Just got a Clip Zip 4gb a couple of days ago as I wanted a player that works with Linux and FLAC support was a nice touch too. But already run into problems.
At first I tried loading just 2 or 3 songs and checked everything played ok. All good. Then decided to load about 2gb of music onto it but once disconnected from the computer it just freezes at the ‘Refreshing Your Media’ stage. I’m guessing its becuase of the large database of music with associated tags etc. But how long to leave it? Its been about an hour and a half now…
What’s more troublesome is I now cant do a thing with the player. Reset just causes the refreshing the media error when it turns back on so I can’t get into the menu to delete anything or format it. Connecting to a computer and it now doesn’t show up so I can’t access the device to format it or delete the music files that way either?
Any advice? I’m a bit miffed, heard nothing but good things about the device and yes ok, I loaded a lot of music at once but there should be some way out of this error. Sure a lot of people would drag and drop quite a lot of files rather than one at a time and it falls over like this? Surely im missing something obvious as this can’t be it.
Hanging up or freezing during the databae refresh on start-up is caused by the player not being able to parse, or read the ID3 tags of one or more of the files. It has nothing to do with the volume of files.
Things like the format of the tags not being what the player is expecting (ID2v2.3 ISO-8859-1), large embedded cover art, strange or foreign characters, or other extraneous and useless infomation in the tags will cause this.
The overwhelmingly recommended ID3 tag editor in MP3Tag. You mention using Linux, so I assume you are using a different program. A popular one is EasyTag, but note this likes to write v2.4 tags by default. You have to change the settings so it won’t do this, and write v2.3 instead.
Thanks for the tips.
The main problem I was having was that I couldn’t get actually into the player or the files to do anything about them. Computer wouldn’t recognise it and player would always loop into the refreshing media message. I found the solution in the end whilst reading up on something else - connecting the player to the computer whilst holding the select button down.
I then proceeded to do a complete wipe, reformat and install latest firmware. Still a ton of problems even following the tagging tips. (My music library had already been properly tagged with correct ISO v2.3 as I went through all that setting up a media server for my HTPC but i did double check with no success). Anymore than 10 or so songs put on at a time and it just went the same way, even stripping any embedded artwork out. On top of that any old .mp4s I had left over from Windows days that I had ripped in iTunes wouldn’t play either; they would either freeze the player or just play garbled sound.
In the end about 5 mins installing Rockbox on it instead and everything works fine no matter tags/artwork or filetype.
Its a nice player and perfect size and storage for my needs but unfortunately it doesn’t look like the software side is fit for purpose out of the box.
Not sure to mark this solved or not? Correct tags and stripping the artwork didn’t clear the problem only installing a third party firmware did. Not sure that would be acceptable to everyone.
Thanks for the reply though, nice to know there seems to be a dedicated bunch looking out for the product.
