After at least a month of this problem, I’ve finally come across a possible explanation. I need to know if this makes sense… I’m not so great at this sort of thing.
I always use the Auto Detect USB setting because I never know which one to use. I upload music from Rhapsody and manage it with WMP. It has happened three times (at least) that randomly while listening to my music, the Fuze will pause. All the songs will begin to shuffle, none of them playing. After this, the songs are useless – missing album art, even!
I have the latest firmware.
So, now I keep reading that Auto “Defect” might cause some problems… Is it possible that if I switch it to one of the other settings it may fix the problem? Or is this wishful thinking?
While I don’t recommend the Auto Defect setting and always advise people to manually choose one or the other, this sounds more like a defect in the player itself, or at least corrupted files (which are more common in MTP mode).
I’d be for for calling SanDisk Tech Support (1-866-Sandisk if in US) and consulting them. If they agree with my assessment, they can get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) started for you to get you a replacement under the warranty.
While I don’t recommend the Auto Defect setting and always advise people to manually choose one or the other, this sounds more like a defect in the player itself, or at least corrupted files (which are more common in MTP mode).
I’d be for for calling SanDisk Tech Support (1-866-Sandisk if in US) and consulting them. They may have you format the player, which will erase all the content you have put on it. IF thei works, great! But if they agree with my assessment, they can get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) started for you on the spot to get you a replacement under the warranty.
Darn. I was really hoping I’d found an easy fix.
I’m not sure about the warranty… I don’t have proof of purchase or anything. Is there a way to get the warranty without this, or am I outta luck?
Auto Detect is simply going to choose MTP every time you connect, if MTP is available. It you’re downloading from Rhapsody, is this a To Go subscription (secure WMA files) or are they MP3 purchases?
WiMP has a nasty habit of doing things on its own, unless you configure Auto Sync. What it does is try to match the files in the library with those on your player, sometimes picking off files that don’t appear in the PC’s library. Or, on the other side of the coin, it likes to live up to my official renaming of the application as my personal PC poltergeist.
Actually, I had a PC poltergeist of an entirely different nature once, but that’s a long and quite intriguing story in itself.
WiMP likes to randomly corrupt its own music database occasionally, requiring an automatic rebuild. I like to sip coffee while watching the application slowly repair itself, quite interesting to watch.
If your Fuze pops from track to track, while showing “paused”, either we have missing license data, or something in those files isn’t reading correctly. Do you get any pink mask of doom (DRM or subscription flag)?
I use both the Rhapsody 4 client and WiMP11 to manage the device, allowing the Rhapsody client to handle the day to day tracks, and WiMP to hold a backup set of my favorites for routine reloads following various “medical experiments” on various Sansas here. In this way, I keep the storage requirements under control, keeping the bulk of music on the Rhapsody servers rather than locally. Soon, I’ll add some dedicated hard drives for that.
Bob
I use Rhapsody To Go.
The first time I started losing my tracks, I began to wonder if maybe it was because of the usage rights… I went through my list of artists and found that two of them had been entirely deleted from Rhapsody. They no longer offer them, even for perchase. But even after I reloaded all of the legal tracks, the Fuze lost its mind again.
I have gotten the “connect to continue subscription” or some such nonsence. But it was only after trying the “chkdsk” command. It acted like it might recover all of my lost tracks, but I got that pink message, then the player froze.
I’m starting to worry that it really is just my player. Oh dear.
neutron_bob, you bring up another interesting point about WMP… It seems to do a one way, or maybe more like one and a half way “sync”.
If there are files in the WMP library that are not on the player it will copy them to the player. However, if the files get deleted from the library and are still on the player it will delete them from the player.
That, to me is not “syncing”. It should only delete files after asking if it should do so. Otherwise, it should copy the files from the player back to the library.
If you delete a file from the player does WMP then delete it from its library also when you connect the player? Very likely it doesn’t and just copies it back onto the player again instead.
Anyway, the way WMP (or anything from Microsoft for that matter) does things is royally screwed up. I try to avoid using any of Microsoft’s software as much as possible (and really wish I could avoid using their foolish OS also, but just can’t seem to get around that at this point).
Since I just drag-n-drop my music files I would not know for sure, but I’d have to assume that virtually any other music management software has got to work better then WMP does.
@jazzistica wrote:
But it was only after trying the “chkdsk” command. It acted like it might recover all of my lost tracks, but I got that pink message, then the player froze.
I’m starting to worry that it really is just my player. Oh dear.
Ah, there could be your problem! Chkdsk does not totally remove files that are corrupted. It only removes the parts of the file systemt that don’t link up correctly and links the rest back together. As such, there may be partial files now on the player that have data missing in the middle of them.
The best way to run chkdsk is from a DOS command window and then run it first without the “/f” on the end of the command line. Then make a note of which files it says are bad. Then run chkdsk with the /f to fix the file system, and go back and delete the files it said had problems (because what remains of them is no longer complete). And then replace them with good files again later on.
If you’ve run chkdsk and it already tried to fix a file system problem, then you’ll end up having to hunt around until you can find the remaining partial files to delete. The only other solution (if you don’t know what the bad files are) is to reformat the player (or the memory card if that’s where the problems were) and start all over with a clean slate.