Freezing up while refreshing

I’m finding that when I after I sync  a bunch of aac (m4a) files from my library onto the 16 GB Micro SDHC card in my Clip Zip, the device freezes up during its “refreshing” cycle. I can scan some of these files on fine, but when I try to do my whole batch at once, it freezes. I’ve been able to sync a similar-size batch (1500 tracks) of mp3 files without a problem, and I’ve tried this with two different versions of the Clip Zip firmware installed (01.01.12 and 01.01.18) to no avail. I’ve also tried syncing through the card reader and then inserting the card into the device, but that seems to make no difference.

My guess is that there is a corrupt aac file in my batch somewhere, but it would be nice if the device could identify the problem file or even just skip over it rather than freeze up. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? Does anyone know of a program that scans for irregularities in aac music files so that it might be able to spot the culprit?

Thanks!

ChkDsk can scan for file errors and sometimes fix them. But your problem might also be caused by one or more ID3 tags that the player is encountering during the database refresh and cannot read. The best dedicated tag editor software is MP3Tag. Set the default Write setting to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 in the Tools menu.

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Thanks for the reply. It may have had something to do with the tags, but I wasn’t able to fix it. I had run MP3Gain on my files, which I guess uses tags to level the volume of the tracks, so maybe that rendered a tag it didn’t like, but I wasn’t able to identify it. However, I just got a new laptop (for unrelated reasons) and reloaded all my music from a backup drive, re-ran MP3Gain, and everything is working fine.

Glad you got it sorted out. I too, use MP3Gain on all my .mp3 files to level the volume. It does modify the ID3 tag by adding an APEv2 format containing the gain information. I’ve never had one of these cause any issues though.

I’ve had a prob of freezing while refreshing when downloading itunes. Eventually it chokes. If I delete all my downloads, the refresh works, but now I not only do not have my downloads, but my 8 gig memory does not “refresh.” I’ve repeated this itunes download attempt many different ways including one by one but it hangs on different tunes, so not clear it’s the files. Then when I delete evreything to resotre I have lost memory that I can’t recover. I’m now down to only a  few mgbytes. This ■■■■■. I bought this because I needed radio and tunes at work. I have mac at home and this zip clip seemed ideal. But it’s been huge time ■■■■ and I’ve never been successful in storing more than about 10 itunes on it. Plus, now I’m out of memory on it.  I’ve also tried cards, but they choke too.  Now I’d just like the memory restored so I can download some mp3 instead of itunes, but have not found a way. What gives? Any ideas?

I’ve spent more than 20 hours trying to get my new 4GbSansa Clip Zip to be useful.  Crashing while refreshing is one of the three major problems.  Here’s what I’ve been forced to do.  Note that I use a Mac, so these are mac-centric problems and mac-centric solutions.

Problem 1: Crashing while refreshing.  This occurs when music is copied to a microSD (mine is 16G), not to the internal memory.  I’ve found that for me it only occurs on m4a files, not mp3, but the issue is not the file type but the ID3 tags.  Many of my m4a files were iTunes purchases.  The fix is to open all those files with an ID3 editor (The Tagger 1.2.3 works, ID3 Editor 1.17.15 does not) and make some change in the tag so the file gets updated.  This is a real pain since the Tagger won’t batch process so you have to do it one at a time.  After you fix all the offending files, they can be copied to the microSD card and it won’t crash.

Problem 2:  There’s no way to create playlists.  I’ve tried all the methods that can be found online, including Gary McCauley’s iTunes to Clip script to no avail.  The only solution that works for me is to copy all the songs I want in a playlist to a separate folder, and then rename them so the file name is preceeded by a numerical order.  (Storage is cheap so who cares about all the duplication.)  Now you can use the folder feature of the Sansa to get them to play in order.

Problem 3: The Clip Zip creates bogus genres with names like :00Ze.  Ignore them.

Problem 4:  I’ve not found a way to update the Clip Zip firmware with the Mac.  If there is one I’d love to know as it may fix the above problems.

Advice:  If you use a Mac and haven’t yet purchased a Clip Zip, don’t.

@veranth wrote:

 

 

Problem 4:  I’ve not found a way to update the Clip Zip firmware with the Mac.  If there is one I’d love to know as it may fix the above problems.

 

 

there are manual firmware update instructions in the firmware thread posted at the top of this board. 

I use my clip zip and clip+ with my 2 MAC’s everyday and do not have any issues. 

@veranth wrote:

 

Problem 4:  I’ve not found a way to update the Clip Zip firmware with the Mac.  If there is one I’d love to know as it may fix the above problems.

 

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Clip-Zip/Sansa-Clip-Zip-Firmware-01-01-20/m-p/270703/highlight/true#M2531