After Six Months, Fuze Decides it Doesn't Like Certain Songs.

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
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I’ve already sent one player back to amazon for this. This first player was fine for a while, but then suddenly stopped working, and the second has the same issue. I’m fairly sure what’s changed is what I’m putting on the player, and not the player itself, so perhaps it’s something I can fix? On startup the player whites out, freezes, or whites out then reboots and freezes. This is while it’s trying to make the database. If I choose songs that I encoded before a certain date (I can’t be completely sure of this, I have a massive library of stuff and anything could be causing the issue) it seems to work much better. The issue started about 2 or so months back, I’ve accumulated about 30 or so records that I can’t really practically listen to. I’m at uni and without a CD player, plus it’d be nice to have it working when I walk into campus.

I’m guessing that my wierd encoding setup, which previously worked fine, is to blame. I encode in vorbis using Max a nice freeware encoder for OS X that supports pretty much everything, and never outputs skips or errors. Maybe I updated it around the same time, and it started making the tags a little bit wierder than the player could handle? For the record, these songs all play fine on my computer; VLC, Songbird, and Quicktime (with plugins. I’m going to try and convert all the tags to an earlier, widely supported version and see if that helps. In the meantime, has anyone else had similar issues? Throw some ideas out there, any will do.

I’d also like to draw attention, pointless as it may be, to the fact that I got it replaced by Amazon and not Sansa. I tried to make a warranty claim with the latter, which basically involved them e-mailing me with poor grammar, explaining diagnostic steps I’d already thought of and tried five times. If someone e-mails to make a warranty claim, they are not asking for a troubleshooting service. I sent an e-mail off to Amazon, they sent one back the next day saying they’d replace it.

Thank you all for your time

Message Edited by Liamness on 10-27-2009 04:21 PM

Message Edited by Liamness on 10-27-2009 04:22 PM

Message Edited by Liamness on 10-27-2009 04:22 PM

Message Edited by Liamness on 10-27-2009 04:23 PM

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Right, poring through the tags seems to suggest that all the problem tracks were encoded in Max 0.9.1, as opposed to Max 0.8.1 and I’ve given the main developer of it a bell to see if he’s got any insight. They’re still standard ogg files that play in everything else though, so I’m really scratching my head as to why on earth this would be the case.

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Your computer has a lot more processing power than the Sansa and can handle a lot more variant tags, encodings and file types.  However, it’s considerably more difficult to put the Mac in your pocket.

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That was probably in good faith, but spectacularly useless all the same.

Fixed; it doesn’t like the extra musicbrainz tags added in 0.9.1, or maybe it just doesn’t like having over a certain number of tags. Anyway, albums that weren’t working before are working now. Sorry for bothering you all.