With the 4000 song limit and it looks like it will never be “Fixed” to ever use a 32GB card, If I keep the Fuze I will be forced to swap smaller SDHC cards to keep from playing the same songs over & over. Is it possible to play ONLY the songs on the card and use shuffle for the songs on the cards? I don’t want to have to hear the same 8GB loaded in the Fuze mixed in with the ones on the cards all the time.
Just don’t put any songs to the internal memory. If you want to use it, use it for audiobooks, videos, photos, podcasts, which don’t mix up.
@ing wrote:
Just don’t put any songs to the internal memory. If you want to use it, use it for audiobooks, videos, photos, podcasts, which don’t mix up.
That’s what I thought. I guess I’ll chock this up as a learning experience. IF the Fuze would be able to upgrade to the 40GB that the info leads you to believe then it wouldn’t be as disappointing. The Fuze is a case of NOT getting what you pay for. The cost of a Fuze and 8GB card works out to at least $6 per GB. The cost of a 120GB Ipod is only $2 per GB and there are TONS of accessories for the Ipod unlike the Fuze. I’m not sure if I’ll put the Fuze on Ebay or just load it with a few Disney songs and give it to the Grand baby. 
Hm… I think you are comparing apples with they are different devices with different target groups. But you are right, one has to calculate sharply here. I bought a 2GB version of the Fuze because I knew I wanted different music on different (quite small) cards. In fact, would there have been a 0GB version I would have thought about buying it.
It is apples and oranges (no pun intended). The iPod classic is less expensive per megabyte because it uses a hard drive. That means its larger, and you have to be very cautious with it. If you handle it like a baby, you might not damage your hard drive. You don’t want to run with it, and you certainly don’t want to drop it. My daughter, a teenager, wasn’t so careful with her iPod and she went through three of them - all dead hard drives. She replaced it with a Creative player, and its hard drive died. We got extended warranties (I almost never buy them, but recommend them for hard-drive MP3 players), so only one of those wasn’t covered.
If you want to compare apples to apples (again, no pun), compare the flash-based Fuze with the $200 Flash-based iPod Nano.
You could play from SDHC only if you made a playlist for each, stored on each card. Of course, it’d just be one long list of songs.
Even comparing the Nano as Apples to oranges (I prefer the citrus, shall we say?), one doesn’t get expansion capability. No memory expansion on the Nano. And which button would you press to listen to the radio?
Ah, that’s an accessory option.
I think I see the pattern.
Bob 
I guess another option would be to clean the Fuze internal memory and buy some 16GB cards and swap them out every 3 weeks. Kind of a pain to keep up with the cards. I forgot about hard drive vs flash. Hmmmmm…Since no one makes a mega GB flash drive (yet)this may be my best/only option. Thanks for opening my eyes. 
Message Edited by TXMike on 12-28-2008 10:47 AM
Or you could use your computer and your favourite media player to create shuffled playlists and sync them.
But the idea with the playlist-per-card seems feasible, too. Wasn’t there a script in these forums somewhere to do this? AutoM3U or such?
If you don’t make much use of the genre tag, another option would be to use it to differentiate internal stuff from the cards. If you use MSC mode, you can change tags of songs after they’re on the Fuze. So you could have i-Rock (for internal flash rock) vs Rock. OK, maybe the i-thing sounds too Apple-ish.
I use my internal flash for music that I love and have always loved and would keep on there regardless, so it rarely changes. Then I leave plenty of space for audiobooks and podcasts. Most of my music is on microSD. If I decided I wanted to use another microSD, it wouldn’t really change how I do things much. I’m not sure how I’d ever keep from losing the tiny little thing, though!
@txmike wrote:
With the 4000 song limit and it looks like it will never be “Fixed” to ever use a 32GB card, If I keep the Fuze I will be forced to swap smaller SDHC cards to keep from playing the same songs over & over. Is it possible to play ONLY the songs on the card and use shuffle for the songs on the cards? I don’t want to have to hear the same 8GB loaded in the Fuze mixed in with the ones on the cards all the time.
Nobody ever said that this was NEVER going to be fixed. Sansafix only said it wasn’t a simple solution and that it wouldn’t happen overnight. Having heard nothing to the contrary, I can only assume the problem is still being worked on. The next firmware update is due out sometime in the 1st quarter of 2009. Whehter this ‘fix’ will be in it or not, is anybodys’ guess but I’m sure eventually they’ll get it done.
Until then, and to address your question you could create a playlist of ‘card-only’ music and ‘player-only’ music. These would have to be .m3u format playlists as there is no song limit on them. Pla format playlists are limited to 250 songs.
As the .m3u playlist file itself resides in the folder containing the music (MUSIC), the playlist for the card would stay on the card, so even if you plugged this card into another player, the playlist would still be there. The ‘player-only’ list would, of course stay on the player, so you would not run into the situation where the playlist contains songs not currently available.
You could use Winamp to set this up very easily.
@txmike wrote:
With the 4000 song limit and it looks like it will never be “Fixed”
Last I heard sansafix said that they were aiming to up the limit to 8000 songs in the next few months.
I don’t have anything to add on this topic as it looks like there are some great suggestions.
@bdb wrote:
I’m not sure how I’d ever keep from losing the tiny little thing, though!
I have many cards with movies on them. I keep them in their plastic case. I keep the cards in a zippered pouch (actually a make up case, a clear one that was only $2–the dollar store one broke on me). I am careful with them though. I take out a card, put it in the plastic case, take the next one out of the plastic case, put it in my Fuze. While the database is refreshing, I put the other one in the zipper pouch (or put it in there right away if I’m not going to watch a movie or use my Fuze right away). So I’m hoping I won’t lose them.
