Formatting the Fuze

Hi everyone.  I am a little confused with the Format command. I just bought a sansa fuze and it has music on it that I don’t want.  If I format it, will just the music be deleted or will all the other info also be deleted like the headings music, settings, etc …

Or is that stuff part of a bios chip of some sort?

Also, Is there a way to transfer all of the music on my old c250 directly to the new fuze by plugging them both into the computer usb?

Which program works best with the fuze?  I have Media Monkey Gold, but it never played any of the music on the old c250 even though it would transfer from my PC to the 250 ok, it just couldn’t play the music files. ( in either mode)  Winamp did play the files, but it had more module windows than I liked and I’m still willing to buy a good software.  I tried the Magix software on my old 250 but that couldn’t play the music either… I don’t really understand all this well and hoped someone could help.

thanks in advance.

OK, one at a time.

Formatting only deletes content. It won’t affect the firmware that shows you Music, Settings, etc. It’s stashed away somewhere safe on the Fuze.

About your C250 music the answer is: it depends. Some music files have codes built in that prevent you from copying it further or moving it around. Some don’t. If, for instance, you ripped the files from CDs with Windows Media Player, it might have “protected” them unless you specifically told it not to. I fear that might be the case with your C250.

But if Winamp would play them…hmmm…that’s interesting.

Do you already have copies of the C250 music on your computer? It’s always good to have a backup somewhere in case your player has problems. Otherwise, yes, you can copy the files directly. Just find them on the C250–keep clicking deeper and deeper in various folders until you find them. You might have to try both MTP and MSC mode–your computer can only see one at a time.

I’d suggest just copy-and-pasting the songs onto your computer or a hard drive so you have a backup, but you can also just copy-and-paste them onto the Fuze if you’ve got two USB ports.

Don’t use any music-library software for the moment. You don’t need any. 

Put the Fuze in MSC mode (Settings/System Settings/USB Mode), find your files either on the C250 or your computer,  and copy-and-paste them onto the Fuze.  For starters, you might want to just do one album to experiment with.

If you see a Music folder, you can throw it in there, or you can make your own folder, or you can just throw it onto the driveletter. (Just don’t put it into Photos, Temp or Audiobooks, which are treated differently.) Try to play it after you disconnect.

MSC looks like any other hard drive to your computer.  This is a beautiful thing because you don’t need any software as a middleman. You can deal with your music files directly. Music-library software like Winamp, Media Monkey, etc. are useful for things like playlists, ripping CDs, etc., but they are not  essential. 


Did the music play on the Fuze? If not…then there are some tangles.

We have to figure out what kind of files they are. There are a lot of different kinds of music files, and the Fuze plays most of them. Your Windows is set by default to “Hide extensions of known file types,” and we need to see those extensions go to Help and search for “hide extensions.” Or if you’re in XP, here are some instructions I found.

http://www.fileinfo.com/help/windows_show_extensions

Now your songs will have an extension like .mp3, .wma, etc.  If it’s .wma, right-click on one and see if a box is checked saying it’s “protected.” Let’s hope not, because that means it’s protected from you. Those files do need a middleman, and they prefer to have the Fuze in MTP mode. You’d want to send them over with the Fuze in MTP and Windows Media Player sending them, because it will also send the hidden codes to unlock them.

Mp3 should just play if you cut-and-paste it.

Try an album and let us know what happens.

Thanks for the reply.  I’ve been playing around with the Fuze now for an hour or so.  I tried all the modes and none will play on MM from the Fuze.  I don’t believe any of these are copy protected. ( Yes I have all the music on my PC and are mp3 files)

Anyway, here is what happens.  The Fuze is set to Automatic when these results occur.  I chose a song from my hard drive and sent it to MM prior to doing the following.

Plug Fuze into my computer, open MMonkey and it shows the Fuze.  Expand the folder heirarchy and it shows the location of an mp3 file which, when clicked on shows up on the right side of the MM list. 

If I click on it to play, it sort of greys out and nothing happens.  If I right click on it, select properties, it shows as an mp3 file but … with no bitrate information or any stereo information shown.

I close MM and open WMP.  Select file open and navigate to the same mp3 file. Interestingly, when I click on the folder while in Windows Media Player while the file type choices are all media files, nothing shows up in the file window.  I change the file type filter to “all files” and it shows up with an extension of mp3. Choose properties and same thing no information shown for bitrate or stereo / mono.  But … when double clicked it plays in WMP.

Now the most interesting thing.  I close WMP, and simply open Windows Explorer, navigate to the mp3 on the Fuze, right click it and select properties, bit rate shows 0 and no info for stereo.

Double click on the file from Windows Explorer, and very quickly a Windows “window” opens, (the one with the flashlight scanning back and forth) so quickly but it says copying to … C:\ blah blah temp folder, and then it plays via WMP.

EDIT again … more interesting new info.  I just downloaded Songbird.  During install it asks if you would like support for mtp and msc and I said yes.  It plays all the fuzes files.  But … if I right click on one of them, I have an option in the songbird program to “show file” and guess what … it is showing up in my TEMP folder on my C: drive. 

It’s all smoke and mirrors I tell ya … all smoke and mirrors.

For what it’s worth, I decided to open my Adobe Premiere program and bring this mp3 file in to check its properties.  Adobe lists all the information perfectly.

It’s nice to have the luxury of being able to listen to songs in your Media player so you can hear the song, identify it, and adjust the tag info if needed.  Just seems strange that this is a problem at all.

BTW, when I change to MSC mode MMonkey lists the Fuze, I can click on the + sign to expand the folders, each are listed, but when I click on a folder nothing is shown in it.

IMO these kinds of things should be easily addressed behind the scenes in the programs programming code and it should be vanilla to us (speaking for myself) dumb end users.  :slight_smile:

Automatic will choose MTP mode if you have WMP 10 or above on your computer. So you are in MTP mode. Since you can see the files, that means they were placed on the unit in MTP mode.

The idea is to make it ■■■■■-proof, to have everyone use WMP and have it work with the Fuze the way iTunes works with iPod. Unfortunately it’s not quite that smooth.

There’s a reason for that. iTunes is in a closed universe where all the devices are made by Apple. Windows Media Player has to grapple with far more different pieces of hardware, and so it is glitchier.

mp3 files should play on anything, and I don’t understand why they are not being played by MM or anything else unless WMP and the MTP interface are getting in the way.

But you should still be able to find the mp3 files on the C250, copy them to your computer or hard drive, and play them with anything: Winamp, MM, anything.

And if you want to start over with the Fuze, you could.  Format the Fuze to clean it off. Put the Fuze in MSC mode so there’s no extra layer of MTP and WMP messing with the files. Copy the mp3s from your computer onto the unit in MSC. Then try and play them from your computer players while connected. . It should work.

A little more. It looks like Windows Media Player is set as your default mp3 player. You can change that. Right-click on the file, Open With…, choose another program, set it as default.

Thanks for the reply.  A lot to learn and understand.  Now if I format and start fresh in MSC mode and copy from explorer to fuze I’m curious about one other thing.

In MMonkey, I scanned my hard drive library for track volume.  If I don’t use MM to import to the fuze do I now have no volume information available for replay gain?

You can use Media Monkey in MSC mode, sync with it, playlist, etc.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/About_MediaMonkey

I know very little about Replay Gain. But if I understand correctly the part about Media Monkey here:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=ReplayGain

then MMonkey  writes the Replay Gain information into the tags of the files themselves. So I would think you could do the Replay Gain thing with MMonkey, and then copy-paste the files via Windows Explorer or via MMonkey.

By the way, you mentioned Winamp. You can just make the unwanted modules (like EQ, Media Library and Video for me) disappear by right-clicking on the top of the window and un-checking them