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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.