Fuze crashes when backlight turns off with firmware 01.01.22

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
#1

Since I upgraded to 01.01.22, my fuze crashes (stops playing and needs ‘hold power switch’ reset) at the very moment the backlight turns off. I observed that

  • it’s actually backlight related, if I keep pressing some keys to make the backlight stay on, everything is fine. Stop pressing keys, wait 15s -> crash
  • it doesn’t happen with all mp3 files. Some do work, many don’t. I didn’t yet find out which difference between the files triggers the crash
  • after downgrading to 01.01.15a or 01.01.11a, the fuze works fine, again

Any idea?

#2

Some further observations:

  • it seems like 128kbps mp3s trigger this behaviour, while 160k or 190k encoded files don’t. (took the same mp3 and reencoded it using lame 3.98.8, using different bit rates. only the 128k file triggers the crash. vbr (-V2) works fine, as do 160k or higher encoded files.
  • after playing one ‘working’ mp3, the ‘bad’ mp3s start to work as well, so to trigger the bug, one has to play a ‘bad’ mp3 as the first one after turning the player on

BTW this is a 8GB sansa fuze, v1.

To make sure this behaviour is not caused by a corrupt filesystem or similar, I did a factory reset and reformatted the device, just uploaded a single mp3 (MSC mode), and was able to reproduce the crash immediately.

#3

I have never had this problem and nearly all of my owned content is 128kps MP3’s (fixed Bit Rate). 

One thing I would check is your MP3 tags.  Look at the tag version on a good file vs. a bad file.

There was an issue on some tags not being recognized if they were not in the right format, but it never caused a crash.

I’ve never had a crash on my system, so I don’t know what to tell you.

Sorry

#4

I ruled out id3 by trying it with a freshly encoded file - just the output from lame, without adding additional id3 tags.

Could this be a hardware problem of my device? I don’t think so, as downgrading to an older firmware seems to fix it, but who knows?