Fuze+ Feedback and Feature Request Thread

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.

I hope the right eyes see this. The  RECENTLY ADDED feature on the Fuze was great. Why did you get rid of it. The menu on the older Fuze was so easy to navigate, why change it? I even convinced my 60 yr old father to get one. I showed him the Fuze + and he had the same reaction I did about the menu. The older Fuze was definitely better. Please give me a firmware update that will allow me to keep the features I loved about the older Fuze.

if you use WMP to sync then the autop[laylist “fresh tracks” might do the trick if you add it to sync to your Fuze+.

Wow…the new Fuze+ sounds really good. I just got a 4GB one, inserted my 16GB card filled with FLAC files and gave it a go. The sound is superb, to be blunt. And I’m comparing the sound to DAPs like a Cowon D2, Apple iPod Nano 3G (the one with a Wolfson chip), Sony NWZ-A818 and others.

Not bad Sand’y! :slight_smile:

I think there should be an option to set the sensitivity of the fuze plus’s touchpad. It could have low, normal, or high sensitivity options. I know my old Zen vision m used to have this option for its touchpad and it was great. It would be good for the fuze+ as some people think its too sensitive. :smiley:

I purchased 4 Fuse+ for Christmas.  These replaced 3 older Fuse units.  One was for me, the others for daughters.  My daughters have not ever complained about the way these units handle music and the radio.  They are very happy.

I used to lesson to music more often.  It took no effort to lesson to music and return to the two or three book I was reading.  I say books, some were scriptures daily, 3 monthly church magazine on MP3, weekly Sunday school lesson,  one very long detail book (10 hour+) and short stories.  

Now that it is so difficult to stop a long book and find your place back to the same spot, I never lesson to music on my Fuse+.  I use two cd/mp3 player to for scriptures and weekly lessons.  I never lesson to music anymore at any time.  The old player was my everything player.  The new Fuse+ is now just for long books.   I know I would lesson to music if I could start and stop book more easily.  This lack in this feature has had far more effect on my uses of my player than how the power button functions.  I have dropped music and the monthly magazines completely. 

I have been looking for an mp3 player for another daughter.  Primarily a music player, but also something that will play books.  It would be nice if it was cheep.   I have spent some time looking for a player that has audio books in the description.  I want her to have this flexibility.  I am looking for some of the flexibility I stumbled into with the old fuse for her… and for me.

a feature i liked in the original fuze was the back to menu or back to list funtion. but in the + when i hit back after turning it back on after being off it goes to the menu. how about a feature with the middle touch button where i can go back to list not just going to the menu with the back button.

when in a artists in the song list tap the back button to go back to the list of artists. Is that what you mean?

Please provide option to customize Music sub-menu and add folder option.

If there is choice that one can choose first music sub-menu to be like playlist and next folder browsing then album,artist,etc

The choice would enable the user to customize as per personal convenience.

Please fix the .m3u playlist feature so that it works with subdirectories.  I use Linux and I want to be able to copy my .m3u play lists onto the device.

The only way I have gotten it to work is by placing the .mp3 file and the .m3u file in the root directory. Anytime I try to use sub directories it fails to find the files.  placing all my .mp3 files in a single directory is not a practical solution.

Thanks

-Mark

Please provide file browsing/folder navigation.

Hello, I love my Sansa Fuze+ Player very much. But many times when I add .m4a files to my player it lists them incorrectly.

It will show them in the videos section. It will say the name of the file. But the tiime is 0:00 and when i try to play it it says unsupported format. TRhe If I remove then add the song again it works till i reset, via either the computer or the player, it does it again.