I just bought a Sansa Fuze a couple days ago and have already spent endless hours trying to set it up. I finally figured out that being in MSC mode results in much faster transfers than being in Auto Detect mode, but I’m still having a problem whenever I disconnect the Fuze from the computer. It immediately goes into a ‘Refreshing Your Media’ screen, which takes 15-20 minutes to complete every time. So after charging the Fuze it then uses up 20 minutes of battery power during this refresh phase, a classic catch 22. I’ve read the user manual front to back as well as several posts on this board but have not been able to solve this problem. I’ve even downloaded mp3tag and made sure all the tags say ‘ID3v2.3’. I will admit I’m not too technically savvy, but I can usually figure stuff like this out with much less effort.
For the record, I have an 8 GB Sansa Fuze with a 32GB micro SD card attached (purchased both in original packaging from Amazon), and am using Windows Vista on my PC. Can anyone offer any suggestions as to what the problem could be? Based on what I’ve read this is not normal, so hopefully someone has some ideas.
The tags need to be ID3V2.3 ISO 8859-1. Get rid of album artist, and composer tags, as the player doesn’t support these. Get rid of comments. Get rid of the V1 tags. Getting rid of embedded album art may also help. Put the album art in the same folder as the album, and have it named folder.jpg
And while JK98's suggestions may speed up the database refresh some, if your player and card are full (or nearly full) with a few thousand tracks 15 minutes or so realistically _is _the time it will take for it to read and catalogue them.
Why does it have to re-read the media every time it is turned on? Once it reads everything, it should be done until files are added or deleted. A 15 minute wait every time I want to listen to music is not acceptable.
If you have a Fuze or any of the newer models, it doesn’t refresh the database every time you turn it on. It only does this if you have plugged it into your computer and manipulated (added or deleted) any files or have removed or inserted a memory card.
Perhaps you could try Rockbox. It might not be able to load the data any faster than the stock firmware, but it will be able to refresh in the background. That means you can still use it to play your music while you wait. Or, you can avoid having the player “catalog” anything at all, and just browse by folders.
In MSC mode, the Fuze should not Refresh unless you have changed something. Just charging should not cause a refresh unless your computer is doing some kind of read/write on the Fuze drive–like an automated backup or something.
Tags that the Fuze stumbles over can significantly delay refreshing. I have downloaded albums that had full-size album-cover images in every song–each 1.5MB instead of the <500 kb of the little .jpg the Fuze is actually going to display, all of which had to be read and then rejected by the Fuze indexing function.
You can get rid of all that, and speed up refresh time, with mp3tag. Under View in mp3tag, show Extended tags. Highlight all the mp3 files in the album and see if cover art appears. If it does, click on the floppy-disc icon on the right to save one copy of the cover art, which will be named folder.xxx with the same extension (Jpg, Bmp, Png) as the original imbedded art. Then, with everything still highlighted, hit the X icon on the right to get that junk out of there.
The Fuze actually wants folder.jpg or album.jpg, so if you’re stuck with a .png or .bmp file, remove it from the album folder on the Fuze after you send it over.
And just out of curiosity, how many files are getting indexed? The more tags the Fuze has to deal with, the longer it’s going to take. The number of files that can fit on 32GB can strain the tiny little Fuze brain, which was made before 32GB cards existed. There is a limit to the number of songs it can list–around 8000, but it could be fewer if the tags are long because if I understand correctly, the index that the Fuze builds–MTABLE.SYS is the name of the file–has a maximum size.
Rockbox does better with huge databases. If you’re computer-friendly, you should try it. You can always uninstall it. www.rockbox.org
My Fuze will refresh media in the middle of a song! It will always refresh media after any changes; however it will also refresh media if it was turned off and then turned back on later that same day without leaving my pocket. and like I said it has started to refresh while I am listening to music, this has happened 3 times in the last month.
It is an older one and I was thinking of the new Fuze, but the reviews I’ve read are less than stellar and I am hard on my player. This one has been a real trooper up till a couple of months ago.
My Fuze will refresh media in the middle of a song! It will always refresh media after any changes; however it will also refresh media if it was turned off and then turned back on later that same day without leaving my pocket. and like I said it has started to refresh while I am listening to music, this has happened 3 times in the last month.
It is an older one and I was thinking of the new Fuze, but the reviews I’ve read are less than stellar and I am hard on my player. This one has been a real trooper up till a couple of months ago.
Any guesses?
That’s not good. It’s definitely not supposed to do that. You can try re-formatting and/or re-applying the firmware, but personally I doubt whether it will help. Still, it’s the only thing you as a user can do to try and correct odd behavior, so you might try it. You’ve got nothing to lose.
Yes, if you are considering the Fuze+ there are many who are not happy with it. Others are. But if you look around you can still find the original Fuze (like yours) available. If you’ve been happy with the one you have (up to now) why not try and find another one?
Unless you have changed something, the Fuze should not Refresh.
If it’s having trouble in the middle of a song, something is wrong with that song. Take that song (or album) off the Fuze and, in MSC mode (Settings/System Settings/USB Mode) delete MTABLE.SYS–the database file. (If you don’t see MTABLE.SYS in MSC mode, you have to tell Windows to “Show hidden files and folders”–look up that phrase in your Windows help file.) After deleting MTABLE.SYS and disconnecting, the Fuze will do a complete refresh of the database. It will take a while, but then the database should be cleaned up and stop giving you problems.
If one song or album has consistently been making the database refresh, then take it off the Fuze and look at it mp3tag and View Extended Tags. See if you can figure out what’s giving you trouble. The only tags the Fuze needs are the ones it lists–Title, Album, Artist, etc. Anything else, like Comments or imbedded art or composer or whatever, is unnecessary.
You might also reload the firmware, as explained here:
Use the manual method. There’s no reason to install the Updater because there won’t be any more updates. Just Download the All Regions link for your version (in Settings/System Settings/Info, will tell you Version 1.x or 2.x), send it to the Fuze driveletter, disconnect and let it re-install.
