ReplayGain feature disables volume control, plays some songs REALLY LOUD

I recently got a Clip Sport, not realizing I was paying Best Buy to work for SanDisk as a beta tester.  If I don’t see some fixes soon, or I won’t be a Sansa user any more. 

My music collection is very large. Some of the songs have ReplayGain tags in them, and others don’t.  I don’t know which do or don’t.

Anyway, when I turn on ReplayGain in Song or Album mode, there are some songs it plays super loud.  Not only that, but the song stays that loud at all selected volume levels except for the lowest, where it goes silent.  There is literally no way to make it softer!  The System Settings/Volume/High/Normal settings also have no effect.

I can work around this by turning off ReplayGain, but then I have to mess with the volume control all through my workout. 

My guess is, it’s misbehaving on the songs that don’t have these tags.  The player needs to allow for this, adopt a sensible default, and allow you to adjust the volume for real.  This bug should be a very high priority for SanDisk, given the risk of hearing damage to its users.

If you are going to use ReplayGain, then you need to load music that has RG tags. I can shuffle through hundreds of songs and they all play at an equivalent volume, because all my music has RG tags. 

Hi there. I have the same issue here. I have all my music in flac analyzed using mediamonkey. I set the clip sport replaygain in song mode. When I played it, the one with -9.9 db analyzed in mediamonkey was playing so loud. There’s no replaygain info on the clip sport music options (clik down when playing).

I don’t believe replaygain works with FLAC files, only MP3.

Replaygain works with FLAC files in mediamonkey, all songs have the same volume. But not in the clip sport.

I just ran into this problem as well.  The Clip Sport is the most half-baked MP3 player I’ve ever seen.  Between being unable to control playback volume on some of my music files and playing albums in alphabetical order (by title) rather than track order, it seems like SanDisk just doesn’t care at all about the quality of their products.

Firmware being worked on as we speak, to try to deal with at least some of the issues.

I think new firmware still do not support replaygain. What I did was I update my clip sport to the latest firmware version 1.17, then test some flac files with and without id3v2 tags but both analyzed using mediamonkey. With replaygain set at song mode, I don’t like the result due to some music plays so loud and some too low.

So I want to roll back the firmware, removed first sd card, then remove the version.sdk from main directory. Then check the firmware version still at 1.17. Then I tried restore options hoping to put it back to factory settings but firmware still at 1.17.

Right now I set the replaygain to off. And result was better.

Is there a way to roll back the firmware? I don’t know what will happen when  id3v2 tags removed and tried using old firmware. I did not test it before.

I don’t think there is any way to revert to the very first firmware on any Sandisk player. They don’t provide a copy of it to install.

After a long time, looks like I found a solution of playing flac files with different volume levels. I use JRiver of analyzing my files in PC. It takes longer compare to other pc music player like foobar or media monkey. Then I transfer the files to clip sport. The result is fantastic, I don’t have to press volume up and down all the time.