Sync speed seems unusually slow ... is there a fix?

I’m using the 4 GB Sansa Fuze, Firmware version V02.03.33A and WMP version 11.0.6002.18111 in Windows Vista. I am also using a 16 GB SanDisk Micro SDHC card, which is where I store all my music, because apparently you can’t do playlists that incorporate songs from both the player and the card.

Right now I have about 2,800 songs that I’m putting on the player, which takes up about 9 GB. I have about 8 different playlists I use, which I like to update from time to time. The problem is, this takes literally 8 to 10 hours, which seems unusually slow. An older MP3 player I had used to accomplish this in about 3 hours. I like to make new playlists often, but this is just too time-consuming. I’ve tried all the USB ports on my computer.

(It also takes at least 10 minutes to refresh the device once the synching is done.)

I’ve already tried MSC mode as well as dragging and dropping files straight on to the player in Auto Mode, which lets me put the songs on faster but doesn’t let me add the playlists. Any suggestions on how to speed up the process while still using WMP?

Thanks!

WMP is probably slowing you down while it thinks things over, and 9GB is a lot to think about.

You could use a different music library software that makes playlists, like Media Monkey

or Winamp. 

You need to add the full lame_enc.dll (Google it) to Media Monkey because its mp3 encoder expires. Winamp wants to to pay for mp3 ripping. So you’d want to rip your albums elsewhere and use Winamp for playlisting.  

I believe they both make .m3u playlists, working in MSC mode.

You could use also MSC mode and create your own .m3u playlists (with, for instance, YAPL ) rather than WMP’s .pla playlists.

You could use mp3tag to make playlists.

In fact, I’d suggest running all your albums through mp3tag after you set its default (Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg/Write) to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. 

Just open the album in mp3tag, highlight all the files, and Save. 

WMP or the Fuze may be slowed down (or stopped) by other versions of tags. 

There are also other playlisting programs around. But no matter how you slice it, 9GB is going to take a while.  

Message Edited by Black-Rectangle on 06-16-2010 09:19 PM

Thanks for taking the time to respond, first of all!

After playing around a bit, what I ended up doing was running all the files through mp3tag as you suggested and then, based on something I saw in another thread, going into Task Manager and ending the SansaDispatch.exe process. Between these two things alone, WMP was a lot faster than before – it did the whole sync in about 3 hours instead of 8+. (I decided to try WMP for transfer because I do like the way it creates a folder hierarchy, which mp3tag didn’t do.)

I’m still going to experiment with Media Monkey, Winamp and YAPL to see if I like their playlist-making. I like that mp3tag lets you make playlists directly onto the player in MSC mode, even across multiple folders, but I like the way WMP lets you edit playlists easily drag and drop new files to a playlist you’ve already created. (One of the big problems with using WMP is that, if a folder has a long name, the Fuze changes the name and automatically modifies the playlists. So, when WMP goes to look for the songs in those folders in another list, it can’t find them, and adds a second copy of each song. Being able to create playlists right on the player eliminates this problem.)

Anyway, thanks again for the help!

I tried YAPL this afternoon as you suggested – it’s exactly what I needed!