SLOW at "Refreshing your media"?

I’ve got an 8GB MicroSD card in my 2GB Clip+ and It’s about 75% full. It takes anywhere from 10-15 minutes to refresh media once I unplug it (after adding songs, etc). I use mp3tag to eliminate every single tag from my songs except for Artist, Title and Album.

I’ve read about doing a chkdsk, or formatting the clip but haven’t tried those yet.

Is there any way I can get the refreshing to go (a lot) quicker?

This should take far less time than what you are experiencing. How many files (tracks) do you have? Are the ID3 tags ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 format?

Yes, I use mp3tag to make sure I’m only tagging them with Artist/Title/Album in ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 format. Also, there are about 1,800 songs on the card (8GB card), none of them on the clip itself.

I’ve tried to download the Sansa Updater to ensure that I’ve got the latest firmware, but when I try and run it, the program does not run. Maybe I should format the device and then put some more media on it…

Does anyone have any suggestions that I might be missing?

Just as easy to manually update when new firmware comes out, and then the Updater isn’t sitting there all the time using computer resources.  See the firmware upgrade sticky thread at the top of the forum for instructions and the latest firmware. 

Does anyone have any tips on how I could make this database refresh go quicker? I’ve got all the files tagged in the proper format, with only artist/title and album fields (and every song has an album name of mp3 - from when I used to have an old clip and the album name came up on the display)

Should I maybe remove the album field? I have about 1500 songs with the same album name.

"I have about 1500 songs with the same album name.’

That is probably why the database refresh takes so long. To get the files in the album in order, it is doing a huge amount of sorting. I suggest that you try keeping the number of songs with the same album tag to a relatively small number.

I guess you could remove the album tag, but a better idea is probably to change the album tag, so you have for example 50 different album tags each with 30 songs.

Maybe I’ll try and actually put the correct albums for the tags - though that would be a pain in the butt. I removed the Album field and it still took forever to sort them (because the album was ‘Unknown’). If I get around to it, I will definitely report back and post the results.

Yeah it takes a very, very, very, very, very long time when you have many songs.:angry:  I don’t know why Sansa doesn’t do this in the background.:wink:

I added a 16GB micro SD to my Sansa Clip. So, I have 24GB of memory.  It may take an hour for it to “Refreshing Your Media” (I just filled up the 16GB and I’ve already been waiting over 30 minutes).  I hope the OS responds, or I’ll have to wait till the battery dies.

I found the best solution is to put Rockbox on your Sansa Player (this may void the warranty).  Rockbox has many more capabilties and it updates the database in the background.  You can “dual boot” into Sansa OS by holding down the left arrow while turning on the power, or just turn on the power and boot to Rockbox.

@rockboxuser wrote:

 

I added a 16GB micro SD to my Sansa Clip. So, I have 24GB of memory.  It may take an hour for it to “Refreshing Your Media” (I just filled up the 16GB and I’ve already been waiting over 30 minutes).  I hope the OS responds, or I’ll have to wait till the battery dies.

 

If the player is truly in a “frozen” state (not just appearing to be frozen while it updates the database), you don’t have to wait for the battery to go dead. Press and hold the power button for 20-30 seconds. This will force your Sansa to reset and shut down (it may shut down after a few seconds, but keep pressing the button for the allotted time to ensure that it actually resets.)

@rockboxuser wrote:

 

I added a 16GB micro SD to my Sansa Clip. So, I have 24GB of memory.  It may take an hour for it to “Refreshing Your Media” (I just filled up the 16GB and I’ve already been waiting over 30 minutes).  I hope the OS responds, or I’ll have to wait till the battery dies.

 

If it takes more than 5-8 min. max, there’s something wrong. Most likely something with the ID3 tags.

@tapeworm wrote:


 

If it takes more than 5-8 min. max, there’s something wrong. Most likely something with the ID3 tags.

What exactly is a ‘good’ ID3 tag for a Clip+ to be able to refresh the database at a reasonable speed?

I have around 6200 MP3s on a 32Gb card which took 2 hours to refresh on MSC mode leaving my fully charged Clip+ with about 20-30 minutes of playtime. Just what I want from an MP3 player.

Another forum thread recommended using MTP mode as the refresh is ‘much faster’ although in practice it’s looking like it’s still going to take ages (15 mins to get to the ‘u’ in ‘your media’, and about 25 mins to get to the ‘r’).

I have converted all the MP3 tags to APEv2 (IDE3v IDE3v2.3 APEv2) using MP3 Tag already and have the Artist, Title, Album and Album Art (200x200) fields filled.

I’ve tried Rockbox and it’s great that it loads quickly, however it doesn’t load the database and complains about a lack of memory when I ask it to refresh the database. If I open the card directly under the folder view I can see a total of 1000 tracks.

This is seriously getting on my nerves. If SanDisk think that I want to spend my time charging my Clip+ so I can watch it refresh, or load my 32Gb card one album at a time to find a ‘rogue’ file, then they have rocks in their heads. Likewise, if there is a tagging issue which can be easily corrected then someone at SanDisk needs to either write some decent firmware - yes, I have the most recent OF on board - or provide a clear set of instructions on the forum for anyone to find which explains exactly what tags their Clip+ firmware likes to work with.

Any help appreciated. Thanks.

What Class is your card?  I have a Patriot 32GB Class 4 microSD card pretty much full (I don’t have the player in front of me, but I’m guessing that there are 4000+ songs/files on it) and my refresh time is around 1/2 an hour or less, if I recall correctly. 

I’m not familiar with APE tags–I just use the good old standard under MP3Tag, I believe it’s ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 that plays well with the Clips. 

My hunch is, the APE tags may be causing the slowdown.  You could try some experimenting, with a handful of files using APE and non-APE tags, and see if that’s it. 

Do keep us advised.

The APEv2 tags are created when one uses MP3Gain to normalize the volume. Kinda like ReplayGain. All my .mp3 files get run through this when they’re ripped just after the tags get edited in MP3Tag.

I have no problem with slow refreshes, but then I don’t have anywhere near 6,000 tracks either. One thing that could be slowing it down is the embedded album art in each tag. I use 1 image (album art.jpg) in each album folder for all tracks.

Thanks for these replies so far. The card is a shiny new SanDisk Class 4 (which is the (4) written on the card, right?).

I’ll look again at the tags and see if they can be modified to make an improvement.

Cheers all.

@rockboxuser wrote:

Yeah it takes a very, very, very, very, very long time when you have many songs.:angry:  I don’t know why Sansa doesn’t do this in the background.:wink:

 

I added a 16GB micro SD to my Sansa Clip. So, I have 24GB of memory.  It may take an hour for it to “Refreshing Your Media” (I just filled up the 16GB and I’ve already been waiting over 30 minutes).  I hope the OS responds, or I’ll have to wait till the battery dies.

 

I found the best solution is to put Rockbox on your Sansa Player (this may void the warranty).  Rockbox has many more capabilties and it updates the database in the background.  You can “dual boot” into Sansa OS by holding down the left arrow while turning on the power, or just turn on the power and boot to Rockbox.

I’m curious about what you wrote here. I have just put Rockbox on and my Clip is just refreshing the media every time I plug it in to my pc and take it out, this isn’t happening in the background. When I plug it in it turns on in Sansa firmware mode, not rockbox so presumably this is why it doesn’t refresh in the background. 

How can I set it up so it turns on in rockbox mode when I plug it in to my pc? 

Just for comparison, I timed my player’s refresh over the weekend when I was adding and deleting a small number of songs onto and off of my microSD card, and the refresh took 35 minutes with an almost full 8GB player with almost full 32 GB microSD card (Class 4; manufacturer Patriot).

So I’m about to time my Clip+ refresh time…an 8GB model with only 17.5MB free on the internal, and a 16GB card with 1.48GB free…I’m going to use the stopwatch on my iPod Touch to time it.:stuck_out_tongue:

And the time is…two minutes, fifty-one seconds. 1,697 songs, of which 671 are on the 16GB card (lots of long songs) and 1,026 on the internal memory, and all the songs are MP3.:smileyvery-happy:

@marvin_martian wrote:

So I’m about to time my Clip+ refresh time…an 8GB model with only 17.5MB free on the internal, and a 16GB card with 1.48GB free…I’m going to use the stopwatch on my iPod Touch to time it.:stuck_out_tongue:

 

And the time is…two minutes, fifty-one seconds. 1,697 songs, of which 671 are on the 16GB card (lots of long songs) and 1,026 on the internal memory, and all the songs are MP3.:smileyvery-happy:

Is that in iTime or real time? :stuck_out_tongue:

@tapeworm wrote:


@marvin_martian wrote:

So I’m about to time my Clip+ refresh time…an 8GB model with only 17.5MB free on the internal, and a 16GB card with 1.48GB free…I’m going to use the stopwatch on my iPod Touch to time it.:stuck_out_tongue:

 

And the time is…two minutes, fifty-one seconds. 1,697 songs, of which 671 are on the 16GB card (lots of long songs) and 1,026 on the internal memory, and all the songs are MP3.:smileyvery-happy:


Is that in iTime or real time? :stuck_out_tongue:

They are one and the same.:stuck_out_tongue: