Sansa Clip+ SD Card issues

I recently got an 8gig Sansa Clip+ and a Sandisk 32gb microSD card. It was working fine for a while, but I began to have issues with adding songs on the card–the player would detect them and play them, but it was displaying my overall song total as going DOWN when I added new stuff.

So I reformatted the player to see if it would fix the issue, currently I’ve been loading all my mp3s on the microSD card rather than the player itself, and I put about 10 gigs of stuff on there before it started freaking out again. The two chief issues are this:

  1. Once again, it started displaying the wrong quantity of songs on it. I had 5225 on it and then I added about 20 more and the song total went DOWN to 5218.

  2. The player suddenly refuses to recognize ANY new songs I put on the microSD card. They don’t show up anywhere on the player, but a quick check of the card confirms the songs are on there. I transferred these mp3s to the player itself and they work fine now, but once again going back to issue 1, the total song count under Play All has not changed to reflect the new tracks.

I haven’t tried to reformat the microSD card yet, but other than trying that, I have no idea what else I can do. Has anyone else run into this issue before?

The answer is simple actually. You’ve hit the database limitation. While officially, it’s 8,000 tracks, that number is dependent on a lot of variables, such as length of titles, embedded album art, number of characters in ID3 tag fields, and so on.

Realistically though, we’ve heard from many others who hit this ceiling at, or around 5,000 tracks like you. Yes, you could go through and edit/clean up your tags and maybe eek out a few hundred more, but I doubt it will make any signifigant improvment. The only way around the issue is to use Rockbox (3rd-party, alternative, open-source) firmware, but that can be technologically challenging for some people.

If you think Rockbox is something you’d like to try, you can click on the link and read all about it. There are a lot of other features and enhancements it offers over the original firmware but as I cautioned, there is a learning curve and it is not for everybody.

Interesting, so even if I had a completely full 32gb card in the microSD slot, the player wouldn’t be able to queue all the songs? Is this because of the inherent 8gb threshold on the player itself?

I had heard about Rockbox before and I think I’m gonna look into it, thanks a lot for the help!

@greliz wrote:

Interesting, so even if I had a completely full 32gb card in the microSD slot, the player wouldn’t be able to queue all the songs? Is this because of the inherent 8gb threshold on the player itself?

 

I had heard about Rockbox before and I think I’m gonna look into it, thanks a lot for the help!

Sandisk doesn’t allocate enough memory to cover more then about 5000 database entries, probably because they figured no one would want to use their players with big SD cards.

@greliz wrote:

Interesting, so even if I had a completely full 32gb card in the microSD slot, the player wouldn’t be able to queue all the songs? Is this because of the inherent 8gb threshold on the player itself?

 

I had heard about Rockbox before and I think I’m gonna look into it, thanks a lot for the help!

It doesn’t have anything to do with either the memory card or internal memory size of the player. It has to do with how many tracks there are in total; doesn’t matter where they are. As I said, it is a “database” limitation in the original firmware.

On a positive note though, this is much higher than the Fuze’s predecessor, the e200 series. The database limit on those machines were 2,000. Guess I should consider myslef lucky; I’ve got 3265 tracks with no issues on one of my 8GB ones with a 16GB card running original firmware.