Fuze won't play next song in list

So I bought a new 8GB fuze this week and immediately started having problems with it randomly pausing during playback of music.  There was no noticible pattern, it would just pause for no reason.  I downloaded and installed the latest firmware update and that seems to have fixed the ‘pausing problem’ but it introduced a new problem where it will not play the next song in the list.  Once again this problem seems to be random as well.  Some songs it will play and others it won’t.  Is anyone else having this problem and does anyone know how to fix it?

I’ve not heard of either of those problems before. You might have a duff unit.

Something’s not right here. I would try running ChkDsk to insure no corrupted files and also take a look at your ID3 tags for something strange and/or out of place.

What format are you using? .mp3, .wma, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis?

Thanks for hte suggestions.  I will follow up on those tonight.

I am using .wma format.

Does your music have DRMs? I know some that I have encountered will sync but not play.

I ran chkdsk and everything looked fine, although the summary screen disappeared so quick I was not able to fully read it.  I have also verified many of my tags and they look good, although I have not figured out how to tell if the tags are ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4.  I have no ‘unknown’ music on my Fuze.  Everything has the correct title, artist and album info.  I also deleted all music from my Fuze, ran chkdsk again and re-synced it with Windows Media 11.  After all of that the problem still exists. 

Here is some more detail to my original post - It will advance to the next song in my playlist but it will freeze at the very beginning of that song, with the green play arrow still being displayed.  The elapsed time is 00:00 and the remaining time is the correct full length of the song. Pushing the Pause/Play ‘button’ will toggle the icon between the green play arrow and the 2 vertical pause bars but it will not play the song; the song remains frozen.  I can use the skip forward ‘button’ to go to the next song in the list (and that one will play) and then use the skip back ‘button’ to come back to the frozen song. Then the frozen song will play.  All of this is occurring randomly.  One playlist may play flawlessly from beginning to end and then later the same playlist will freeze between some or all songs.  All help and suggestions are greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Hi Conversion Box, yes my music has DRM’s as part of Windows Media 11.  The ones I have looked at show unlimited usage on an unlimited number of players.  The songs that freeze are able to be played after skipping to the next song and then back to the frozen song. Thanks!

I’m seeing exactly the same problem with my new Fuze. It happens on mp3 and ogg files, both those that I’ve downloaded from sites like emusic and those I’ve transcoded myself from flac files. I loaded the latest firmware and reformatted the unit before loading any songs on it.

Do you have some protected and some unprotected songs in the same album? That might cause the player to choke. If you have protected songs with different levels of protection in the same album, the player might also choke. 

I just noticed that you said you are using playlists. Do the problem songs in the playlist also give a problem if you try to play them not through a playlist, but through their albums? If so, then the player might be choking on transitioning from unprotected files or files with a different protection to the problem ones.

Message Edited by JK98 on 12-24-2008 10:19 PM

I don’t have any protected songs at all on my Fuze, so I’m pretty sure that’s not the problem.

Whether in a playlist, album or the alphabetical song list, random songs will freeze. 

I don’t have any protected songs either.

@paulec wrote:

I ran chkdsk and everything looked fine, although the summary screen disappeared so quick I was not able to fully read it. 

Make sure you use the /f switch, telling it to ‘fix’ any corrupted files. If there are any, it should pause and ask you if you want to save the bad data as files, giving you the opportunity to look at the screen. Answer NO to the quuestion and it will then complete the process.

@paulec wrote:

I have also verified many of my tags and they look good, although I have not figured out how to tell if the tags are ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4.

Download MP3Tag; it’s free and is the overwhelmingly preferred tag-editing program here on the forum. Set it to write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags.

@paulec wrote:

Here is some more detail to my original post - It will advance to the next song in my playlist but it will freeze at the very beginning of that song, with the green play arrow still being displayed.  The elapsed time is 00:00 and the remaining time is the correct full length of the song. Pushing the Pause/Play ‘button’ will toggle the icon between the green play arrow and the 2 vertical pause bars but it will not play the song; the song remains frozen.  I can use the skip forward ‘button’ to go to the next song in the list (and that one will play) and then use the skip back ‘button’ to come back to the frozen song. Then the frozen song will play.  All of this is occurring randomly.  One playlist may play flawlessly from beginning to end and then later the same playlist will freeze between some or all songs.

This behavior sounds like ID3 tag issues, and might be corrected when you check and edit everything in MP3Tag.

You may also want to format the device, giving you a clean slate to start over with. :wink:

@paulec wrote:

I ran chkdsk and everything looked fine, although the summary screen disappeared so quick I was not able to fully read it. 

Make sure you use the /f switch, telling it to ‘fix’ any corrupted files. If there are any, it should pause and ask you if you want to save the bad data as files, giving you the opportunity to look at the screen. Answer NO to the question and it will then complete the process.

@paulec wrote:

I have also verified many of my tags and they look good, although I have not figured out how to tell if the tags are ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4.

Download MP3Tag; it’s free and is the overwhelmingly preferred tag-editing program here on the forum. Set it to write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags.

@paulec wrote:

Here is some more detail to my original post - It will advance to the next song in my playlist but it will freeze at the very beginning of that song, with the green play arrow still being displayed.  The elapsed time is 00:00 and the remaining time is the correct full length of the song. . .

This behavior sounds like ID3 tag issues, and might be corrected when you check the tag type and edit everything in MP3Tag.

You may also want to format the device, giving you a clean slate to start over with.  :wink:

I’ve had this problem with ogg files too, so it’s not strictly an id3 tag issue.

Thanks Tapeworm.  I downloaded MP3Tag and am using it to change all of my tags to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags.  I have converted about 30% of my library and so far it has not frozen up on me once.  I played all 437 songs over the course of a day and a half and none of them froze.  Now I am working on the rest of my library.  One thing I had trouble with was that I could not figure out how to use MP3Tag to change the WMA tag to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.  I am sure it was user error but I found that if I converted all of my .wma files to .mp3 they came up with an ID3v1 tag and that one would convert to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 using MP3Tag.  Now I am just ripping all of my cd’s as .mp3 instead of .wma.  I also found one of your posts that suggested to delete the mtable file so that the fuze would have to reload all the song “info”.  I did that as well and everything seems to be working great so thanks!  I am very relieved.

@paulec wrote:

.  One thing I had trouble with was that I could not figure out how to use MP3Tag to change the WMA tag to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.  I am sure it was user error but I found that if I converted all of my .wma files to .mp3 they came up with an ID3v1 tag and that one would convert to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 using MP3Tag.  Now I am just ripping all of my cd’s as .mp3 instead of .wma. 

You shouldn’t need to change the .wma tags. I don’t even think MP3Tag will do it; I’ve never tried. They’re usually never a problem. At least none of mine have ever given me any problems.

I’ve converted (re-ripped) most of my .wma files to .mp3 though for the simple fact that so many CD’s are recorded at such a high volume/db level that there is a lot of distortion and clipping. There’s a free program called MP3Gain which will ‘normalize’ the db level to whatever you want (Default is 89, but I set mine to 94db), eliminating the distortion, clipping and saving you from constantly adjusting the volume diring playback.

But . . . it only works on .mp3 files, not .wma. Good enough reason to switch for me. :wink:

What is the difference between the /r and /f when using chkdsk? Or are they both the same?

This is still happening here, even on songs I’m sure have only iso-8859-1 v2.3 tags.

It also seems to be happening on *all* ogg files.

@kuniklo wrote:

This is still happening here, even on songs I’m sure have only iso-8859-1 v2.3 tags.

 

It also seems to be happening on *all* ogg files.

No body seemed to really aask are you going from Mp3 to ogg? The choke happens a lot when going between ogg and mp3. It is a known bug.