Fuze+ Feedback and Feature Request Thread

@P Opus:

There is no player which is ideal.

Sansa Fuze: Proprietory port

Clip+: Bad radio plus less battery and bi color display.

Ipods: itunes or its substitutes are nagging.

Samsung R0: poor firmware,no library integration

So, Fuze+ is no exception and it appleals to those who like it with what it is.

For me Fuze+ is budget player with good sound quality and FM radio and I have learned to adapt to touch control.

The really sad thing on part of Sandisk is that they did not ask people what they want before giving green light to R&D department and production.

I am sure Sandisk will go back to tactile controls and that will be Fuze+ V2.

Till then love this player and still Fuze is available so grab some units.

Absolutely,

That’s why I kept the Fuze+  I love the Rhapsody integration of the unit.  It’s lightning fast.  It’s a perfect player for me to explore music with and I use it at my office daily.

If my fuze classics should fail I know the Fuze+ will work “in a pinch”

@P_Opus:

Moreover it does not break bank like ipods do:smileyvery-happy:

Hello

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE can you enable music folder browsing on the Fuze+.

Many of my folders have mixed songs by various artists and they are now all over the place!!

Very Disappointed!!

Thanks

Hello,

  1. Same request here: FOLDER NAVIGATION please!!! Is the best way to organize music I think, especially when is the same way that you organize your PC.

  2. On the clip+ you can change EQ in the music option directly when playing a song. On the fuze+ is just ■■■■■ that we need to go in the setting menu to change EQ! Take too much time.

  3. Pease enable the possibility to go around the menu and song list. Cycling from A to B to C … to Z in an unique way is very disappointing ! How about A to Z in the opposite way?

  4. The Locking mechanisms is really annoying, it just unlocking when I walk!

Solution : lock the device or turn off display and sensitive button with 1 press on the power button, leave the volume + & - enable (customizable in setting menu). A long press of 5 sec on the power again to turn it back on or unlock it.

5) more customizable settings, like: the album art, it slowing down the fuze a lot (i think), i want too put it away. Or maybe the possibility to disable the “tap” navigation, leave only the “sliding” navigation on the sensitive area.

  1. “quick playlist” feature, like windows media player (yes im old school ^^) that you can add next songs to play while listening. I don’t understand why no one do that on an mp3 player ??? I tried sony, creative and cowon D2, none have it !

  2. forget me for my bad English ^^ im from French

Darkbuddah wrote:

“3) Pease enable the possibility to go around the menu and song list. Cycling from A to B to C … to Z in an unique way is very disappointing ! How about A to Z in the opposite way?”

“5) more customizable settings, like: the album art, it slowing down the fuze a lot (i think), i want too put it away. Or maybe the possibility to disable the “tap” navigation, leave only the “sliding” navigation on the sensitive area.”

3): 

i agree with this one. but the fuze+ handles it better than the clip. on the clip you don’t have a “cycling option” at all.

it would be sweet if you could open a little slider with the letters A-Z and scroll with this one like the creative has on its players.

maybe it is realizable if this slider opens when you do the same movement on the touchpad as now when you want to skip some letters

5):

is it really the album art? i’d say it’s the background. i experienced a little performance boost when i left the background blank.

it would be nice to see something like a one coloured background where you can chose between some colours. i really don’t like the “stripe”, “sansa” and “spectrum” option.

Add Podcast menu back and include a Books menu.  My Podcasts are now showing as Books.  THEY AREN’T BOOKS!

It does have a Sleep Mode…in settings.

@darkbuddah wrote:

 

  1. The Locking mechanisms is really annoying, it just unlocking when I walk!

Solution : lock the device or turn off display and sensitive button with 1 press on the power button, leave the volume + & - enable (customizable in setting menu). A long press of 5 sec on the power again to turn it back on or unlock it.

 

The locking mechanism was changed to the power button as you suggest here 2 firmware updates ago.

@gorkon wrote:

Add Podcast menu back and include a Books menu.  My Podcasts are now showing as Books.  THEY AREN’T BOOKS!

 

 

many others complined that the menu item was podcast so thats probably why they changed it to books. guess you cant please everyone. since it was just changed from podcast to books i would not hold my breath waiting for a change because it likely will not change back. 

Another thing to add is when you start it up the sandisk logo seems brighter than the original fuze one i liked the original it looked way better

they can recognize the relationships. Rockbox is doing just fine.

Just face the truth, the Fuze+ is a piece of **bleep**. The firmware completely broken. If a firmware can not handle playlists with paths in them it is just that: broken. If a firmware is stuck in constant reboots: broken. If a firmware refuses to boot because of a file: completely, utterly broken.

We were all ripped off. Surprisingly some people still defend sandisk.

/me wonders why they didn’t try to hire some rockbox devs. 

me wonders why you are still trolling?

What about Volker’s comments amount to trolling?  I happen to think the comment is a bit overstated, but at the same time, I am constantly frustrated because I know if I were on the quality assurance team (I used to do quality assurance for a video card company), I would recommend that this product not be released until these problems were fixed.  If I were on the development team (I used to be a computer programmer) I would insist on fixing these things. I would work extra.  If I were on the marketing team I would not have marketed it as a genuine iPod alternative. Though I have never been in marketing, my current job requires me to manage customer expectations and I can say that I do it much better than Sandisk’s team.  On three fronts here I know that I am capable of more than what Sandisk has put forth, and if I were in a management position I would have to discipline and ultimately fire many people if this product reached the shelves in the state it did.

On the other hand, I have used an iPod nano 6th gen, and I have used other “off-brand” mp3 players, and the Fuze+ (after 4 months+ of firmware upgrades) is still my favorite, hands down (after the regular Fuze).  Yes, yes, many mp3 player companies are even worse than Sandisk, and the iPod is not really my cup of tea.  Around 4 months after the original release, the firmware finally got to where the product was over 80% good (by my standards of good), and I just kind of sigh and deal with the other 20%, because many of the upgrades and changes made over the original Fuze are too important to me to just go back to using the Fuze as my primary player.  Once Sandisk finally fixes many of these obviously wrong aspects of the firmware, this will be my favorite player with no caveat.  It’s frustrating not knowing when that will happen, or frankly even if it will happen.  I can see why Sanidsk would have a policy against announcing what will be coming in future firmware updates, or when these updates will be released, but it sure would help to manage customer expectations if they could.  If they make promises to fix these problems and deliver on their promise (this happens to be basic “good” business practice) then there will be fewer people registering complaints (or, as some people like to call it, trolling) on this site.

Even if they fix the problems many of us have mentioned, Sandisk will have made their great product at the expense of what I consider to be basic customer service.

Thank you for keeping work going after you sold the product. Much appreciated. These are my qualms:

in somewhat random order with 1 (followed by 9) being my absolute favorite, most pressing requests:

  1. image zoom and scroll! This was actually my biggest dissappointment with my purchase. I just took it for granted that this was included. I actually want to put topographic maps on there and if I could see them at an original size and would be able to scroll (should be nice with touch controls), this would be pretty useful for navigating. However resized to fit the screen there is no point. Same with city maps. Take a screenshot from google maps before going somewhere and you don’t have to buy a map or get lost in an new city… How much I want this feature… (video playback is so much fancier, but i have to wonder other than school kids who actually uses it, but I can put decent image support to so many good, practical uses, but most break without scroll and 1:1 zoom at least…)

  2. allow users to choose background none instead of spectrum, sansa and stripes. Personally I am in it for battery life and appreciate a black screen unless it shows me something useful.

  3. Indicate clearly in your manual how we should format our album art so it works properly with all file formats… and consider allowing replacing missing album art with black background instead of a random textured background which offers us nothing but battery drain.)

  4. In the screen where you actually see playback of a song, there is a rectangle centred in the bottom which shows the name of the track and artist and album. Somehow this uses only 50% off the screenspace and just wastes the other half (and it don’t manage to show track/album/artist names completely because of this)… It would seem logical to make efficient use of your limited screen space and let this field take the entire width of the screen.

  5. This is a really minor one, but regardless, I see that the latest firmware update does something like saving voice/radio recording with a date in the filename. However this shows ddmmyy. This actually does not make sense. If you at least start a filename with (yy)yymmdd it will sort chronologically. It will also make sense to both americans and others, and is an iso standard.

  6. support txt. This should be relatively straight forward, and a lot of users will use this I think, for shopping lists, on the road directions, phone numbers, and whatever general info one shoudn’t forget… (workaround possible with http://rendertext.sourceforge.net so less pressing than other improvements…)

  7. automatic detection of landscape/portrait on an image. If they are shown wrong they are really to small to be any good at all, and going into the menu to change this image zoom and scroll. Turning the device on it’s side however would be far less tedious, and actually be for the good benefit of actually seeing something because of extra screen size.

  8. png support. Jpeg really isn’t so great for anything but photos

  9. an alarm feature. There already is a clock and a sleep, so why not an alarm. It doesn’t need an external speaker, just let the user set the alarm volume, so you know that if you are not sleeping with the headphones on you can just max it out and put it next to the bed…

  10. make your firmware open source or make some sort of api so users can implement features like this themselves. This might make your hair stand up at first, but reconsider. It would actually make alot of users really happy, secondly it would save you alot of work (thus money -> make cheaper players -> bigger market share) for implementing all this stuff, and third it would seriously improve sales (people already are more inclined to buy a player if it has rockbox support).  There is a serious market segment for this and no other company offers this right now. Think of how many linksys routers got sold after they were obliged to opensource their firmware: http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3562391/The-Open-Source-WRT54G-Story.htm

  11. equip future players with a slightly larger battery so you can have 60 hours of playback like cowon.

@ufotds wrote:

Thank you for keeping work going after you sold the product. Much appreciated. These are my qualms:

 

in somewhat random order with 1 (followed by 9) being my absolute favorite, most pressing request:

 

<list snipped>

Finally . . . some constructive and interesting suggestions!

Thank You!

i noticed something about the albumart which i find really ugly.

for some reason some of my album arts won’t show up (all of them are either 200x200px or 400x400px). when there isn’t a cover avaible there just an ugly screen for it. maybe it would be better when there would be an extra sign for it or leave the space just blank. i know that this is just “eye-candy” but it could look far better than now :wink:

I wrote about leaving it black to save battery, actually it could also be for example a black background with some musical notes on it, and there could be a number of such pictures to randomly choose from, but that would be better I think than textures that are in there now.

I don’t know how many have posted about this, but I’d like full FLAC support (not partial like presently) and better Linux support. For instance, with a Sansa Fuze I was able to effectively use the player in MTP mode with Banshee, but with the Sansa Fuze+ it refuses to handshake with the MTP libraries and jumps straight to MSC (I’ve set it to MTP mode, not Auto, which always takes down any audio apps I have running).

gorkon wrote:

Add Podcast menu back and include a Books menu.  My Podcasts are now showing as Books.  THEY AREN’T BOOKS!

I agree with him.  Each should have its own menu.  This may be why the book section was poorly designed.  BOOK ARE NOT PODCASTS.  A 11 hour book with 30 chapters will need to be handle differently.  For one, is reasonable to delete 1 podcast after hearing 1 of 12 episodes. It would be nice to be able to delete a book after 3 chapters when you come to the conclusion that you would not want to die with a certain book on your player.   I have only play 10 to 15 podcasts ever.  The feature of coming back to the last 10 mp3 files would have been ok on 3 of them.  When coming back to a book section, I spend 2 to 3 minutes to find my last spot and set the player to play the remaining chambers in the book and not the last 10 chapters I read.  The last book completely ready to resume on no book at all would save me time. 

I do not think Podcast or book readers like touching the screen while walking, driving, lessening in bed,  and have it jump to the next chapter.  If this was music, you would just get to hear a 3 minute song again.  For me, for books, left and right arrows should be only for fast forward or fast reverse.  Jumping chapters should be on the same menu as changing speed or deleting chapters–no graphics and not the main book menu.  There is a setting Settings/podcast and book setting called Chapter skip.  This seem to have no effect on skipping chapters. 

Anytime I select a book already started, I should always be asked “Resume Playback?”  The play should return be to the chapter and second is read last. This is not reasonable for music albums.  

There are some books that I play from the Music section.  These are books that do not start their title with chapter 1, chapter 2. The Book section could handle these books by having an option in each book to sort by file name or mp3 title–the default being file name or selectable in settings/ book settings.