I recently bought a 4g Fuze, from Woot, V2 firmware. I switched to .msc mode, and dropped about 3g of .mp3’s on it. Leaving it run, I found it with a dark screen, and locked up requiring holding the power button to reset. Playing it in the car, I found one particular song that would lock up the player–a reset would back up to a particular song about 4 or so spots back in the playlist, then when it hit the problem song the player would lock again. I got it home, and found a different song that does the same thing.
When I got home I formatted the player and upgraded to the latest firmware. I then expeimented with one of the problem songs, and found that if I selected that song to play, the screen would lock with the song information page halfway across the screen. If I selected play all with only that song available, the player would reboot rather than locking up. In either case, I was unable to delete the offending song from the player without hooking it to the computer.
I hope that at least there is something I’m missing about deleting this file–It appears to me that a song has to be playable to load it far enough that delete is an option. I really don’t care if there are some songs that won’t play as long as the player moves to the next song with minimum drama. If I have to delete these songs as I find them, that is annoying but acceptable if I can delete from the player.
Is there any way i can delete these songs when I don’t have access to a comptuer>
Is there any way I can fairly easily tell in advance which .mp3’s will cause this problem before I put them on the Fuze?
Your bad files probably have tags the Fuze doesn’t like.
Sansas like ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.
Here’s a step-by-step
to make Sansa-friendly tags.
Make sure Comments is empy (use <blank>).
Having certain audio files that cause all that grief (hang-ups, re-boots, etc.) and that won’t delete ususally means they’re pretty badly corrupted. You can try running ChkDsk on them, but depending on the level of corruption, you may just have to get new copies of them.
Obviously, you have several of these. Where did you get them? Not from a P2P site I hope. I’d run ChkDsk on your entire library while on your computer. Those that won’t fix, get rid off. Now you should be able to load your player up again and have no further problems. But to keep transferring the same corrupted files to your player, hoping that somehow they will suddenly work OK is silly. Ain’t gonna happen.
To delete a song, press the bottom of the scroll wheel to access the Options menu. Scroll down until you see the Delete option.
It isn’t file corruption or anything that chkdisk would likely find, but rather badly encoded mp3s. I suspected a bitrate problem, as that has generally been the issue when a particular player I’ve had won’t play a certain file. Checking for a program to change bitrate in Linux, I found mp3Diags instead. I ran the two files I was having problems with through mp3Diags-it found several errors in each of the files that it was able to correct, and that let these files be played on the Fuze. (Both were already playable on Linux, Windows, my other mp3 player, and PDA) I’m not sure which error was the main culprit, since i had it fix all of them. I’ve got backups of the original versions, I may experiment to see exactly which error caused the crash.
…and I wasn’t merely deleting and putting the same files on the player over and over, expecting different results, that *would* be silly. I changed something between each attempt–formatting the Fuze, upgrading firmware, or changing something in the mp3 itself.
The Fuze is the first mp3 playback device of any sort I’ve found that will crash on these or any other bad mp3–while others may have problems, they would merely skip the file. It also seems odd that there isn’t a mechanism to delete a file without having it playing. (On the other hand, at least the Fuze allows you to delete music without a computer, unlike the iPod that lets you delete podcasts, but requires a computer to delete a song)
I investigated the backup copy of the file I was experimenting with. The error in MP3 Diags was “frame count mismatch between the Xing header and the audio stream”. Mp3 Diags has an option to repair VBR data which fixed the problem and let the Fuze play the file, and a way to batch find and fix files with this problem.
