Fuze+ Feedback and Feature Request Thread

My feature request would be to replace the touch controls with Clip±like buttons.:smileyvery-happy:

Manual Bookmarking like the creative Zen’s & Folder View for easy navagation.

  1. Folder navigation.

  2. Option for 24h time format (unless I’m so stupid that didn’t notice it).

@barber76 wrote:

  1. Folder navigation.
  1. Option for 24h time format (unless I’m so stupid that didn’t notice it).

Great idea! Of course, I am in the minority here in the USA, as far as preferring the 24 hour format without ever having been a part of the military, but I like it much better than the 12hour format.

I am VERY unhappy that the new fuze+ will not seperate audiobooks (if they are tagged correctly) like the old Fuze did.  Listening to an audiobook is now much harder and more cumbersome.  Will Sansa correct this in a future firmware update?

I agree, 24 hour time format is great to have on the device.  After years in the fire service, 24 hour format is all I use.

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

I picked up the Fuze + from Sandisk and am very happy with it.  I would like to suggest an option that continues playing music when the unit is turned on.  I use it at work and often put the unit in pause when speaking to someone or on the phone, if my interaction takes a while then the player shuts off.  It would be cool if I could just hit the power button and hear music when it restarts.(Rockbox does this so I know it can be done.)

Another thing I would enjoy on any small player would be a clock feature that would turn off to music and the turn on to music, they all have sleep timers but not a wake up to music alarm, not even apple comes with this standard you gotta buy it.

I also do not understand why the case colors are distributed as they are.  What difference would putting every Fuze + size into every color case?

Here are a few suggestions, while I’m still hot about the ■■■■ you’re currently calling an mp3 player:

The load time at startup is ridiculous.  If I go off of just the songs I currently have in internal memory (a little under 500), it can take anywhere up to a minute for the player to load at startup before I can actually listen to music.  If I plug in my external card and bump up the song count to about 1500, then it could be five minutes if not infinity and beyond.

Similarly, the above problem also seems to make it nearly impossible to access the Music section in anything resembling a timely manner.  Just getting into the section may take two minutes, then moving to each sub-section (Artists, Albums, Songs, etc.) takes an equally tedious amount of time.

Amazingly, these are the revised time estimates after checking the mp3 files for lengthy tag information based on the suggestions of members of these forums.  While it is nice that such a fix has somewhat alleviated this problem, 1) I never had to make any such concessions for my Fuze so there’s no good excuse for having to make them on an “improved” Fuze, and 2) this is not an issue that should be left to the user to resolve anyway.

Clearly there’s a system problem here, whether it’s in the database itself or the player’s ability to read the database.  Fix it.

Also, if there’s going to be an issue with loading in the Music section it would be nice if the backlight were forced to stay on at least until the process is complete.  If the player has to load for longer than 90 seconds (and mine almost always does), the longest backlight timer available, the backlight shuts off and it appears that the mp3 player has shut itself off.  Thankfully I discovered that it was not shutting itself off, but it shouldn’t have been up to me to discover it, much less wait around pushing buttons on the player to see if maybe it has finished loading yet.

And if I pause the player at the beginning of a song and turn the player off, when I turn the player back on my paused song then starts at 10 seconds.  I don’t want to hear the song starting at ten seconds in, I want to hear it starting from the beginning.

This could be a very unhappy Christmas for Sandisk if your flagship mp3 player is this unusable.

I have a feature request. Something that iTunes and iPods can do that I hate that other players don’t seem to have this option.

Basically, I would like the ability to group songs in the playlist with other songs so that even on shuffle those particular songs will play back to back. This is an issue because I have a number of songs that are intros to the one after them, so they’re meant to play back to back. Also, classical music is divided in to movements which are separate tracks, and when on shuffle you end up getting bits and pieces of the whole scattered around. The only current option is to manually put them together in one file, but then the titles are wrong since each track or movement has a different name. It’s not an overly difficult feature, but for some reason it is one that most manufacturers and software writers seem to overlook that is very useful.


@keonyn wrote:

I have a feature request. Something that iTunes and iPods can do that I hate that other players don’t seem to have this option.

 

Basically, I would like the ability to group songs in the playlist with other songs so that even on shuffle those particular songs will play back to back. This is an issue because I have a number of songs that are intros to the one after them, so they’re meant to play back to back. Also, classical music is divided in to movements which are separate tracks, and when on shuffle you end up getting bits and pieces of the whole scattered around. The only current option is to manually put them together in one file, but then the titles are wrong since each track or movement has a different name. It’s not an overly difficult feature, but for some reason it is one that most manufacturers and software writers seem to overlook that is very useful.


it basically means that an element of a playlist shouldn’t only be a song, but another playlist as well.

If you were able to reference another playlist from within a playlist, wouldn’t the files in the referenced playlist still just be shuffled with the rest?

As far as I know iTunes is the only software that supports this feature, but I could be wrong. In iTunes you can select 2 or more files and group/link them so that they’re always kept together in shuffle play and always play in that order. When the software/player shuffles the library it treats those grouped songs as a single song, more or less. I would think if a playlist was referenced from another playlist it would just pull the songs out of it and shuffle them with the rest. Then again the Fuze+ doesn’t let you do that anyways, so who knows.

I really don’t like Apple and I don’t care for iTunes, and while the Sansa’s can do everything else I need, I must admit that this is one feature that they do do that would be nice if the Sansa’s could as well.

@keonyn wrote:

If you were able to reference another playlist from within a playlist, wouldn’t the files in the referenced playlist still just be shuffled with the rest?

 

Yep, you are right… There should be some kind of a check-box for a playlist, smth. like “Allow Shuffle”.

One more thing I’d like to see (in addition to folder navigation & 24h time):

I’d like the main menu to be looped. It’s annoying to swipe all the way through top-level choices to get, e.g. from Music to Settings & vice versa. 

It would be nice if I could play all of the Albums by a Artist or group in order instead one at a time.

Not sure if this is there on the Sansa Fuze+, but since I havent seen it, I think there should be a Recently Added playlist. I used that feature alot on my original Sansa Fuze. 

@barber76 wrote:

One more thing I’d like to see (in addition to folder navigation & 24h time):

I’d like the main menu to be looped. It’s annoying to swipe all the way through top-level choices to get, e.g. from Music to Settings & vice versa. 

Overall, I really like the fuze+; but, yeah…that is one little thing that would improve the functionality of the player for me as well.

Yes, I second this.  The main menu should definitely loop instead of having to go back and forth.  

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Fuze/How-would-you-improve-the-fuze/td-p/207310

For scrolling down lists, instead of having to flick over and over, then overshoot and have to inch your way towards the song, the up and down were constant as long as you held your finger there and the speed at which it scrolls would vary depending on how far your finger is from the center

My understanding is that the flicking system touch interaction isn’t that responsive because otherwise the fuze would be doing all sorts of crazy things if you held it in your pocket, so the touch system is abit delayed intially, so stopping where you want is a pain in the ass

Locking the fuze should just be a tap of the power button, instead of holding the play button. Or it automatically locks once your backlight turns off, and then make the unlock process a bit quicker. The animation is very slow for the lock. Could have it like the (i think zune?) where you just slide up and a cover-ish thing moves with you, and once its pushed off the screen the device is unlocked.

Also, the scroll selection white bar should be smooth, instead of having to flick from song name to song name, just have it settle down on a song name and have it smoothly interact with song names when you scroll, so it looks smoother. It looks especially choppy when the scrolliing slows down

Finally, album art always has annoying bars if your album art sizing isn’t perfect. So why not just have it be transparent and adjust to fit any picture size? I can’t imagine this being very hard to implement from my basic coding knowledge for skinning gaming devices.

@fuze_owner_gb wrote:

 


@barber76 wrote:

One more thing I’d like to see (in addition to folder navigation & 24h time):

I’d like the main menu to be looped. It’s annoying to swipe all the way through top-level choices to get, e.g. from Music to Settings & vice versa. 


Overall, I really like the fuze+; but, yeah…that is one little thing that would improve the functionality of the player for me as well.

 

I believe I read somewhere that this will be added in a future firmware update. The orginal Fuze when it first came out did not have wrap-around scrolling either (at least not in the ‘lists’). It was a real pain to scroll through a long Artist list and not be able to continue on to A from Z :smiley:

@tapeworm wrote:

 


@fuze_owner_gb wrote:

 


@barber76 wrote:

One more thing I’d like to see (in addition to folder navigation & 24h time):

I’d like the main menu to be looped. It’s annoying to swipe all the way through top-level choices to get, e.g. from Music to Settings & vice versa. 


Overall, I really like the fuze+; but, yeah…that is one little thing that would improve the functionality of the player for me as well.

 


I believe I read somewhere that this will be added in a future firmware update. The orginal Fuze when it first came out did not have wrap-around scrolling either (at least not in the ‘lists’). It was a real pain to scroll through a long Artist list and not be able to continue on to A from Z :smiley:

 

Good to hear…Let’s hope that it happens.  Not that I’m in the least unhappy with the fuze+ as it is now, but a looping scrolling design would make the product even better…:smiley: