Some issues/bugs I've found with the CJ

The battery on my old Clip+ finally gave out so I replaced it with a Clip Jam.  Here are some issues I’ve had.  Dunno if this is a useful place to post them, but here they are anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m using the newest firmware (1.05)

  1. Truncated Artist/Album names: With many mp3s, especially old ones that I’ve had since I ripped all my CDs about 10 years ago, the tracks will show up on the player but the artist name and/or album title will be truncated to 12 characters.  This causes lots of problems like multiple entries for the same artist (one with the full name and one with the first 12 letters) or albums being merged into one if their first 12 letters are the same etc.

I was able to work around the issue with effort.  Blanking out unnecessary metadata fields in the file properties or in Mp3tag fixed a small number of them, but in general what I needed to do was strip out the metadata completely with Id3kill and add the artist/album/title/track info back in with Mp3tag.  Quite annoying and time consuming.

These were all files I copied over directly from my Clip+, which never had this problem.  I could understand if the files were in a format that wasn’t supported anymore, but then the player wouldn’t be able to see the artist/album info at all, right?

  1. All album titles seem to be limited to 26 characters, so any albums with titles that only differ after the 26th character will be merged into one unless you abbreviate them somehow.  The Clip+ didn’t have this problem.

  2. The power can be turned off in the normal way when the player is locked, so while it won’t skip songs when other things in your pocket hit the buttons, it will turn itself off.  It behaved like that on the Clip+ too, but the power button on the Clip+ was much harder to press accidentally.  I think locking should disable the power button too.

  3. Please merge the songs on the internal memory and the songs on the microsd card into one list like it used to be.  It makes no sense to separate them.  At least make it optional.

  4. Tiny annoyance that maybe only I care about: The “Play All” from the Clip+ was replaced by “Shuffle” on top of the various listings, but since Shuffle is an option in the Music Settings anyway, this doesn’t add any functionality and actually removes the ability to play all files in order.

Great comments and thoughts.  Having said that, I think it unlikely (although not impossible) that SanDisk will change anything, given the player’s unfortunate hardware and related firmware limitations and apparently SanDisk’s decision just to “live with it” and that it’s just “good enough.”    :frowning:

Number 5 is incredibly annoying for me. I would like to arrange my folders by music style, so that i can listen to groups of shuffled folders.

Do you know of any other mp3 players that supports this?

Best Regards, Ulrik Christiansen

There is a way to shuffle multiple sub-folders under the Music Folder using Playlists. I think this method may work even without careful curation of your ID3 tags. And without ID3 tags you will likely be guaranteed of a shuffled playback.

This suggestion is based on installing the software “mp3tag” on your PC. 

      http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html     And using Windows File Exploret to copy audio folders from your PC.

Briefly:

  1. Create a new subfolder under Music in your CJ (or in the micro SD card).

  2. Name this subfolder “Genre-A”  (or anything you want).

  3. Copy a few subfolders of audio files into the Genre-A subfolder.

4. Right-click on the Genre-A subfolder and select “mp3tag”

  1. In the File menu of Mp3tag, select Playlist (all files).

  2. Save your new playlist in the Genre-A subfolder with the filename Genre-A.m3u.

  3. Eject your player from the USB connection.

  4. Use the Music Mode (or Card Mode) on your CJ to access the Genre-A Playlist. 

  5. You can access the Shuffle On/Off command from the Muisc Options SubMenu while a track is playing.

     You can access the Shuffle On/Off command from the Settings ->Music Options menu.

Please let us know if this method is possibly useful for you???

  (You probably already know that Folder Mode does not work for playlists).

Thank you very much :slight_smile: I will try this solution when I get some time tomorrow.

Best regards, Ulrik

Well, I was too late… my new clip died. No reaction - just wont start up anymore. Thanks for your reply, but I’ll see if I can return it and go with another player.

Best Regards, Ulrik

I experienced this a few times with my Clip Sport.

Assuming your CJ still has some charge, try pressing down on the “back” and “power” buttons at the same time for at least 30 secs.  IF this does not work,  try again while the device is connected to an A/C charger via the micro USB cable.

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Sometimes when I walk around with my clipjam in my pocket, it will turn itself on, and then drain my battery, something like a vibrator to signify it has turned itself on would be nice.

Sometimes when I do random things, i.e I tried to remove a song from a “golist” the screen will freeze and nothing I press will work to fix it. Inevitably, I often have to wait until it drains (Even though the screen is physically frozen, somehow the battery still updates) and then recharge it, so something like a killswitch would be nice.

If there are any physical fixes to the screen freezing, can somebody reply a way?