is very quick even absolutly full… but if I build a playlist “list togo” it start to be very slow over 10-15 songs in it. Very anoying indeed! I hope this will be solve because else after the very last update this player is (at the end) starting to rock
what are you using to create playlists? i have one created in WMP 12 that has 423 songs and I dont see any sligish menu.
-I don’t use any external play list I build them directly with the player (music to go)
-And I did the enormous work to recovert my whole ID3 tag to v2.3 because I had v2.4 So nothing from that (but I still mix wma, ogg, flac and mp3)
How do you convert the tags using Mp3Tag?
I’m on linux so I’ve been using easytag and kid3-qt. Easytag can be pretty slow with big quantities of files and does not accept wma, so kid3 was better. Anyway it doesn’t solves the sluggish issue wich come for sure from playlist.
through it solves the problem of having files showed under unknow artist/album
I’ll second the experience of clean, updated tags really improving performance. I have ~1000 songs on my fuze+ right now and it starts in less than 10 seconds compared to the 30 it took with 250 songs with non-normalized id3v1 tags.
It also improves the experience of using the box, being able to sort and find your music by all possible field references.
I *don’t* know if this affects performance, but I don’t apply the album image to each song via its id3 tag. I just place a copy of the album cover in the directory for that album and rename the image folder.jpg. YMMV.
FWIW: I use MusicBrainz when I don’t have complete information, but before I transfer anything to the fuze+ I check and re-write the tags with cowbell. That way I know the filename/metadata are consistent.
