Clip+ hang/freeze at "refreshing media" with plug-in card

I have a Sansa Clip+ 4GB running 01.02.15A and over 500MB free.  When I turn it on without a flash card, it works great.  I have a 32GB flash card that worked in it when I had just a few files on it, but when I load it up with about 3500 files/10GB it gets about 1/4 way through the “Refreshing your media” bar and just hangs (minutes).  All the files read just fine on my computer.  What do I do next?  4GB is too small.

One or more of the 3500 files you put on the card is either corrupted or has bad (or wrong format) ID3 tags. When the player is attempting to compile its database and reaches one of those un-readable files (or tags) it stops, or hangs up.

Use a utility like MP3TAG to check your tags. Change the default ‘write’ setting to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1, and re-save all your files with that format of tag. It’s what your Clip+ is looking for. You should also run ChkDsk or Windows Error-Checking to look for (and fix) any corruption in those files.

Message Edited by Tapeworm on 07-03-2010 08:45 PM

Thanks, I will give it a try.

Can I request when a file has unrecognized tags the Clip+ does something other than hang?  Even just skipping the file (maybe marking it red in the file list) would be helpful.  “File tag?” and the name of the file (scrolling by) would be even more helpful.  Using the filename instead of the tag would also work.  I’m sure there’s a bunch of ways that would be more obvious to the user and take little more code than just hanging.

clippy wrote:

Can I request when a file has unrecognized tags the Clip+ does something other than hang?

 

Sure.

Doesn’t mean that anything will come of it though. :stuck_out_tongue:

Another possibility is to look at the card using the manage function in Windows, use the Check Volume For Errors option.  If there’s a glitch in the file allocation table of the card, this can also cause a hangup.

As the Sansa is an ID3 tag based life form, MP3Tag is your friend.  Sometimes, if the included jpg album art is too large, or has a corruption, the device can freeze during the database refresh.

Enjoy that monster-capacity card!

Bob :smileyvery-happy:

Thanks for everybody’s help.  It looks like tags in an unexpected format were part of the problem, and a flaky 32GB flash also part of the problem.  I’m using a 2GB flash while I wait for my SanDisk 16GB flash to arrive… I guess that will “learn me” for buying an off-brand flash.  With the 2GB flash and tagging converted to something that the Clip+ can understand, it no longer hangs when powered on.  16GB isn’t quite so “monster” as 32GB, but even 16GB will be pretty great.

I find MSWind’ohs difficult to use (tho’ MP3Tag seems fine) so I am happy to report Linux’s “eyeD3” seems to work also, even tho’ it does not let you specify as many details of the ID3 encoding.

I understand the Clip+ is an ID3 “life form”, but just hanging is bad programming!  The Clip+ has a nice big display, and could show “tag problem” and show the file name, or what not.  There’s other things about the Clip+ that are dumb, but I can easily work around – I can’t charge and listen at the same time, but at least I can figure out what to do. A hang caused by one of 3,500 files (or a few hundred with the 2GB card) is much harder to work out.

Thanks again for the help, folks.

clippy wrote:

The Clip+ has a nice big display . . .

Really? You think so? Maybe, if you have one of these ant-burners:

clippy wrote:

There’s other things about the Clip+ that are dumb, but I can easily work around – I can’t charge and listen at the same time . . .

Sure you can, just not while it’s plugged into your computer as it will always make a ‘data’ connection. You can use an AC-USB wall charger:

Smiley

By “big”, I meant “plenty of characters to display a message”.

Wall charger: I have one, but it is annoying to use since I don’t want to carry it around everywhere.  The whole point of a compact/portable player is convenience, right?  I often sit at a computer, it has a USB port, and I could charge and listen at the same time except SanDisk won’t let me. I recharge overnight, but that’s a hassle since I have to unpack the Clip+ at night and remember to pack it again the next morning.  It makes sense to me the Clip+ cannot transfer data and play at the same time, but for me, I’m not usually transferring data.  Maybe there is a power-only USB cable, but I have not found one yet.  I could go find the USB pinout and rip apart a USB cable and only solder up the power/ground connections, but I shouldn’t have to.

It’s annoying, it’s not critical.  It’s not as annoying as having the Clip+ hang because software got confused by (legal!) ID3 tags.

I got my 16GB SanDisk micro SDHC today and formatted it NTFS… 5.6GB transferred so far.

clippy wrote:

By “big”, I meant “plenty of characters to display a message”.

 

Wall charger: I have one, but it is annoying to use since I don’t want to carry it around everywhere.  The whole point of a compact/portable player is convenience, right?  I often sit at a computer, it has a USB port, and I could charge and listen at the same time except SanDisk won’t let me. I recharge overnight, but that’s a hassle since I have to unpack the Clip+ at night and remember to pack it again the next morning.  It makes sense to me the Clip+ cannot transfer data and play at the same time, but for me, I’m not usually transferring data.  Maybe there is a power-only USB cable, but I have not found one yet.  I could go find the USB pinout and rip apart a USB cable and only solder up the power/ground connections, but I shouldn’t have to.

 

It’s annoying, it’s not critical.  It’s not as annoying as having the Clip+ hang because software got confused by (legal!) ID3 tags.

 

I go t my 16GB SanDisk micro SDHC today and formatted it NTFS…. 5.6GB transferred so far.

Why did you do that?

I just plugged my card into my card reader and started adding music on it right away. Back when I had my Fuze, I did the same thing with that card. 

>> my 16GB SanDisk micro SDHC today and formatted it NTFS

> Why did you do that?

I assume you mean: why format it NTFS?  NTFS should deal better in the long term with flash errors than FAT32.  It can do things like mark bad blocks and not reuse them.  In theory, part of the automatic wear leveling in flash includes transparent remapping around some errors, but in practice some errors are still visible.  It’s all duplicates of files I have elsewhere, and I expect to play lots but write rarely, so this should be a minor detail… but lower visible error rates is better.

There’s various reasons to avoid NTFS including it only works on a few devices.  I am using the flash with only the Clip+ and the Linux box I use to fill it, so I do not need the wider range of devices that accept FAT32.  I was also using it with MSWindohs7 to set the ID3 tags, but I found a Linux program that gets close enough to the limited tag formats the Clip+ accepts the Clip+ no longer hangs.  If the Clip+ takes ext4 or ReiserFS or something, somebody please tell me, I’ll use that instead!

Another reason to avoid NTFS is you have to do a safe eject else you may corrupt the drive.  That’s fine for me.

In theory another reason to use NTFS is it also offers transparent file compression, but all my files are formatted .ogg, so I doubt the FS can find additional compression. NTFS should also have better small-file performance, but unless that includes small directories I don’t think I’ll see that.

clippy wrote:

By “big”, I meant “plenty of characters to display a message”.

 

Wall charger: I have one, but it is annoying to use since I don’t want to carry it around everywhere.  The whole point of a compact/portable player is convenience, right?  I often sit at a computer, it has a USB port, and I could charge and listen at the same time except SanDisk won’t let me. I recharge overnight, but that’s a hassle since I have to unpack the Clip+ at night and remember to pack it again the next morning.  It makes sense to me the Clip+ cannot transfer data and play at the same time, but for me, I’m not usually transferring data.  Maybe there is a power-only USB cable, but I have not found one yet.   I could go find the USB pinout and rip apart a USB cable and only solder up the power/ground connections, but I shouldn’t have to.

 

It’s annoying, it’s not critical.  It’s not as annoying as having the Clip+ hang because software got confused by (legal!) ID3 tags.

 

I got my 16GB SanDisk micro SDHC today and formatted it NTFS… 5.6GB transferred so far.

There’s a simple work-around for this. You can plug your Clip+ into your computer and play the contents through WMP, Winamp, Media Monkey or any number of other media players through the computer’s speakers while it is charging. It’s just that it will not play through the headphones while the data connection is active.

And if you don’t want to listen through the speakers, most computer speakers have a headphone jack on them as well. Just plug your headphones into that one instead of the one on the player.

Alternatively, if you gently plug your cable slowly into the USB port on your computer, and stop halfway your player will connect (and charge) but no data connection will be made, so your wish will be granted. :wink:

> play the contents through … the computer’s speakers while it is charging.

Ah, great idea!

 > plug your cable slowly into the USB port on your computer, and stop halfway

Cool, I will try that, too!

*Sigh* :frowning:

I was wrong about NTFS… it was not recognized by the Clip+.  I had just tried it with a few files on it and though they were not on the 4GB part, but I was wrong, nothing on NTFS was recognized.

I reformatted the MicroSD (SanDisk 16GB 2-grade) back to FAT32 and reloaded it.  Now it has odd behavior where everything on the 4GB part is recognized but it skips past everything on the FAT32 part.  “Skips” as in: it shows the name, but before it can play it, it jumps to the next track.  I deleted everything on the 4GB part, and it just skips endlessly, not playing any tracks at all.

I loaded it on an MSWin7 box and ran MP3TAG as indicated above, ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.  A few directories were apparently unwritable, not sure why, so I deleted them.  No improvement though.

 There, about 3300 files.  I gather some firmware versions have a 4,000-file limit, but it is well below that.

 It seems to work great no matter what I do with the 4GB part, but it seems to lose no matter what I do with the 16GB card, at least with what I have tried so far.

I moved everything that had been on the 4GB part – which I did not run through MP3TAG – over to to the 16GB card, it seems to work fine.

Following that as a clue, I just moved stuff over without using MP3TAG.  I tried after a few hundred files and it seems to be fine – meaning this time it actually plays stuff from the flash card, instead of hanging or silently ignoring it, or going in to some kind of crazy loop.

Now I’m guessing the original problem was a flaky off-brand card, rather than ID3 tag problems as somebody thought.  But I don’t understand why forcing the tags to ID3v2.3/ISO-8859-1 caused it to hang?  Or what to do in the future when it hangs?  Which seems like a foregone conclusion based on my experiences so far.

Anybody got suggestions?  It’s annoying that it fails, but it is especially annoying it fails and gives no clue what is the problem.