CincyJr,
It’s good to hear from another CZ owner with some concerns about SanDisk’s spotty M4A (AAC) support.
Out of 3100 songs, I had about 32 M4P files that were from some of my few iTunes purchases back in the day when everything was protected. I also found I had about 24 newer iTunes downloads that were not protected. These were M4A files. I found a way to convert the M4P’s to M4A files, but I found M4A files themselves were an issue, so I gave up on M4A and converted all M4A files to MP3’s. Once I went to all MP3’s I was able to put 29GB of songs on my 32GB card and this left the player’s 4GB for everything else, like podcasts, audio books, and recordings.
ITunes has an option to import files as either M4A’s or MP3’s. I was using M4A as my import choice, but the issues I encountered with the Sansa not finishing the refresh when the M4A files were loaded to the card forced me to rethink this choice. It is easy to mass convert the M4A files to MP3’s in iTunes, so I went down the path of least resistance to resolving this problem. Use MP3 format and be done with it.
I don’t have the time to debug the flawed M4A file handling that the Sansa ClipZip exhibits. Just recognize there are iTunes aac (M4A) issues and steer around them with MP3 format. I wasted enough time trying to get SanDisk to acknowledge the aac(M4A) support issues and work towards a fix, but they were still in denial and said my card must be bad.
I have since loaded all my 3100+ songs to the card thinking I will put all podcasts, audio books and recordings on the player’s memory. I thought this approach would minimize the player refresh cycle when any content changed. The podcasts get added and deleted regularly, so I wanted to keep refresh cycle times to a minimum. I am disappointed to report that any adds or deletes to the player memory result in player refresh cycles that still take over 10 minutes with the almost full memory card still inserted. I guess SanDisk would say it takes that long because I have so many songs on the card, but I think their refresh routine is inefficiently written assuming a much smaller memory footprint than most people will ultimately try and use with this player. Your use case appears similar to mine. You are using the 32GB card like I am. Adding or deleting a few podcasts to the player should not take over ten minutes to update the players “database”.
That is unfortunately the situation, even using all mp3 files. What is your file count and what are your refresh times like? How are your files spread (player memory versus card)?
GPH
