Still having numerous Clip Zip problems

SanDisk MP3 players All other MP3 players
1

I posted a thread awhile ago about my issues with song taking too long to change. This issue has been mostly rectified. Sometimes song change is instantaneous, sometimes it takes up to 5 seconds. Is there any way to fix this? I don’t want it to take so long to change songs.

Another issue I have is frequent crashing, sometimes after disconnecting the thing from my laptop the device crashes, have to hold down the button for at least a minute before it starts again.

Yet another issue is transferring songs, I’ve not been able to do so recently, the MP3 player won’t let me, the window will pop up, but nothing happens, nothing is transferred, or it just gives an error saying I can’t.

2

Okay, I fixed the last problem I listed on there…

Really, if somebody could tell me how to be rid of the stupid delays between songs, that would be fantastic. 

3

As I mentioned before in your previous thread, it is most likely an ID3 tag issue. Wrong format, Comments field loaded up with extraneous garbage, excessively large embedded album art, foreign characters are all things that can cause what you are experiencing (delay changing tracks & crashing).

Download MP3Tag and change its Write default (in Tools menu) to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. Then open up your music folders and check for the above-mentioned anomalies, editing as needed. Note you should do this on the copies of the files on your computer, not on your player. Save the edited files, wipe the ones off your player and transfer over the newly edited ones.

4

Alright, I’ll give that a go, thanks.

EDIT: Okay, I’m totally unfamiliar with this program… What exactly am I looking for? Foreign characters as in words not in english, like Japanese or Russian? How do I change things? Not all of the tags match, is that an issue (I get one on ocassion called “!BAD ID3v2”)?

5

So… I have to go through each and every song and edit the ones that have “Foreign characters” (Like non-english stuff?) and album art that’s too big (How big is too big?). Is there no easier way to do this? It seems like such a hassle just to have to change songs efficiently. I don’t entirely know what I’m looking for, and I’m totally unfamiliar with this program.

6

Would formatting my Micro SD help?

7

@yutrzenika wrote:

 

Okay, I’m totally unfamiliar with this program… What exactly am I looking for? Foreign characters as in words not in english, like Japanese or Russian? How do I change things? Not all of the tags match, is that an issue (I get one on occasion called “!BAD ID3v2”)?

Using the Search function here, you can find many, many discussions and tips on using the MP3 Tag program. Here are a few posts that should help:

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Fuze/How-do-I-delete-all-the-music-on-my-Fuze-player-using-my/m-p/186270/highlight/true#M45467

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Fuze/Unable-to-edit-music-in-Fuze-8Gb/m-p/140331/highlight/true#M37191

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Fuze/Long-Delay-Slow-When-Changing-Tracks-Songs/m-p/270489/highlight/true#M50250 (read this entire thread. It is a similar problem to yours)

@yutrzenika wrote:

So… I have to go through each and every song and edit the ones that have “Foreign characters” (Like non-english stuff?) and album art that’s too big (How big is too big?). Is there no easier way to do this? It seems like such a hassle just to have to change songs efficiently. I don’t entirely know what I’m looking for, and I’m totally unfamiliar with this program.

 You can open up entire folders in MP3 Tag at once, but if there is editing to do yes, you have to change it file by file. Album art should be no larger than 500 x 500 pixel size & 100kb (I think) file size. Given that the image displayed on your Fuze’s screen is way less than 200 x 200, there’s no reason to store larger images on the player. It could be causing part (if not all) of your problem.

@yutrzenika wrote:

Would formatting my Micro SD help?

While it won’t do any harm, I seriously doubt it will help.

8

Okay so I looked through some of those threads, and I changed the tag write format to   ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1  as you specified, and then resaved them, but they still show up as other various tags, mainly “ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3)”. Did I do something wrong, is there a step I missed?

9

@yutrzenika wrote:

Okay so I looked through some of those threads, and I changed the tag write format to   ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1  as you specified, and then resaved them, but they still show up as other various tags, mainly “ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3)”. Did I do something wrong, is there a step I missed?

That’s correct. What other ‘various’ tags do they show up as?

Did you clean out the Comments field?

Did you check the extended tags for embedded album art and reduce the size to 500 x 500 (or less) or eliminate embedded atags altogether? You can still get album art to display without wasting memory space having it embedded in every file.

Were there any foreign or strange characters in any of the fields? Any forward / or reverse \ slash marks? Any exceptionally long titles that should/could be shortened?

10

Some of them don’t even appear to have tags, the tag is totally blank for some songs, and then some others I get “ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3 APEv2)”, “WMA (WMA)”, and “ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 Lyrics 3v2 ID3v2.3)”.

I tried removing some of the overly large album art from some of the songs, by clicking on the song, and then right clicking on the album art and hitting “Remove Cover”, but if I click back to a song I did that on, the art shows up again. I’m not entirely familiar with how to use the program, like I said, the various threads say what to do, but not HOW to do it. I don’t really know what these Tags are.

When I tried to change the tags initially, I went into the tools like you said and set it to what you said it should be, and then hit the save icon in the top left corner.

11

@yutrzenika wrote:

Some of them don’t even appear to have tags, the tag is totally blank for some songs, and then some others I get “ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3 APEv2)”, “WMA (WMA)”, and “ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 Lyrics 3v2 ID3v2.3)”.

I tried removing some of the overly large album art from some of the songs, by clicking on the song, and then right clicking on the album art and hitting “Remove Cover”, but if I click back to a song I did that on, the art shows up again. I’m not entirely familiar with how to use the program, like I said, the various threads say what to do, but not HOW to do it. I don’t really know what these Tags are.

When I tried to change the tags initially, I went into the tools like you said and set it to what you said it should be, and then hit the save icon in the top left corner.

Your problem is multiple tags on the files. There’s something in the MP3Tag settings you’re missing…

Once your settings are set up like this, then in MP3Tag, select all your files, and then in the File menu of MP3tag, select “Remove tag”

12

@yutrzenika wrote:

Some of them don’t even appear to have tags, the tag is totally blank for some songs, and then some others I get “ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3 APEv2)”, “WMA (WMA)”, and “ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 Lyrics 3v2 ID3v2.3”.

Let’s take these one at a time:

ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3 APEv2) - Perfectly fine. The APE v2 tag is added if you (or someone else) have run the files through the volume normalizing software MP3Gain. This portion of the tag is where the gain or reduction settings are held so that one song is not louder than another.

WMA (WMA) - Again, perfectly fine. Apparently, you have some .wma format files as well as .mp3 files. Not to worry, they play OK and cause no problems.

ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 Lyrics 3v2 ID3v2.3) - OK, problem. Lyrics are not supported on such a small player so you have to get rid of these. Re-saving in the current SAVE settings should eliminate these, but having never had a file with lyrics attached, I’m not 100% sure.

“the tag is totally blank for some songs” - Problem #2. What type of files are these? If they are .wav files, they won’t have a tag and the player will have to read the file info. Not a huge problem, the player will read them and (usually) play the files, but wavs take up an awful lot of space as they are uncompressed. A better format for these ‘lossless’ files would be FLAC, but I don’t want to go into that, given the problems you seem to be having with more basic stuff.

If however, these are .mp3 files with no tags then yes, these could be causing some of the problems you’re encountering along with the afore-mentioned ‘lyrics’ tags. You will have to create the tags manually. This means typing in the Artist, Album, Title, Genre, Track#, etc. by yourself and then saving the changes. MP3Tag does have a tag filling-in option, but I’ve never had reliable luck with the accuracy of the database it uses. Maybe others have, and can make some suggestions.

@yutrzenika wrote:

I’m not entirely familiar with how to use the program, like I said, the various threads say what to do, but not HOW to do it. I don’t really know what these Tags are.

Have you tried reading the Help Contents? Everything is very succinctly explained, from the basics to the more involved aspects. There’s even an online forum (like this one) for additional support.

13

Okay, I’m just gonna take a guess and say the Tags are what have the songs info (Song name, album, artist, etc), if I’m correct, then why is it on iTunes the songs with no tags still show album art and all that information, but it doesn’t show up on MP3 Tag?

The tagless songs are all MP3.

14

I think iTunes doesn’t always write stuff to the file tags, so you may just be seeing the contents of its internal database.

15

Ah okay. Gotcha. 

So what exactly is this Tag-Filling option? Is it the Tag Sources option on the top? If so, I tried to use it for all my tagless songs, but it just gave me an error. Is there any way to fix the tagless songs more efficiently? I dont really want to go through all of them.

Also, what I have done with my MP3s so far has significantly decreased the amount of time it takes to switch songs, so progress has been made, which is good, so thanks for the help. If I can, I want to decrease that time further.

16

I noticed a kind of annoying issue with a majority of the songs present on my MP3 player now that I’ve edited the tags. None of them have any song info anymore. What gives?

17

Did you read up on how to use MP3Tag? Did you use this to edit your tags? Did you set the Write settings to write tags in the format of ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 as suggested by myself and Marvin_Martian (who even provided a picture of the correct settings) earlier?

Also, without more input from you as which of the (multiple) format song files you have are now not showing any tag info or what exactly you’ve done to change things, it’s impossible for us to guess or help.

18

Yes, I did everything as you and he said, and I read up on how to use the program, though I haven’t gone much further than what you two suggested, it did improve the time it takes to switch songs, but now it shows the songs by filename instead.

19

So… Is this something that is supposed to happen when I modify the tags? I was just expecting it to change the tag, not remove all the song info along with it, and then apply annoying numbers to all the file names. Is there any way to fix this?

This is what all my songs are looking like, with the number starting at 01, and going into the 30s. Each number has a few dozen songs to them.

20

“You can open up entire folders in MP3 Tag at once, but if there is editing to do yes, you have to change it file by file.”

So, if I have 400+ podcast files and I open the folder they’re in (on my Win7 PC) in MP3Tag – I have the change everysingle doggoned tag individually across 400+ files?!  That will drive me completely insane! Is there no way – or no program? – that will make the change  (I guess I’m supposed to make every “genre” tag be “podcast”) across every single file in a folder?!

(I’ve now had a ClipZip for 12 hours – and I think I really really HATE IT!

I LOVE the original Clip (I still have three that work); and I LIKE the Clip Plus (I have two; one with a clothespin glued to it to replace the missing and unreplaceable broken-off clip.) (Sansa? Was it really necessary to NOT offer replacement clips?!). 

But this ClipZip?!?!  I download podcasts, listen to them once and delete them after they play. I do NOT want to spend hours “categorizing” podcasts so I can play them.   Does NO ONE at Sansa use podcasts?!

I’m seriously thinking of returning this and trying to find another ClipPlus!