Fuze+ Linux Tips

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1

This my Sansa Fuze+ Linux-FAQ

it contains what I learned when tried to use my new Sansa Fuze+ without touching Windows.

It’s in FAQ form and might possibly help other Linux user to have more fun with this cool player.

It contains two parts (so far):  the first longer one dealing with “Music” and a rather short one dealing with

viewing Photos on Sansa Fuze+

Hardware/Software I used:

Player: Sans Fuze+ 16GB, firmware 01.30.01F
PC: Ubuntu 10.04, Kernel 2.6.32

Music FAQ

Q1: Can I use MTP mode on Linux?
A1: There is something called ‘mtpfs’ together with a lot of command line
   tools mtp-*. But I didn’t manage it to work for me.
   To keep life easy stick to MSC mode.

Q2: Which audio format is suitable for sound files?
A2: I tested MP3, FLAC, and OGG. All three seem to work.
   I experienced sometimes problems with ID3 tags of MP3 files not being
   correctly parsed.
   My favourite is OGG (Vorbis).

Q3: Why does Sansa not recognise changes of sound file tags (e.g. album,
    artist, …)?
A3: It seems that Sansa is maintaining some kind of local database that    
    get’s updated during each startup. The firmware seems to inspect added
    files for tags but (presumably for performance reasons) does not check
    for tag changes within files that had been there before.
    The following sequence of actions ensures that files get inspected again:
    - attach Sansa to your PC
    - save the files you are going to re-tag to your hard disk and
      remove them from the Sansa drive.
      (If your are using some graphical file management make sure that
      you empty the “trash”. Otherwise the files will still turn up in some
      stupid hidden directory)
    - disconnect Sansa and check that the files are gone
    - correct the tags of your sound files
    - re-connect Sansa to your PC and copy the changed files to it

Q4: Some sound file information (album, artist, …) doesn’t show up correctly,
   e.g. some files end up with ‘Unknown’ artist and ‘Unknown’ album.
A4: try the strategy from A3. If that does not help try another file format,
    decoder, tagging tool. Additionally you can try to use simple file names
    instead of long ones containing funny characters (as long as the metadata
    gets parsed correctly it cannot hurt to stick to UNIX friendly filenames)

Q5: Which file structure should I use to organise my sound files on Sansa?
A5: It’s not really mandatory but I recommend to put all sound files into the
   “Music” folder of Sansa and organize them by artist and album, i.e. each
   sound file has a path like “Music/<artist>/<album>/<file>”.

Q6: The sound files for an album turn up in the wrong oder. What can I do?
A6: Normally titles within an album are ordered by track number read from the
    metadata. If no track number is defined (or wasn’t recognised by the
    firmware) sound files are order by title.
    Check that the track number is part of the metadata tags.
    It they are there but does not seem to be used for ordering see A4

Q7: How to I get the cover/album art displayed for my sound files?
A7: There a basically two different methods to store cover arts:
   1) put them directly into the meta data section of sound files.
   2) put a suitable image separate on Sansa.

   I do not recommend 1). Here the test results:

   FLAG (picture added with ‘easytag’): cover art not displayed
   OGG (picture added with ‘easytag’):  cover art not displayed
   OGG (picture added as tag METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE): cover art not displayed
   MP3 (picture added with ‘easytag’): cover art gets displayed but album/artist/title information got lost

   So I stick to 2):
   just copy picture (JPEG format assumed) into the folder holding sound files for that album and rename it to ‘folder.jpg’

Q8: I’ve put a ‘folder.jpg’ file into the correct folder but still Sansa doesn’t
   display it. What can I do?
A8: try the strategy from A3 but remove the complete folder temporarily
    from your Sansa.

Q9: Which format and resolution is suitable for cover art?
A9: The method relying on a file named ‘folder.jpg’ already assumes JPEG format.
   Pictures seem to be rescaled automatically but you can save some space by
   transforming big ones (most are available with 500x500) to the display
   size of cover art during file replay which is 220x220.

   I used ‘convert’ from Imagemagick tool set for conversion:

      convert <origfile> -resize 220x220\> <newfile>

   The strange looking suffix “\>” tells ‘convert’ to not rescale files
   already having lower resolution. Those are get displayed with a white border.

Q10: Does it make a difference whether to store sound files on the Sansa
     directly or putting them onto a card in the expansion slots?
A10: No, both should work the same.
     But you should respect the main file structure, i.e. put your sound files
     into the ‘Music’ folder of your microSD cards root directory.
     (Those top level directories are created when the Sansa “sees” the
     card for the first time)

Q11: How do I create playlists?
A11: Still open…I don’t know whether the firmware can read .m3u files
     and if yes where it expects them.

Photo FAQ

Q1: How to organize my photos on Sansa?
A1: Just create a directory within the “Photo” folder and put the image
   files there. Each subdirectory is treated as a separate photo collection.

Q2: Which format and resolution is suitable for my photos?
A2: I only tested JPEG files so far.
   To get the best balance between display quality and required storage
   you should rescale photos to 320x240 which is the native display size
   of Sans Fuze+ before copying them to your Sansa.
   Using Imagemagick you can do something like:

   convert <origfile> -resize 320x240\> <newfile>

   If you have rotated some pictures for better displaying on your computer
   you should rotate them back before copying them to your Sansa.

   The nice feature of the aforementioned command line tool is it can
   easily be used to transform a whole bunch of photos in one go. The
   following example transforms all JPEG files from the current workding
   directory into the collection named “My Collection” on your Sansa:

   for i in *.jpg; do base=$(basename $i .jpg); convert $i -resize 320x220\> /media/SANSA\ FUZEP/Photo/My\ Collection/$base.small.jpg; done

2

Two things I’d change:

  • If tags are not getting fixed, simply delete all of the cached tag data. I forgot the extension since I no longer own a Fuze+, but they are named ARTIST, ALBUM, and so forth. Delete all the files with those extensions, restart the Fuze+, and it’ll regenerate the tag cache without having to re-transfer all the songs.
  • If tags are correct but aren’t showing up, you might have APE tags. Sticking with id3v1 and id3v2.3 is the safest. If tags show up wrong after retagging, just do what I mentioned above.
3

Here’s a partial answer to Q11 from having a Fuze+ for all of 5 minutes.

Here’s a partial answer to Q11 from having a Fuze+ for all of 5 minutes.

Yes it will read .m3u’s and m3u8’s. The location seems to be about anywhere but I saw something about creating a Playlists folder off the root directory. That said. So far it doesn’t do a lot of good.

Here’s a partial answer to Q11 from having a Fuze+ for all of 5 minutes.

Yes it will read .m3u’s and m3u8’s. The location seems to be about anywhere but I saw something about creating a Playlists folder off the root directory. That said. So far it doesn’t do a lot of good.

I figured out they show up by inserting my memcard from my fuze and populating the m3u8 files on there (which work on my fuze, my pc, my psp, etc). The fuze+ recognizes the files are there, I suspect it tries to enumerate them, but then fails and marks them as empty. In MSC mode the Fuze+ exposes each file system separately. In this mode you can create your m3u’s and save them and they work on your computer or Fuze (not +) and the Fuze + will enumerate them.

Here’s a partial answer to Q11 from having a Fuze+ for all of 5 minutes.

Yes it will read .m3u’s and m3u8’s. The location seems to be about anywhere but I saw something about creating a Playlists folder off the root directory. That said. So far it doesn’t do a lot of good.

I figured out they show up by inserting my memcard from my fuze and populating the m3u8 files on there (which work on my fuze, my pc, my psp, etc). The fuze+ recognizes the files are there, I suspect it tries to enumerate them, but then fails and marks them as empty. In MSC mode the Fuze+ exposes each file system separately. In this mode you can create your m3u’s and save them and they work on your computer or Fuze (not +) and the Fuze + will enumerate them.

In MTP mode, the system masks the file systems and creates a single virtual file structure that only allows certain operations. I strongly suspect the firmware reads the file system in this MTP mode, and therefore the the m3u files no longer work as the root of the file system they are on is not the root of the filesystem the device sees. In short, I suspect it works but there’s some sort of trick to it. Moreover and somewhat concerning, is that I think in order to get the m3u playlists to work on the fuze+ they will no longer work on the fuze or your computer from a given SD card (this may not be a problem for some people, it is for me).

Here’s a partial answer to Q11 from having a Fuze+ for all of 5 minutes.

Yes it will read .m3u’s and m3u8’s. The location seems to be about anywhere but I saw something about creating a Playlists folder off the root directory. That said. So far it doesn’t do a lot of good.

I figured out they show up by inserting my memcard from my fuze and populating the m3u8 files on there (which work on my fuze, my pc, my psp, etc). The fuze+ recognizes the files are there, I suspect it tries to enumerate them, but then fails and marks them as empty. In MSC mode the Fuze+ exposes each file system separately. In this mode you can create your m3u’s and save them and they work on your computer or Fuze (not +) and the Fuze + will enumerate them.

In MTP mode, the system masks the file systems and creates a single virtual file structure that only allows certain operations. I strongly suspect the firmware reads the file system in this MTP mode, and therefore the the m3u files no longer work as the root of the file system they are on is not the root of the filesystem the device sees. In short, I suspect it works but there’s some sort of trick to it. Moreover and somewhat concerning, is that I think in order to get the m3u playlists to work on the fuze+ they will no longer work on the fuze or your computer from a given SD card (this may not be a problem for some people, it is for me).

I believe the fuze had a similar problem at one point and eventually SanDisk released a firmware change the reversed it so that the device read it’s own file systems in MSC mode and made any necessary changes to location logic when in MTP mode (which makes sense as MTP mode itself is trying to impose a black-boxed logic over normal file-structure logic).

Here’s a partial answer to Q11 from having a Fuze+ for all of 5 minutes.

Yes it will read .m3u’s and m3u8’s. The location seems to be about anywhere but I saw something about creating a Playlists folder off the root directory. That said. So far it doesn’t do a lot of good.

I figured out they show up by inserting my memcard from my fuze and populating the m3u8 files on there (which work on my fuze, my pc, my psp, etc). The fuze+ recognizes the files are there, I suspect it tries to enumerate them, but then fails and marks them as empty. In MSC mode the Fuze+ exposes each file system separately. In this mode you can create your m3u’s and save them and they work on your computer or Fuze (not +) and the Fuze + will enumerate them.

In MTP mode, the system masks the file systems and creates a single virtual file structure that only allows certain operations. I strongly suspect the firmware reads the file system in this MTP mode, and therefore the the m3u files no longer work as the root of the file system they are on is not the root of the filesystem the device sees. In short, I suspect it works but there’s some sort of trick to it. Moreover and somewhat concerning, is that I think in order to get the m3u playlists to work on the fuze+ they will no longer work on the fuze or your computer from a given SD card (this may not be a problem for some people, it is for me).

I believe the fuze had a similar problem at one point and eventually SanDisk released a firmware change the reversed it so that the device read it’s own file systems in MSC mode and made any necessary changes to location logic when in MTP mode (which makes sense as MTP mode itself is trying to impose a black-boxed logic over normal file-structure logic).

What puzzles me is why are M3U files being read if they can’t be made in MTP mode. I might be missing something here having only had the device for a few minutes, I’d love thoughts if people have them. Cheers!

4

 (Let’s try this again, Richtext mode on the site fubar’d my last time through)

Here’s a partial answer to Q11 from having a Fuze+ for all of 5 minutes.

Yes it will read .m3u’s and m3u8’s. The location seems to be about anywhere but I saw something about creating a Playlists folder off the root directory. That said. So far it doesn’t do a lot of good.

I figured out they show up by inserting my memcard from my fuze and populating the m3u8 files on there (which work on my fuze, my pc, my psp, etc). The fuze+ recognizes the files are there, I suspect it tries to enumerate them, but then fails and marks them as empty.

 In MSC mode the Fuze+ exposes each file system separately. In this mode you can create your m3u’s and save them and they work on your computer or Fuze (not +) and the Fuze + will enumerate them. In MTP mode, the system masks the file systems and creates a single virtual file structure that only allows certain operations. I strongly suspect the firmware reads the file system in this MTP mode, and therefore the the m3u files no longer work as the root of the file system they are on is not the root of the filesystem the device sees. In short, I suspect it works but there’s some sort of trick to it. Moreover and somewhat concerning, is that I think in order to get the m3u playlists to work on the fuze+ they will no longer work on the fuze or your computer from a given SD card (this may not be a problem for some people, it is for me).

I believe the fuze had a similar problem at one point and eventually SanDisk released a firmware change the reversed it so that the device read it’s own file systems in MSC mode and made any necessary changes to location logic when in MTP mode (which makes sense as MTP mode itself is trying to impose a black-boxed logic over normal file-structure logic).

What puzzles me is why are M3U files being read if they can’t be made in MTP mode. I might be missing something here having only had the device for a few minutes, I’d love thoughts if people have them.

Cheers!

5

You’re right. It is possible to do it without re-transferring all the files.

Here is an improved answer to Q3

A3:  - connect Sansa Fuze+ to your PC

       - modify the tags directly on the sana filesystem (if you like) or replace sound files with versions having correct tags.

       - than remove the files name STDB* from the root directory of Sansa  (on most distros it will be /media/SANSA\ FUZEP)

       - disconnect sansa

       On next startup those STDB* files are re-created by the firmware and the modified tags should show up.

       However, I don’t know whether this procedure is 100% safe.

       So I recommend you should keep a suitable a backup of the data (just in case…)

       For an extension card the same procedure should work but it has it’s own STDB* files. After the sansa is connected to

       your PC you’ll find them presumably in /media/<some strange hexadecimal id>

6

Here’s a short description how you get your Sansa Fuze+ working with Rhythmbox or Banshee. So you don’t have to create folders or copy cover images manually:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/SansaFuze

7

Thanks for the link. Banshee now recognizes the Fuze+. Also, the Fuze+ does play .ogg files. However, When I try to drag and drop from Banshee to the Fuze+ I get errors indicating that the player does not support .ogg

Any help would be appreciated.

8

Hello Nardis,

You need to add a line like this in the “.is_audio_player” file

output\_formats=application/ogg,audio/x-ms-wma,audio/mpeg,audio/flac
9

Non-trivial (listing files not in the same directory as the .m3u file) playlists (as of FW 2.38.6) can only be written in MTP mode. I could successfully use gMTP for importing an m3u playlist and storing it on the fuze+ (ignoring some warnings that show up).