Fuze+ with large collections (16 gig internal and 32 gig card nearly full)... will it ever work?

Hi,

I’m posting this in the hope that if anyone here has an actual loop in to the Sansa product management or development team, they could get back to me.   I bought a 16 GB Sansa Fuze+ and a 32 GB sd card the week the Fuze+ was available.  I have a 60 Gig collection, listen to it, the radio and sometimes record it and had been making do with a small brick (a 40 Gig Rockboxed iRiver hard disk player). 

Finally my dream was here… a solid state player that could fit a reasonable amount of my collection in my pocket, play and record radio and hold a charge for hours upon hours!  I love Sansa products, had bought my wife a few and had been waiting for years for their high capacity solid state products.  So I quickly sold my iRiver for $150 on eBay & I only had to add another $63 for the Sansa and the 32 GB card.  Life is good!

… or so I thought…

I never dreamed that the Sansa Fuze+ was nearly completely useless with a large collecton.  You can only play by the artist tag because it is so sluggish that you can’t get through albums or songs without it timing out.  The user interface becomes completely unresponsive.  The start up takes so long that you give up, look away and when you look back it has finished but shut off while looking for a quick response. To get even minimal use from the device I combined all similar types of music by switching the genre with the artist for many artists and using few genres.  I also reduced the artists, lying to decrease the number of entries in the list.  With all of these tricks I get bare bones minimal usability by avoiding the albums and songs (which are respectively nearly and completely unresponsive) and choosing random play within really broad genres and fake grouped artists.  This is such bad software that it is unbelievable. 

I check back every few months and get the new firmware… nothing important is fixed because the base functionality just isn’t there with a large collection.  I fail to understand how this could even be offered in large capacities with which it was clearly never intended or even tested.  This is an expensive, sleek and pretty $213  48 gig solid state radio/dap combo that likes nearly useless in my top desk drawer. I keep thinking that Sansa is going to fix these basic problems… just adding folder based play would be enough to keep me happy.  But I’m giving up… there seems to be no prioritization for the development team to work on the basic failure of the device as opposed to the numerous volume / lock / podcast renaming fixes that are trivial in comparision.

So… I wish that I hadn’t lost $213 on something that I could now sell for $50… but I have.  Does anybody here know if there is anyone with a heartbeat at Sansa that understands this issue and plans a resolution?

I wish that I had never sold my giant brick sized rockbocked iRiver i-HP40 with the 10 hour battery. 

same boat man, same boat! I’m just so disappointed! I know nothign about futuredevelopment but for what I’ve seen till now they’re fixing simple “things” (and introducing others like clock). The only thing that I know is that I can’t sell it

Yep, it’s an unusable, unsellable piece of junk until it gets viable firmware.  The only hope seems to be the Rockbox team, an unpaid group of hobbyists porting stuff to DAPs for fun…  Isn’t that sad?  That a group of unpaid hobbyists might make a Sansa+ device work when a multination company like Sansa that built it cannot?

Awful

This is very disapointing. Same also here.

@fuzionnow wrote:

Hi,

 

I’m posting this in the hope that if anyone here has an actual loop in to the Sansa product management or development team, they could get back to me.   I bought a 16 GB Sansa Fuze+ and a 32 GB sd card the week the Fuze+ was available.  I have a 60 Gig collection, listen to it, the radio and sometimes record it and had been making do with a small brick (a 40 Gig Rockboxed iRiver hard disk player). 

 

Finally my dream was here… a solid state player that could fit a reasonable amount of my collection in my pocket, play and record radio and hold a charge for hours upon hours!  I love Sansa products, had bought my wife a few and had been waiting for years for their high capacity solid state products.  So I quickly sold my iRiver for $150 on eBay & I only had to add another $63 for the Sansa and the 32 GB card.  Life is good!

 

… or so I thought…

 

I never dreamed that the Sansa Fuze+ was nearly completely useless with a large collecton.  You can only play by the artist tag because it is so sluggish that you can’t get through albums or songs without it timing out.  The user interface becomes completely unresponsive.  The start up takes so long that you give up, look away and when you look back it has finished but shut off while looking for a quick response. To get even minimal use from the device I combined all similar types of music by switching the genre with the artist for many artists and using few genres.  I also reduced the artists, lying to decrease the number of entries in the list.  With all of these tricks I get bare bones minimal usability by avoiding the albums and songs (which are respectively nearly and completely unresponsive) and choosing random play within really broad genres and fake grouped artists.  This is such bad software that it is unbelievable. 

 

I check back every few months and get the new firmware… nothing important is fixed because the base functionality just isn’t there with a large collection.  I fail to understand how this could even be offered in large capacities with which it was clearly never intended or even tested.  This is an expensive, sleek and pretty $213  48 gig solid state radio/dap combo that likes nearly useless in my top desk drawer. I keep thinking that Sansa is going to fix these basic problems… just adding folder based play would be enough to keep me happy.  But I’m giving up… there seems to be no prioritization for the development team to work on the basic failure of the device as opposed to the numerous volume / lock / podcast renaming fixes that are trivial in comparision.

 

So… I wish that I hadn’t lost $213 on something that I could now sell for $50… but I have.  Does anybody here know if there is anyone with a heartbeat at Sansa that understands this issue and plans a resolution?

 

I wish that I had never sold my giant brick sized rockbocked iRiver i-HP40 with the 10 hour battery. 

 

 

I was hoping to do this same thing. However I like to put my player on shuffle.

Have you tried that? If so how did it work that way.

Currently I have a 16 G card and 16G player and it only seems to take time to load with an occational lock up.

what about the lates firmware?

Update to latest firmware V02.38.06 it supposedly fixes the problem.

@alienkid10 wrote:

Update to latest firmware V02.38.06 it supposedly fixes the problem.

I actually seem to be having more problems since the update. My fuze+ seems to be taking longer to load now and has several times locked up loading. Prior to the update I only had to deal  what I thiough was slow loading. Now though I swear it takes longer.

Both 16gig card and player are nearly full total over 4400 songs.

weird… Try reloading the firmware also try booting without card in the plug it in.

My stats at the moment read:

Internal Free: 537 mb

Card Free: 709 mb

Songs: 12213

Videos: 4

Photos: 1

Not sure what’s the issue with your player. I have used the 16+32 from the start and I was just as frustrated also, but since I updated to the 2.38.06 firmware, I have yet to experience any problem other than the minute or so boot-up time. I wanted to be able to carry my entire library with me and after almost 6 months of frustration, I was just about ready to ■■■■ it up and just buy a 120gig iPod classic, but this last update finally gave me the Fuze+ that I paid for. Finally if I want my shuffle mode, I can just shuffle my 5-starred songs on both internal and on the card and ALL the ratings are saved at last. I would have preferred sticking with my original Fuze V1 with a similar firmware update (and larger database). It still works perfectly, but what are you gonna do if they aren’t going to add any more updates.

@alienkid10 wrote:

weird… Try reloading the firmware also try booting without card in the plug it in.

It loads much faster without the card. Really loading takes just a little over a min, unless I have done a complete reboot. When I had less mp3s it took less time to load, and it seems like the old Fuze (the one with the wheel) loaded quicker. That Fuze though got crushed so I upgraded to the 16 gig.

Since the update though I have had it lock up a few times while loading which I found odd.

On a side note I learned that if you completely fill the card and it gets to a song on the card it will lock up telling you to make some room on the card.

It might be that large collections might be stressful for the player, after all it is not like having that big of a collection on a laptop.