Playing a song crashes the whole thing

MP3 players Sansa Clip | Clip+
1

Whenever I try to play a song (any song) on my sansa+, it immediately starts cycling through the songs one after the other, then after about 15 of them it crashes (usually) or just freezes up, requiring a hard reset.

I tried upgrading to the latest firmware, but it still crashes. It does it no matter which menu option I use to play a song.

3

Figured it out after I plugged it into my PC.

The Mac likes to add metadata files, so it had made dotfiles with metadata for every single audio file. For example:

for “asong.mp3” it created “.asong.mp3”

You might want to modify the firmware code to ignore dotfiles to provide better support for Mac, as there’s no way to stop this annoying behavior.

4

This is a user forum, so modifying the firmware is out of our pay grade.

SanDisk has basically been using the same interface for all of its mp3 players and it hasn’t yet solved the Mac finder file problem–probably because those geniuses at Apple decided to give their metadata files the .mp3 extension, which confuses the tiny little Sansa brain. 

When I get albums that were converted on Macs they usually have a subfolder called MACOSX with all the metadata files and often a DS_Store file in the folder with the real mp3 files. On a PC, you could search for all the MACOSX subfolders and delete them from the Clip.  Not being in the Apple universe, I don’t know if you can find those subfolders from the Mac itself. 

5

    kstenerud wrote:

    Figured it out after I plugged it into my PC.

    The Mac likes to add metadata files, so it had made dotfiles with metadata for every single audio file. For example:

    for “asong.mp3” it created “.asong.mp3”

I take care of this issue at the command line: I have the Clip+ hooked up to my Mac. I Finder-copy mp3 files to a folder on the Clip+. Then, in Terminal, I switch over to the folder where I copied the mp3 files. Then I execute this command:

$ find . -type f -iname ‘.*’ -print0 | xargs -0 rm -v

This will delete all files in that folder whose names start with a dot, i.e, the ones like

._01 Song title.mp3

that confuse the Clip+.

If you’re not comfortable with the command line, you’ll need to get someone who is to help you with this the first time.

Once you get it down, it’s very simple.

WARNING: Never execute this command anywhere except in the folder where your mp3 files are. Ignore this warning at your peril.