Surprise: Clip+ works fine with a 64 GB SDXC card...

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Clip | Sansa® Clip+
1

…although it took about three hours for refreshing. :confounded: This with original firmware.

The Zip couldn’t handle the same card. The Clip+ has no problems so far and shows all 5873 MP3s on its display, so it most likely will find and play them all. Effective capacity is 59.6 GB or so, and it’s filled with 56.3 GB.

2

:cry: After doing that, the player only recognized and played a fraction of the songs on it, and this with some waiting times and black screens now and then during skipping. The next try ended up with an «empty card» (according to the player), and so did the next few ones. So the initial success was only by accident and won’t repeat.

3

Did you re-format the card to FAT32?

4

Yes, I did.

5

Are you certain that the card is not counterfeit or otherwise defective?   You might try it out in you computer.

If it’s a fine card, you could try reformatting it, using the SD Association’s formatter tool–that has been known to help.

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

6

The card is o.k. when inserted in my computer’s SD card slot. But I’ll try the reformatting anyway; if it doesn’t help, nothing’s lost – except for some processor activity.

It’s a SanDisk Mobile Ultra.

7

I tried it with a second Clip+ – same result. But before I’m formatting the card, I must know: Does the SDFormatter format it with FAT32? There’s no options to choose, so I would expect it to do with exFAT, the standard for SDXC, as far as I know, whereas the Clip+ needs FAT32.

8

Unfortunately, I don’t know . . . .  A good point.

9

I think you have to use something other than Windows to format those big cards to FAT32.

Here’s a thread with one program. I’ve never done this, so at your own risk…but the phone geeks are usually pretty serious.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s3/general/how-to-format-64gb-micro-sd-card-to-t2041679

Here’s the link to the partition program mentioned in the thread–of course you know to be very careful with anything involving partitions. Don’t format or partition the wrong drive.

http://download.cnet.com/EaseUS-Partition-Master-Free-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html?tag=mncol%3bpop&cdlPid=10982635

Also, I expect you’ll run into the Clip’s limit on the size of the database if you fill up that card, so you still probably won’t see all your songs. Rockbox can handle a bigger database if you want to try it.   www.rockbox.org

10

I went a different route – let Windows run CheckDisk for the SDXC card. Indeed it found some errors (…why the hell!..) and fixed them. After that I inserted the card into the Clip+ again. And again database refreshing lasted more than three hours – a good sign. Now the player seems to work fine again, without any hickups. Neither did it stumble across any missing tracks; the display still shows a number of 5873 files, and the Clip+ plays them all so far (in shuffle mode), even the ones in the high 5000s.

BTW, a simple way of formatting a (micro)SDXC card to FAT32 is to use a Mac (that’s what I did initially).

11

Congratulations, and thanks for the chkdsk reminder!

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@jazz wrote:

And again database refreshing lasted more than three hours – a good sign.

Not really. Even a full 64GB card sholdn’t require any more than 30 minutes to refresh the database.

13

@tapeworm wrote:

@jazz wrote:

And again database refreshing lasted more than three hours – a good sign.

Not really. Even a full 64GB card sholdn’t require any more than 30 minutes to refresh the database.

In fact it’s almost four hours…

Yes, it’s too much under normal circumstances, but I wasn’t expecting the Clip+ to work with a 64 GB card (and original firmware) at all. So from my previous attempts I knew that a quick refreshing means the card isn’t properly recognized.