Long delays between songs located on microSD card

Please help.  I have been trying to resolve this issue for weeks.  I have v2 fuze, 8gb and sansa micro sdhc 8gb card.  Whenever I press the button to skip to the next song or even if I just let the songs play thru and go to the next by themselves, there is a pause of several seconds or longer before it loads the next song and plays it.  I’ve search a couple threads that talked about reformatting the card and removing v1 tags and making several folders for the files but I still have the long delay in going from one song to another if that song is located on the micro SD card.  I am just wondering if there is a dedicated thread that provides step by step instructions as to how to resolve this problem.  I know some people have got theirs to work correctly after trying some of the suggestions, but there does not seem to be a consistent solution for everybody that I can find.  This is so frustrating.  Additionally, it takes over 30 minutes to refresh after I disconnect the fuze from the computer.  I appreciate any help or if all the recommendations that are spreadout all over this board could be linked or placed in this thread, that would be a gigantic help.  Otherwise, for all intensive purposes, the expansion slot is worthless for anything but storage more than it is an expansion slot for playing more mp3s.

I’d be willing to wager that based on what you’ve described (long delay between songs and extremely long database refresh) that it’s an ID3 tag-based issue. Maybe the wrong format of tag?

If you’ve perused around or searched here on the forum, you’ll have seen that the Sansa line of players are very particualr when it comes to ID3 tags. You will probably also have seen the recommendation to download and use MP3Tag, a free dedicated tagging utility. Set the Write format (in the Tools section) to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. Open your files in the program (from your computer, not your player or card) and re-save them in the new format. While you’re at it, check the Comments field in the tag and delete anything in there. There’s nothing there that is going to display, and your player can sometimes have a hard time with this too.

Then delete the files on the player/card and re-transfer the newly-edited ones over. Hopefully, this will fix your problem. :smiley:

Eureka! Hooray! Bingo!  Problem Solved!  Huge props to Tapeworm!  Automatic shoo-in for Hall of Fame!  It took awhile to do it, but doing exactly what he said fixed all the problems I was having with the microSD card.  Prior to doing Tapeworm’s suggestion, I formatted microSD card using DOS prompt, I used Tag and Rename to remove all ID2v1 tags, but no improvement.  I used Tag and Rename to remove all tags and then retagged just artist and title with ID3v2.3, still no good.  Apparently there is not an option in Tag and Rename to tag ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 (that’s the only thing I can think of), because once I downloaded MP3Tag and set it to write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags and remove v1 and APE as instructed by Tapeworm everything worked like a charm.

Let me just re-emphasize something that I think is important about fixing the problem.  In addition to using MP3Tag and not another tagging program, it seems that it really does make a difference to copy all your songs to your laptop/computer desktop first and then correcting the tags from there first before you put them on your microSD card.

I initially used MP3Tag to tag my mp3s with the microSD card in the Fuze slot with Fuze connected to computer.  Don’t do that.  This took time and afterwards the refresh still was taking forever (might have even froze up).  So I powered off the Fuze even before the refresh was done and copied the files from microSD card to my desktop on laptop, and then ran MP3Tag on the desktop files.  I reformatted the microSD card again using DOS prompt just to make sure and then dragged the MP3Tag’d files from my desktop to the microSD card (just like Tapeworm said).  It took time to get 7+ gb back on the 8gb card, but once done, refresh was much quicker, and the best thing of all…no more delays between songs when moving from one to another!

I don’t know how or why exactly MP3Tag works and Tag and Rename doesn’t, but at this point, I don’t care.  The problem is fixed and thanks to Tapeworm for taking the time to reply to my post.

You’re welcome! "And I’m glad it worked for you.

I don’t believe Tag & Rename writes the correct format of tag your player is looking for, so that’s probably why it didn’t work. MP3Tag is a great little utility that’s got an easy learning curve and while it is free to download, they do take donations to further the project. I’d encourage anyone using it to thank them by giving some financial support.

Meanwhile, enjoy the “Sound of Music”! Smiley

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