Fuze extremely slow to load / skip songs

MP3 players Sansa Fuze
1

Hello,

I recently updated my Fuze’s firmware to 1.01.22A. I also purchased a new SanDisk 16GB microsdhc card for it. I have all 2378 of my mp3s on this card. All my songs show up and play… but it is painfully slow to skip songs. Even the initial loading of the first song is slow; it just sits at the splash screen while it loads. I will literally have to wait 5-10 seconds before the next song will play. Before I updated the firmware, I had a 8GB card in it and I never experienced this problem. What can I do to fix this? Is 16GB (or > 2000 songs) just too much or maybe the firmware update has something to do with it? thanks

2

@elitrix wrote:

Hello,

 

I recently updated my Fuze’s firmware to 1.01.22A.

 

I’m a new user like you - but one thing I’d ask is - did you check the version of your device before selecting that firmware update.   I purchased Mine Saturday - and I got the Revision 2 device

 

Revision 1 = 1.XX.XX (example: 1.01.15)
Revision 2 = 2.XX.XX (example: 2.01.16)

 

If you hadn’t checked your system the Hardware version before installing 1.01.22A - that might be a source of the problem.  The Revision 2 Device takes software 02.01.17

 

 

3

Yes I did check this. I purchased my fuze about 2 months ago and received a revision 1 device. Everything else works just fine, there is just a huge pause between tracks. It may be because I just started using a new 16gb card. Has anyone else had this issue? Is anyone else using a 16gb card and not having this issue? I’d be interested in what card you have (brand, size, and class) as well as how many songs you have one it? Thanks

4

Alright guys… I’ve solved my own problem. I’ll put the solution here in case anyone else has this issue. I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned before.

Anyway, the 16GB card I have is just fine, even though it’s just a class II card. Also, the number of songs I have (>2000) is also perfectly acceptable by the Fuze. The issue, I believe, arose from the method I used to transfer all the songs.

I had originally transferred all 2300+ songs via MSC. The media refresh took a good solid 10 minutes or so. Everything worked except an unusually long pause before loading any track.

In order to fix this I formatted my card in Windows (fat32) and then transferred all my songs back to the card, but this time in Windows Media Player using MTP mode. After this finished I noticed the media refresh took much less time (maybe 5 minutes) and the long pause before loading each track was gone! Now switching tracks takes less than a second.

So for anyone who stumples upon this having the same issue, it seems the Fuze likes songs transferred via MTP a little better than MSC… or at least it is able to load them up faster.

So there you have it… go figure.

5

Rather than an MTP vs. MSC problem, it’s more likely an cluster allocation issue. The Sansas run best when formatted with a 32KB cluster and this is what is used with the Fuze’s on-board Format function.

However, if you format via Windows it creates tiny little 4KB clusters that can slow things way down, especially with that 16GB card. You should probably re-format the card to the preferred 32KB size cluster, but you’ll most likely have to do it from a DOS prompt.

6

Hi guys,

I recently picked up a new Fuze (v2 firmware) and a 16gb microsd (class II) card, and am running Ubuntu 8.04. After cleanly tagging everything consistently using easytag and successfully connecting in MSC mode, I transferred over enough music to fill up the internal memory and the microsd card. The transfer, while quite slow, worked ok, and similarly to elitrix’s comment earlier, the refresh took over 10 minutes. The tracks (mostly) play OK, but the time to skip from one track to another (whether it’s shuffle or sequential, adjacent or far apart tracks, etc.) is extremely long – 10 to 15 seconds.

I don’t have a Windows machine handy, and my efforts at getting MTP mode working and detecting the Fuze on Ubuntu have thus far been unavailing (I’ve got latest libmtp and mtp-tools, edited the libmtp-rules file, and a number of other suggestions from the forums). I did have a chance to do a partial test re: the MTP mode theory on a friend’s windows machine – I only had time to load a few hundred songs, and those that did transfer worked well – no skip time delay.

I confess that I am not experienced enough with disk formatting tools to figure out / reformat the microsd card using a different cluster size, if the later suggestion in this forum is on point (although it’s worth noting that the skip speed is still slow, albeit not as slow, when the microsd card is taken out and only internal memory is used). Do you have any advice either on how to correct this problem re: MSC mode – it can’t possibly be the problem for all the Linux Fuze users out there, since this problem doesn’t seem to come up anywhere else no matter how hard I’ve looked (plus MTP support for the Fuze is still regarded as spotty). Any ideas on how to fix this, since it makes the device practically unusable (nearly a minute to flip through a half dozen songs), would be tremendously appreciated!

7

t0ranga wrote:

 

I recently picked up a new Fuze (v2 firmware) and a 16gb microsd (class II) card, and am running Ubuntu 8.04. After cleanly tagging everything consistently using easytag and successfully connecting in MSC mode, I transferred over enough music to fill up the internal memory and the microsd card. The transfer, while quite slow, worked ok, and similarly to elitrix’s comment earlier, the refresh took over 10 minutes. The tracks (mostly) play OK, but the time to skip from one track to another (whether it’s shuffle or sequential, adjacent or far apart tracks, etc.) is extremely long – 10 to 15 seconds.

 

I don’t have a Windows machine handy, and my efforts at getting MTP mode working and detecting the Fuze on Ubuntu have thus far been unavailing (I’ve got latest libmtp and mtp-tools, edited the libmtp-rules file, and a number of other suggestions from the forums). I did have a chance to do a partial test re: the MTP mode theory on a friend’s windows machine – I only had time to load a few hundred songs, and those that did transfer worked well – no skip time delay.

 

I confess that I am not experienced enough with disk formatting tools to figure out / reformat the microsd card using a different cluster size, if the later suggestion in this forum is on point (although it’s worth noting that the skip speed is still slow, albeit not as slow, when the microsd card is taken out and only internal memory is used). Do you have any advice either on how to correct this problem re: MSC mode – it can’t possibly be the problem for all the Linux Fuze users out there, since this problem doesn’t seem to come up anywhere else no matter how hard I’ve looked (plus MTP support for the Fuze is still regarded as spotty). Any ideas on how to fix this, since it makes the device practically unusable (nearly a minute to flip through a half dozen songs), would be tremendously appreciated!

This might be a long shot, but it might be worth a try.  I used to have a problem similar to this.  Skipping through songs on one of my albums was slow.  What I did was to use Mp3tag to eliminate all unnecessary tag fields, and the problem was solved.

 

The fields I ended up with for that album are album, artist, band, composer, genre, rating WMP, title, track, and year.  I suppose I do not really need band and composer.  The problem was on a version-2 2-GB Fuze with the latest firmware and an 8-GB class-6 Transcend microSDHC card and MTP mode. The album is in internal memory with 287 MB free on internal and 7022 MB free on external.

 

I am using Vista Home Premium.  Refreshes take only a few seconds.  On a version-1 8-GB Fuze with the latest firmware and a 16-GB class-2 Patriot microSDHC card, MTP mode, 10 MB free internal, and 4980 MB free external, the last time I timed a refresh, it took only two minutes and fifteen seconds.  I have never had any problems playing any tracks on my Fuzes.

8

Hey Contrapuntal,

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried your idea and ran easytag to strip everything out using easytag (leaving only artist, track title, and album; I thought you might be on to something b/c all my mp3s have embedded album art tags), but the skip time between tracks hasn’t substantially improved (maybe some, but still 7-10 seconds and 5+ minute refresh). I realize that the size of the sd card (16gb) and that it’s class II slows things down, but I have the problem even only using the internal memory (which I retested after updating the tags).

There’s still a big difference between our systems, Contrapuntal, in that you’re connecting via WMPlayer in MTP mode, whereas I’ve been using MSC mode on Ubuntu Linux 8.04.

I’m still having trouble believing that this is due to MSC mode, given the lack of other people raising this same issue on forums/etc. and positive reviews of the device using both modes. I’m still stumped – anyone have any other thoughts or a similar problem? Thanks in advance.

9

Can you set EasyTag to encode in ISO-8859-1 instead of Unicode (UTF)? The Fuze might be choking on those.

10

I have a similar issue with one of my albums and I know exactly what causes the problem but I’m too lazzy to work on it and I have rockbox so I don’t need to do it.
The thing is that the ID3 tags on those faulty files are the v2.4. The fuze prefers the v.2.3.
Just use easytag and convert the ID3 tags to v2.3.

I hope that it’ll work

11

Wanted to belatedly update the thread. Unfortunately none of the above solutions – reformatting w/ diff. clusters, using v2.3 instead of 2.4 tags, clearing out extra fields, using MTP mode, removing album art – were working, and Fuze was still very slow to rescan songs and skip tracks. I got back to this problem recently, and finally figured out what’s been causing so much trouble for me. Easytag, the program I’ve been using for tagging on ubuntu, was set to automatically ALSO write an id3v1 tag. I set it to clear those out and only write a v2.3 (western iso, not unicode) tag, and voila: everything sped up to normal. It seems it was getting confused/bogged down processing dual sets of tags for each file. Hope that helps someone with a similar problem – check your tagging app to see if it’s automatically adding v1 tags. Thanks for everyone’s help.