In another thread I chronicled my difficulty getting my first Fuze to work properly with a Maximo FM transmitter/charger. After sending both the Maximo and the Fuze back to their respective origins, I got the Fuze back today and hopefully that problem is resolved.
In the meantime, after reading a few threads on the subject, I decided to invest in an 8GB MicroSDHC drive from Kingston. It arrived a day or so ago and today I started the process of putting all of my music and playlists on it. I needed the extra capacity because the internal memory of my 4GB Fuze was not enough, and I had heard somewhere that it would make sense to put the music on the external/MicroSD drive and leave the internal memory for pictures and video because of compatibility problems with Kingston and video between the external card and the player. Whatever.
So, the SDHC card also came with a USB adapter and I decided to upload one playlist and 40 songs to it this way. After copying all of the internal Fuze folders externally to the Kingston card (so as the sync would recognize them), I opened Media Monkey and right-clicked on the playlist and chose Send To and the drive letter for the USb adapter/Kingston card. Once that was completed, I put the card into the Fuze, which recognized the drive and the music folders. It even played the music files flawlessly in Play All mode or any other mode, such as Artist or Album. BUT … when I went to the Playlist option and right-arrowed on the playlist I had synced to the card, it said it was empty. Bummer.
I then went back and did this: I synced the same playlist to the Fuze itself, where it showed up as expected. Then I copied all folders to my desktop, formatted the Kingston card to wipe it, then copied the folders that had been on the Fuze and were now on my desktop to the Kingston card. Again, when the card went back into the Fuze the playlist was empty.
My latest brainstorm was to try something like this: Sync one playlist to both the Fuze’s internal memory and to the Kingston’s external memory, then delete the Playlist folder from the external memory and the Music folder from the internal memory, leaving me with only one of each but on different drives. Nope, still says empty when I choose that playlist.
Does anybody have suggestions? Should I have gone with a SanDisk SDHC or am I just not going to be able to have playlists on the external drive?
m3u playlists work fine on the external drive (I do this myself). When the playlist appears empty on the Fuze it means the paths inside the playlist are wrong. When you copied the files from the internal to the external, did you keep the exact same folder structure?
On my first attempt there weren’t any files on the Fuze, just the folders, which I copied to the external drive. Then, with the uSD card in a USB adapter and plugged into my desktop computer, I sent, or synced, a playlist to the external card from Media Monkey. Before when I would do the same only to the Fuze instead, the playlists showed up just fine. I’m actually in the process of doing what Tapeworm suggested in another thread, which is to put all of my music files onto the uSD card and making my playlists from there in Winamp (or maybe Media Monkey if it looks as though it’s nearly the same as Winamp). I’ll keep you posted.
In another thread I chronicled my difficulty getting my first Fuze to work properly with a Maximo FM transmitter/charger. After sending both the Maximo and the Fuze back to their respective origins, I got the Fuze back today and hopefully that problem is resolved.
In the meantime, after reading a few threads on the subject, I decided to invest in an 8GB MicroSDHC drive from Kingston. It arrived a day or so ago and today I started the process of putting all of my music and playlists on it. I needed the extra capacity because the internal memory of my 4GB Fuze was not enough, and I had heard somewhere that it would make sense to put the music on the external/MicroSD drive and leave the internal memory for pictures and video because of compatibility problems with Kingston and video between the external card and the player. Whatever.
So, the SDHC card also came with a USB adapter and I decided to upload one playlist and 40 songs to it this way. After copying all of the internal Fuze folders externally to the Kingston card (so as the sync would recognize them), I opened Media Monkey and right-clicked on the playlist and chose Send To and the drive letter for the USb adapter/Kingston card. Once that was completed, I put the card into the Fuze, which recognized the drive and the music folders. It even played the music files flawlessly in Play All mode or any other mode, such as Artist or Album. BUT … when I went to the Playlist option and right-arrowed on the playlist I had synced to the card, it said it was empty. Bummer.
I then went back and did this: I synced the same playlist to the Fuze itself, where it showed up as expected. Then I copied all folders to my desktop, formatted the Kingston card to wipe it, then copied the folders that had been on the Fuze and were now on my desktop to the Kingston card. Again, when the card went back into the Fuze the playlist was empty.
My latest brainstorm was to try something like this: Sync one playlist to both the Fuze’s internal memory and to the Kingston’s external memory, then delete the Playlist folder from the external memory and the Music folder from the internal memory, leaving me with only one of each but on different drives. Nope, still says empty when I choose that playlist.
Does anybody have suggestions? Should I have gone with a SanDisk SDHC or am I just not going to be able to have playlists on the external drive?
The whole base problem here is that you are trying to do everything with the card plugged into a card reader instead of just putting in the Fuze and doing things with it directly thru the Fuze when it is connected.
When in the card reader everything will assume that the card is the main memory, however when you plug it into the Fuze it will become secondary memory (like a 2nd hard drive). So, I say start off with the card in the reader and delete everything off of it. Pull the reader and forget about it (as it’s not needed anyway).
Put the card into the Fuze, turn it on (it creates a few directories automatically). Then plug it into the computer and use MM or WinAmp to sync what songs and playlists you want for the internal memory, and then sync what songs and playlists you want on the external memory card.
If that doesn’t work, then someone else here can try to explain how to do it correctly with one of those programs (I don’t use either one and don’t mess with playlists, so I don’t know exactly how it needs be done with those programs).
I actually tried that first but had the player in Auto Detect mode and the external drive didn’t show up when I tried to sync a list to it, so I tried it again today in MSC mode, and while the external drive showed up for me to sync to, it still showed as empty after syncing a playlist.
On a much brighter note, I just finished trying Tapeworm’s method from this thread Adding Playlists and it worked! Thanks to everyone who responded.
Message Edited by CeeElGeeFuze on 05-14-2009 11:32 AM
Message Edited by microsansa on 05-15-2009 06:19 AM
In general you should be able to manage your card in a USB reader and create playlists that will work on the Fuze (I do this all the time). As long as you save the playlists in the root or MUSIC folder, and the paths inside the playlists are relative to that folder, it should work fine in the Fuze. So your approach was fine, but there must have been samething about MM causing a problem with the paths.
In any case, the “drag into Winamp and save to the MUSIC folder” method always works and is the most reliable way to create playlists. Incidentally, that method will work whether the card is in the Fuze or in a USB adapter.
Just in case anyone was wondering, it doesn’t work for MediaMonkey, and since Winamp doesn’t support Replay Gain (unless I’m missing something), I lost that. Small sacrifice, though.
Winamp does support ReplayGain. You can enable playback support in Options->Preferences->Playback. To add ReplayGain to your files, select some files in either the playlist editor or media library, right-click and select Send To -> Calculate ReplayGain.
Great! I based my assumption on the fact that I went to the Winamp Help page and searched “Replay Gain” and got no results. Guess I should have dug deeper.
What am I supposed to do with all of these Replay Gain Results windows that keep popping up?
Message Edited by CeeElGeeFuze on 05-15-2009 04:42 PM
So, when I had all of those 244 results windows open after scanning, and each one asked me if I wanted to save them, if I simply closed Winamp and all of the wiindows without saving, then did Replay Gain not take effect?
Not sure. My whole library is FLAC and I use another tool to automatically calculate the replay gain while ripping, so I don’t actually use Winamp’s replay gain calculator that much.
You can view the replay gain values in Winamp to see if they saved or not. In the Media Library, go to Local Media\Audio. Right click on one of the column headers in the track list section, select “Customize columns…” and add the Track Gain and Album Gain columns. Then you can sort on those columns to see which tracks have values in the replay gain tags.
