Sansa Fuze+ Firmware 02.38.06

I wouldn’t worry too much.  We’re going to keep getting these incremental updates and it is possible to use it now at full capacities of content (16 gig internal + 32 gig SD card).  So it’s well worth keeping it around and remember: keep your eye on the prize!  This is a great combination of hardware and potential  and soon it is going to switch from a problematic device to the best platform out there when the Rockbox port is ready in the next couple months or so.   Certainly we guinea pigs who shelled out roughly $250 for  a 16 GB Fuze+ with an 32 GB SD card as soon as it came out have a right to be ticked off.  After all, these first devices went out of warranty back in early September; out of warranty before they ever became usable!!!  Worse yet, we have wasted over a year and paid $100 over what we would pay now for the same device and 32 GB SD card.  That’s a hundred bucks to pay for the privlege of hauling an unusable device out of the desk drawer every few months to be an unpaid beta tester of a new firmware update. 

The sad thing is that we wouldn’t buy it now, becasue now there are 64 GB iPhones out there with the iOS embedded iPod app which is infinitely better than the Sansa Fuze+ interface.  I have to believe that any servicable mp3 player on an Android phone beats the Fuze+ as well, but the iPod app in a solid state phone with large capacity is significant because it is the iPod that clearly served as the UI design goal for the failed Sansa Fuze+ project.   But now, with most everybody carrying a smart phone, it’s really not clear that devices such as the Fuze+ are even needed.  This is why Apple is now phasing out the entire iPod line.

But Rockbox either equals or exceeds the iPod design depending upon your perspective and in the near future we will have Rockboxed Sansa Fuze+ devices.  The Rockboxed Fuze+ will almost certainly be the best and most full featured solid state dedicated media player available.  This is mostly because it is unlikely that any competitor is going to release new devices to compete in that disappearing niche market. 

These Rockboxed Fuze+ devices will only be of value to very limited classes of users:

  1. Folks who do not carry smart phones because of the cost of a data plan

  2. Folks like me who do carry a smart phone with a lot of music and/or media but do not want to expose it to harsh conditions.

  3. Systems Folks who put in long hours & all nighters maintaining servers and choose to carry a Fuze+ as their USB drive of choice because of the addition of the music and radio.

When the Rockbox port is ready there will be a surge in Sansa Fuze+ sales.  I wonder if the Product Managers at Sansa will understand the reason.  Probably not, but Sansa will have at least earned it to some degree for putting out a decent selection of components.  Too bad the software never really arrived.

@fuzionnow wrote:

 the Rockbox port is ready in the next couple months or so.

 

I would say in the next couples of weeks

 

@fuzionnow wrote:
Certainly we guinea pigs who shelled out roughly $250 for  a 16 GB Fuze+ with an 32 GB SD card as soon as it came out have a right to be ticked off.  After all, these first devices went out of warranty back in early September; out of warranty before they ever became usable!!!  Worse yet, we have wasted over a year and paid $100 over what we would pay now for the same device and 32 GB SD card.  That’s a hundred bucks to pay for the privlege of hauling an unusable device out of the desk drawer every few months to be an unpaid beta tester of a new firmware update.

This is clearly unacceptable. And a lot of other custumers already said so. I hope Sansa is going to give a better approach on their next device.

On the other hand: I’m the one who started the rockbox port’s process by opening the device and giving the picture of the pcb on the port’s page. I did without any kind of knowledge or pratical hability. Just a few video in youtube about how to open such devices.  Right after that came people around, especially Pamaury, starting to work on it. I mean: if people like you had just opened their device from the early beginning, we could be having a rockbox’s port at least since one year already!

@fuzionnow wrote:
When the Rockbox port is ready there will be a surge in Sansa Fuze+ sales.  I wonder if the Product Managers at Sansa will understand the reason.  Probably not, but Sansa will have at least earned it to some degree for putting out a decent selection of components.  Too bad the software never really arrived.

Sansa seems to have helped the port, even offering to send a free fuze+. Also answering a few question. I guess it is not totally a hazard if so many sansa devices are supported in Rockbox.

And clearly I just can’t wait for the port to be usable for the hardware of the fuze+ is really nice!

"1) Folks who do not carry smart phones because of the cost of a data plan

  1. Folks like me who do carry a smart phone with a lot of music and/or media but do not want to expose it to harsh conditions.

  2. Systems Folks who put in long hours & all nighters maintaining servers and choose to carry a Fuze+ as their USB drive of choice because of the addition of the music and radio."

  3. Folks like me who take the privacy of the media I read/watch/listen too, seriously, meaning that no one, not even the phone company, gets to see the list of media I own. And dont fool yourself, they can. Oh and by the way, the only media I actually purchase is purchased in actual stores with paper money.

Ok here is another reason to have a seperate MP3 player.  I work with confidential information and my employer will not allow a cell phone to be on while on the floor. 

@misscrystalyn wrote:

Ok here is another reason to have a seperate MP3 player.  I work with confidential information and my employer will not allow a cell phone to be on while on the floor. 

Ooooh . . . don’t let him find out it has voice record capability, or they’ll outlaw that too. :dizzy_face:

■■■■, you’re right… Oh well.  Less my boss knows the better I am.

Playlists are apparently impossible. Got the Fuze+ a few days ago. Never would’ve dreamed I’d spend all this time going in circles, but that’s all I’ve been doing since trying everything possible to transfer a playlist that doesn’t read empty using Ubuntu.

At least now I know about Rockbox and can keep my fingers crossed that it will soon be here. I only paid $40 for my unit off ebay. Now I know why. On the other hand, I have a Creative Nomad Jukebox that cost about $400 way back when. As clunky as it is, it’s less annoying than the Fuze+ in some ways.

Firmware will probably have to reach 5.5+ before this forum reflects happy, smiling users.

fuze+ only handles m3u(8) playlists if all the files are in one folder. .pla playlists work as expected. I don’t know how you’d make them on Ubuntu.

RB is here and still unstabe but I’ve been using it for days now fine.

I was banging my head against the wall with playlists.

PROBLEM:

Using Ubuntu with m3u files produced an empty playlist no matter what I did.

SOLUTION:

Booted into Windows, used WMP to create a playlist, I now know how to make playlists work.

OPINION:

Fuze+ is okay once you figure out how to use it. I think it’s confusing and clunky, but it works. For $40, there’s not much to complain about at this point. Looking forward to firmware updates or Rockbox to make it seamless with Linux. If you’re 100% Linux and you want playlists, you’re probably out-of-luck for now. If you beg to differ, please, tell me your secret.

Okay, so it’s reported that .pla files will work.

Hopefully this will eliminate the need to use WMP.

sudo apt-get install fapg

manpage
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/intrepid/man1/fapg.1.html

example
Generate a playlist that will work on a Sansa e200 series  MP3  player:
       fapg -f pla -o /path/to/playlist.pla /path/to/all/music

Right now i have seen - that development of rockbox: http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaFuzePlusPort has been improved a lot since the last time… hopefully they’ll setup a good firmware!!!

Had a 16gb Fuze + for two days. Loaded some music, podcasts, and a few videos. (MSC mode)

Updated to firmware 02.38.06. After the firmware update my podcast folder seems to have ended up with duplicates of all the podcasts that were on the Fuze+ before the update. Notice PODCASTS had changed to BOOKS after the firmware update, don’t know if this somehow caused the duplication.

Now I am concerned the file structure might be a bit wonky. Is a Format the best way to set things back to a more pristine state?

@dhartsoc wrote:

 

Now I am concerned the file structure might be a bit wonky. Is a Format the best way to set things back to a more pristine state?

Yep. Then you can re-load everything.

Reformatting AND also reloading the firmware believe it or not does NOT technicaly

restore your device to stock original states. I confirmed this by dumping the filesystem databases

before AND after firmware upgrade + reformat and reset settings

and using a comparison tool i could see TONS of references to content i had put on in the past…

And to the guy talking about the playlists earlier,

I coded a program that can do a bunch of things to the Fuze+

one of them is it can read what formats it supports

and i can see that the only format for playlist that returns “supported” (through the MTP api)

is .m3u playlists.

So,

WMDM_FORMATCODE_WPLPLAYLIST, “WPL Playlist” = NO
WMDM_FORMATCODE_M3UPLAYLIST, “M3U Playlist” = YES Supported
WMDM_FORMATCODE_MPLPLAYLIST, “MPL Playlist” = NO
WMDM_FORMATCODE_ASXPLAYLIST, “ASX Playlist” = NO
WMDM_FORMATCODE_PLSPLAYLIST, “PLS Playlist” = NO

WMDM_FORMATCODE_ABSTRACTAUDIOVIDEOPLAYLIST, “Abstract AudioVideo Playlist” YES Supported

@xpmule wrote:

Reformatting AND also reloading the firmware believe it or not does NOT technicaly

restore your device to stock original states.

It probably doesn’t overwrite all of the stuff on the firmware partition. I guess you might have to clear that from recovery mode using the imxtools, or just wait for the sandisk software to clear up its old database on its own.

I think I’ll take a wait and see approach. The Fuze+ is functioning properly. It just seems some confluence of the firmware update and re-indexing caused the podcast and video files to be duplicated, maybe even tripled in some instances.The music files seem to be unscathed. May I ask how many firmware updates has Sandisk done for the Fuze+? After applying 2.38.06 the functionality seemed quite an improvement over the stock Fuze+ .

i meant the database files not the partition eh but i think the concept is the same…

basicly just like a hard drive flag’s things for deletion but they still exist until actualy overwritten

so i’m guessing the index’s for Fuze+ content are sorta like an MFT record / HDD type of system ?

I dont think any method does a very good job at restoring the device to factory defaults

You’d think if you selected reformat it would be reformatted like on a hard drive but…

I thought it was interesting for a privacy point of view

you could then see what people are loading on their player no matter what they do lol

EDIT:

I wanted to make another comment regarding the playlists…

I posted info i found nothing more. I don’t use playlists and have NOT tested any playlist formats,

so i don’t really know what will or won’t work

@xpmule wrote:

i meant the database files not the partition eh but i think the concept is the same…

 

basicly just like a hard drive flag’s things for deletion but they still exist until actualy overwritten

 

so i’m guessing the index’s for Fuze+ content are sorta like an MFT record

In MTP mode you don’t have access to the underlying file system, so its not really like file table. Instead you’re just asking the software for a list of the files it thinks it has. Until it goes through and rescans its files, the results you get might be out of date. I suspect just copying a few files in MSC mode and then rebooting into MTP mode will be enough to force a rescan, although I’m not sure how smart the sandisk software is about it. Its possible it also needs to be synced to software like WMP first too.

@xpmule wrote:

You’d think if you selected reformat it would be reformatted like on a hard drive but…

Reformatting a partition does exactly what you would expect: erase that partition. It doesn’t reset all the info on the drive though because there is more then 1 partition, and not all of them are exposed in MTP or MSC mode. I think the only way to get access to the hidden ones is with third party software like rockbox, or using the recovery mode + imxtools. This is intentional, the firmware tries to prevent you from messing with its internals by preventing USB access.

My main point was that if data that is indexed is not removed through any method THAT in itself

could potentialy be a problem…

Imagine you had files on your hard drive that would never be removed no matter what you did etc

You get what im driving at ?

I think there is a misconception around here that restoring to factory defaults

does exactly that when in fact it does NOT

That i was trying to point out for people having issues.

I can’t be the only one that noticed this…

Anyway i have no idea what imxtools is, sounds interesting

It has been so long since  the last firmware updated, I am starting to wonder if SanDisk is working on frimware updates or features.  It could be that what we have is all we are going to get.

1 Like