Fuze locks up with two mp3s

I have two mp3 files that lockup the 8GB Fuze whenever I try to play them. I bought them both from the Amazon music store. Don’t laugh, I’m old :slight_smile:

04 - No Sleep Till Brooklyn [Explicit] - Beastie Boys - Solid Gold Hits [Explicit]

15 - Fight For Your Right [Explicit] - Beastie Boys - Solid Gold Hits [Explicit]

Amazon Link:

I re-downloaded the files to rule out corruption and the new ones didn’t play either. They play fine in WMP 11 as well as my c250. 

Vista x64 SP1

WMP 11

Sansa Fuze firmware 01.01.11A

Message Edited by denzilla on 04-04-2008 02:58 PM

Hi Denzilla,

I suspect that the mp3 you’re trying to play is variable bitrate mp3.  The fuze does not support it. 

If you have Winamp, you can check this very easily. Play the song with winamp and you can see the “kbps” area flutuate numbers.

You’re correct that those particular mp3s are variable bit rate BUT I have other vbr mp3s that do play fine on the Fuze, so it must support them. As long as vbr mp3s have been around, I would be shocked if it wasn’t compatable with them. I’m not the only one buying music from Amazon, so there will be alot of angry Fuze customers if it has a problem with vbr files.

Question still stands, Im afraid :frowning:

This issue is quite interesting.  By support, I don’t necessarily mean the device can’t handle it, but that actual Sansa do not support (provide troubleshooting / fixes for). 

You can think of it as a cable service (by example).  Suppose you got a sports cable package and you can only watch sports channel, but by some fluke, you were able to get the movie channels too.  Now if you call into the cable company and tell them your movie channel wasn’t working properly and you wanted them to fix it, they will notice that you weren’t suppose to get that channel in the first place. so the question is … . don’t offer help to you and let you keep your free channel? or strip you from having that channel at all.

I sometimes wonder about this, because VBR does work (in rare cases) with my fuze. most mono encoded VBR plays at double speed, but I’ll just convert my mp3s to CBR (since I prefer my collection to be in CBR anyways).   However, it maybe possible that sansa does not intend to support VBR anytime soon . . . with that in mind, I wonder if they will just take it away completely.

VBR is supported on Fuze,  I suspect we might have an issue with the particular files, we will look into it.

I downloaded both tracks from Amazon.  They are MP3,  320KBPS not VBR.  They are playing fine on my Fuze.

Message Edited by sansafix on 04-07-2008 12:54 PM

What firmware are you using? Are you getting your bitrate info by what WMP is telling you? If so, then its wrong. Play them in WinAmp like what was suggested and you can clearly see the bitrate fluctuate.

I formated my player, reset it to factory defaults, resynced and it still will not play those files. That combined with the fact that I also re-downloaded those two files indicates the player is the problem.  I want to like this player so much but I keep finding new problems with it as the days go by. I didn’t purchase an mp3 player to play only some of my music.

Would another kind soul please try those files and post your firmware version?

Message Edited by denzilla on 04-07-2008 03:20 PM

I downloaded one of the songs “04 - No Sleep Till Brooklyn [Explicit].mp3” and winamp shows it as variable rate. I also got the device to freeze when playing the file. (firmware .11)

However, when I reconverted the song using mediacoder to both VBR and ABR rate, they played fine on the device without freeze.

Message Edited by thoma on 04-07-2008 03:48 PM

Thanks so much for your help :slight_smile:

I wonder if they’ll play in a Fuze using the older firmware? Since I didn’t play those files before flashing to the most current firmware release, I can’t say if its a bug in the new firmware or not.  You shouldn’t have to re-encode those files in order to play them. Either the files are corrupt in some way or the player has a glitch in its firmware. If its the files, then why would they play in my old Sansa c250 and also on my PC?

Message Edited by denzilla on 04-07-2008 03:54 PM

my firmware is the most recent release from the forum.  unsure as to what the problem is, but its just weird that the device would choose to play it after I reconverted it using lame codec.  maybe amazon is using something that wasn’t implemented into the Fuze, if it is suppose to support VBR.

If you’re using the lame to re-encode it, then its technically not the same file anymore. I hope the SansaFix reads this and investigates further…

I am playing the files as downloaded from Amazon.  Using V 1.01.11A Firmware.  I have a 8 GB Fuze.

So far it has not locked up / frozen on me.  Ill set the player to loop on these two songs overnight to see if it freezes.

Ill also log this as a bug and have other developers look into it.

Cheers,

SansaFix. 

Thanks. I appreciate it :slight_smile:

Hey I think I might have figured out why those songs don’t play. Denzilla, please remove the ID3 tags and see if those file play. I removed the id3 on my original download from amazon, and the freeze does not happen anymore.

Yes we are getting the same.  It seems theres a bug in the ID3 tag handling in the Fuze.  We will get it fixed soon.

Thanks Sansafix and special thanks to thoma for discovering the root cause :slight_smile: