sansa fuze battery drains quickly not 24hrs of audio :(

i just bought my sansa fuze and ive used it for about 5hrs, not continuosly. ive turned it off and on throughout the whole day. and at the end of the day i have 36% of battery. im not sure if my player is defective cause of this. i also realized that the codec matters about the battery. well i mostly used wma codec ripped from cds. is there anyway to extend the battery throughout the whole day i was expecting that the battery would at least last for a whole two days with turning on and off the player cause obviously nobody would really listen to music continuosly non-stop. and there was another thing that the battery percentage was changing from 36% to 42% then it goes back to 36%.

The only way to see how long your  battery runs is to see how long your battery runs. Charge it and put it on continuous play. If you don’t get 20-25 hours, it’s defective. If you do, that’s the basic Fuze capacity.

The gauge is not very accurate. With a lot of battery operated devices, you’ll find that when you turn it on it reads a little bit higher than it did when you turned it off. 

Reading .wma files use more ‘juice’ than .mp3’s; as well as bit-rate. Plus, you didn’t say if you are using the EQ or not; that also requires more power. What are your Backlight settings? Are you fiddling with the controls a lot as it is new and you’re getting familiar with it? One more thing; sometimes maximum battery life is not acheived until the unit has gone through a few charge cycles.

So you see there are many things that can contribute (or detract from) battery life. Look around, there are many discussions on the subject here.

You should expect around 20 hours of battery life playing mp3 files if the equilizer is off, the screen brightness set to minimum, and the screen time at minimum. For example if you set the screen brighter, battery life could be much less. At maximum brightness with the screen on all the time, battery life could be less than 3 hours.

Playing wma files the best you could probably get is around 17 hours of battery life. If the wma files are protected, around 14 hours might be the best possible battery life. Using the equilizer might also cut battery life around 15%.

The 24 hour battery life stated is the best case scenario. It is like the mpg figure for a car. Most people won’t get anything near it with real world usage. The 24 hour figure is reached when playing 128 kbps mp3 files at a low volume with the equilizer off, screen brightness and screen time at a minimum,  letting the player play continuously with play all, and no buttons pressed once the player starts playing.

yeah i think ur right. and my equalizer is being used. i use the custom eq but my brightness and screen timer and my auto power off are all on minimum settings. i hope your right about the device being new and still needs to go through charging cycles to get the maximum power of battery. your also right about fiddling with player cuz i like changing from album to another album of artists. w8 so u suggest that i should use mp3 codec to make the battery last longer. sry for making new threads about the battery questions its just i wanted to be more specific about it. btw the battery doesnt comepletely die it just ends up being 36% but i figured that if i killed about 64% throughout the whole day.