Sansa Fuze Firmware Update 01.02.26 & 02.02.26

The white indicator bar disappears for a second or two when the volume is adjusted.  It doesn’t happen all the time, but frequently.  The songs play just fine, and I tried it with different settings – replay gain on/off, repeat on/off, shuffle on/off, all three off and all three on.  Also, when it’s on pause.  It still happens for each setting.

Re the 0 count for podcasts and audiobooks:

On the 8Gb Fuze, I reformatted the device (msc AND mtp modes) and then re-dropped the firmware in mtp mode.

* Audible books are added to the count (MTP mode) only if they’re transferred via the Audible Manager. This updates the database with the track, artist, album, year.  (the 4Gb Fuze shows the audiobook count correctly even though I just dumped the Audible files back on it.)

* neither the 4Gb  nor the 8Gb Fuze shows a correct Podcast count. Both show 0.

* Taking the 4Gb to MSC mode and copying down files to the podcast and audio folders in Windows explorer: both counts change correctly. The 8GB: neither count changes.

Strange. 

I’ve been experiencing a variety of problems since updating to this new firmware.

 

1. After installing it successfully and marveling at folder navigation, I turned my Fuze off.  It then would not turn back on, nor do anything when connected to my computer.  Nothing.  I took out my 8GB microSD card and it then turned on just fine, as well as connected to my computer just fine.

 

2.  Later on, I made a large playlist (right click, “Create Playlist”) and went to play it.  The Fuze was stuck on pause and then skipped through the songs one by one without me doing anything.  The only way stop it was to shut the Fuze off.

 

3.  Some songs won’t play and cause the Fuze to lock up.  The only way to fix it is to shut the Fuze off.

 

Should I just downgrade to the old firmware for now, or what?

Thanks.

This thread seems to be going pretty  fast :dizzy_face:.  It’s doubled in size since last time I checked yesterday.  Anyway, I am really disappointed in this firmware.  Don’t get me wrong, all the new features are very nice and some have been desperately needed.  The problem is when you can’t get your Fuze to turn on.  I posted about it yesterday, and still have found no cure – formatting, reinstalling firmware, reset to factory settings, etc.  No matter what, I have to hold the slider up in excess of 3 minutes four or five times just to get the thing to turn on.  And it’s getting worse – it seem like every time I turn it off it takes longer to turn back on.  It’ll also turn on and get stuck at the welcome screen.

Once I do get it to turn on, the device acts competely normal.  I can even connect it to my computer normally (when it’s shut off, my computer now refuses to see it).  This is really frustrating, and I’m trying to contact Sandisk to try and see if they know what’s going on… in the meanwhile, is there a way to uninstall the new firmware and go back to the previous? I would like to know if it is really the firmware’s fault in the end (though it did begin right after I upgraded).  Thanks.

@rainbreak wrote:

This thread seems to be going pretty  fast :dizzy_face:.  It’s doubled in size since last time I checked yesterday.  Anyway, I am really disappointed in this firmware.  Don’t get me wrong, all the new features are very nice and some have been desperately needed.  The problem is when you can’t get your Fuze to turn on.  I posted about it yesterday, and still have found no cure – formatting, reinstalling firmware, reset to factory settings, etc.  No matter what, I have to hold the slider up in excess of 3 minutes four or five times just to get the thing to turn on.  And it’s getting worse – it seem like every time I turn it off it takes longer to turn back on.  It’ll also turn on and get stuck at the welcome screen.

 

Once I do get it to turn on, the device acts competely normal.  I can even connect it to my computer normally (when it’s shut off, my computer now refuses to see it).  This is really frustrating, and I’m trying to contact Sandisk to try and see if they know what’s going on… in the meanwhile, is there a way to uninstall the new firmware and go back to the previous? I would like to know if it is really the firmware’s fault in the end (though it did begin right after I upgraded).  Thanks.

You seem to be the only one haveing this exact issue. I would contact tech support and see if anyone else has this happen. If not then ask about an RMA, because it sounds defective. 

Yeah, conversionbox, I was thinking I may have to go that route.  I simply can’t comprehend how a firmware update could mess up my Fuze enough that it doesn’t even want to turn on…  Ah well. :cry:

@rainbreak wrote:
Yeah, conversionbox, I was thinking I may have to go that route.  I simply can’t comprehend how a firmware update could mess up my Fuze enough that it doesn’t even want to turn on…  Ah well. :cry:

I mean you could try to roll it back but I’m thinking if this was a wide spread issue we would have heard about it more.

I made an account just for this post :slight_smile:

First off, I want to thank everyone at Sansa for staying in touch with the community like you are. You don’t see this kind of love from many companies, and we all deeply appreciate it!

What I’m working with: A 4GB Fuze v1 + 2GB SanDisk uSD (and Koss Plugs, for those interested) 

Now, on to the bad. After installing the update the “Refreshing Your Media” stalled for a solid 10 minutes. Normally this doesn’t take more than a minute for me, so I decided to be patient. After it didn’t go, I shut off the Fuze and removed the card. After a much faster Refresh it didn’t hang and did it’s usual “yay new firmware!” bit. I made sure it still worked as-advertised (which it does), and tried putting the uSD back in. Same problem. A full 10 minutes later I shut it off and I’m currently backing the card up so I can format it and reload it (FAT32 is a nasty filesystem…). *edit before posting:* I just did that and it’s doing the same thing again. It’s hanging at about 90%, so I removed the bottom 10% (alphabetically) from the uSD and it refreshed the media just fine. When I have some time I’ll add songs back one at a time to find the culprit and I’ll let you know if there’s anything weird about it (probably just a corrupted header).

Now for the really bad… Pressing and holding “next” while listening to a song in Folder mode (YAAAY!!!) does not fast forward! It changes songs, and keeps changing them as long as you have it held down.  I’m absolutely positive this isn’t the intended action because in every other view it fast forwards, which is why I’m bringing it up. Since I mostly listen to hour+ long DJ mixes, this pretty much makes the folder view useless :frowning:

Again, many thanks to Sansa for being involved, and many thanks to the community for helping each other out. I’ve been lurking on these forums since I got my Fuze and every question I’ve had has been answered without me needing to ask it. You rock! 

@mngrif wrote:

I made an account just for this post :slight_smile:

 

First off, I want to thank everyone at Sansa for staying in touch with the community like you are. You don’t see this kind of love from many companies, and we all deeply appreciate it!

 

What I’m working with: A 4GB Fuze v1 + 2GB SanDisk uSD (and Koss Plugs, for those interested) 

 

Now, on to the bad. After installing the update the “Refreshing Your Media” stalled for a solid 10 minutes. Normally this doesn’t take more than a minute for me, so I decided to be patient. After it didn’t go, I shut off the Fuze and removed the card. After a much faster Refresh it didn’t hang and did it’s usual “yay new firmware!” bit. I made sure it still worked as-advertised (which it does), and tried putting the uSD back in. Same problem. A full 10 minutes later I shut it off and I’m currently backing the card up so I can format it and reload it (FAT32 is a nasty filesystem…). *edit before posting:* I just did that and it’s doing the same thing again. It’s hanging at about 90%, so I removed the bottom 10% (alphabetically) from the uSD and it refreshed the media just fine. When I have some time I’ll add songs back one at a time to find the culprit and I’ll let you know if there’s anything weird about it (probably just a corrupted header).

 

Now for the really bad… Pressing and holding “next” while listening to a song in Folder mode (YAAAY!!!) does not fast forward! It changes songs, and keeps changing them as long as you have it held down.  I’m absolutely positive this isn’t the intended action because in every other view it fast forwards, which is why I’m bringing it up. Since I mostly listen to hour+ long DJ mixes, this pretty much makes the folder view useless :frowning:

 

Again, many thanks to Sansa for being involved, and many thanks to the community for helping each other out. I’ve been lurking on these forums since I got my Fuze and every question I’ve had has been answered without me needing to ask it. You rock! 

Good catch on the fast forward thing (Just tried it myslef and yup it just skips). As for the corruption, try switching to msc mode loading the songs back on the player, and then running the chkdsk utility, that may help.

@conversionbox wrote:


@mngrif wrote:

 

Now for the really bad… Pressing and holding “next” while listening to a song in Folder mode (YAAAY!!!) does not fast forward! It changes songs, and keeps changing them as long as you have it held down.  I’m absolutely positive this isn’t the intended action because in every other view it fast forwards, which is why I’m bringing it up. Since I mostly listen to hour+ long DJ mixes, this pretty much makes the folder view useless :frowning:

 


Good catch on the fast forward thing (Just tried it myslef and yup it just skips). As for the corruption, try switching to msc mode loading the songs back on the player, and then running the chkdsk utility, that may help.

Do both of you happen to have V1 models? Reason I ask is because the FF and RW work just fine on the V2 that I have. The hold left/right to FF/RW and single click to step to next/previous work exactly the same as they always have before even in Folder/File mode on mine.

I have a V1, and holding down Next works fine for me with songs in Folder mode.

@miltst wrote:


@conversionbox wrote:


@mngrif wrote:

 

Now for the really bad… Pressing and holding “next” while listening to a song in Folder mode (YAAAY!!!) does not fast forward! It changes songs, and keeps changing them as long as you have it held down.  I’m absolutely positive this isn’t the intended action because in every other view it fast forwards, which is why I’m bringing it up. Since I mostly listen to hour+ long DJ mixes, this pretty much makes the folder view useless :frowning:

 


Good catch on the fast forward thing (Just tried it myslef and yup it just skips). As for the corruption, try switching to msc mode loading the songs back on the player, and then running the chkdsk utility, that may help.


Do both of you happen to have V1 models? Reason I ask is because the FF and RW work just fine on the V2 that I have. The hold left/right to FF/RW and single click to step to next/previous work exactly the same as they always have before even in Folder/File mode on mine.

 

I made a Boo Boo (as my little cousin who is watching his music sync to his newly updated fuze on my desktop pc would say). On my test I did it on an audiobook which I just threw on and did not set up properly.

@conversionbox wrote:


I made a Boo Boo (as my little cousin who is watching his music sync to his newly updated fuze on my desktop pc would say). On my test I did it on an audiobook which I just threw on and did not set up properly.

I’m not sure how it is intended to work with audiobooks in Folder/File View mode. I have a set of MP3’s as an audiobook on mine and if I go in Folder View, then into Audiobooks and play it… it will still let me FF/RW even the the Chapter setting is set to off.

However, the exact same audiobook file(s) will not FF/RW when played thru the normal (original) menu system. I have to change the Chapter mode setting to on to be able to FF/RW when playing it the old original way (not Folder View). This, of course, is the way it was intended to work.

So, not sure which way you were trying to test things there CB. Maybe ya should give the player to your cousin and have him explain it to ya LOL. Young kids these days seem to know how to do a lot more things than I ever could have imagined back at that age. And, many of them can work with stuff that I can’t even begin to understand at all now LOL.

@miltst wrote:


@conversionbox wrote:


I made a Boo Boo (as my little cousin who is watching his music sync to his newly updated fuze on my desktop pc would say). On my test I did it on an audiobook which I just threw on and did not set up properly.


 

I’m not sure how it is intended to work with audiobooks in Folder/File View mode. I have a set of MP3’s as an audiobook on mine and if I go in Folder View, then into Audiobooks and play it… it will still let me FF/RW even the the Chapter setting is set to off.

 

However, the exact same audiobook file(s) will not FF/RW when played thru the normal (original) menu system. I have to change the Chapter mode setting to on to be able to FF/RW when playing it the old original way (not Folder View). This, of course, is the way it was intended to work.

 

So, not sure which way you were trying to test things there CB. Maybe ya should give the player to your cousin and have him explain it to ya LOL. Young kids these days seem to know how to do a lot more things than I ever could have imagined back at that age. And, many of them can work with stuff that I can’t even begin to understand at all now LOL.

 

Im only 21 so Im still pretty Quick, and he is 4 and can only read the menu that says songs and then play all (He is still learning the rest) so I doubt he can help. Ill ask him though. What I need to do tomorrow (Its movie time here now) is set up some stuff for folder nav (At this point my tags are almost perfect) and test it out on both the internal and external memory system and see what happens

Yep, that would be the best thing to do CB, especially since you would have many more types of files (of both audio and audiobooks) than I do. And, of course, for anything to work properly on the Fuze all the ID3 tags do need to be done correctly. Don’t know if that could have been the other persons problem with FF and RW though or not.

Ya say your only 21 ah? I was already older than that when the first Radio Shack TRS-80 came out. My first so-called computer was a Balley Game machine with a game cartridge that had Palo Alto Tiny Basic on it. Later, (after several other devices) my first actual PC ran DOS 3.3.

You could say I pre-date computers because I was already married and had a daughter back when Steve Jobs, the Whoz, and Bill Gates were just starting to figure out how to make a home computer and/or OS for one.

That should give you some idea how old (and slow) I am now LOL.

Good update,it does make sense for the current updates,if you go through music list there’s no way to go back to current playing track w/o pressing the menu twice…over all the update would be a major face lift for most…thanks

miltst wrote:


Conversionbox wrote:


mngrif wrote:

 

Now for the really bad… Pressing and holding “next” while listening to a song in Folder mode (YAAAY!!!) does not fast forward! It changes songs, and keeps changing them as long as you have it held down.  I’m absolutely positive this isn’t the intended action because in every other view it fast forwards, which is why I’m bringing it up. Since I mostly listen to hour+ long DJ mixes, this pretty much makes the folder view useless :frowning:

 


Good catch on the fast forward thing (Just tried it myslef and yup it just skips). As for the corruption, try switching to msc mode loading the songs back on the player, and then running the chkdsk utility, that may help.


Do both of you happen to have V1 models? Reason I ask is because the FF and RW work just fine on the V2 that I have. The hold left/right to FF/RW and single click to step to next/previous work exactly the same as they always have before even in Folder/File mode on mine.

 

 

“What I’m working with: A 4GB Fuze v1 + 2GB SanDisk uSD (and Koss Plugs, for those interested)” Yes, a v1. Also, my bad, it’s a Kingston uSD. The SanDisk is my 1GB card in my phone…

I always use MSC mode. The option was a selling point for me. Mostly I was sold by the FLAC and OGG support, I’m a big fan of open standards and non-proprietary stuff :smiley:

My Ubuntu 8.04 fsck.vfat craps out  because of the odd partitioning, and has since I got it. Win XP’s … thing, says it’s OK.

After some listening and general rocking out, I realized that the music on the uSD wasn’t showing. I plugged it in to my computer, explorer.exe crashed beautifully but the system survived. When I went to open the drive it didn’t have a name, and I was requested to Please Insert A Disk. Now I’m back to it hanging on the refresh again. I popped the card in my reader and it recognized just fine, XP’s fsck says it’s clean with no bad sectors. I just tried with the aforementioned different known good card, and it works fine. If nobody else reports anything like this, let’s chalk it up to convenient hardware failure even though the card works fine elsewhere… unless anyone has any ideas. This makes for a good excuse to upgrade for no good reason :slight_smile:

 

How’s this for *really* weird, the song skipping instead of fast forwarding thing is sporadic or has managed to fix itself! I can’t replicate it again. The original conditions I found it under are under the MTP part of the Folder view mode. I was deleteing some god-awful-horrible music a friend put on it and discovered that it would skip instead of FF.

Maybe that uSD card has an evil spirit about it…

@mngrif wrote:

How’s this for *really* weird, the song skipping instead of fast forwarding thing is sporadic or has managed to fix itself! I can’t replicate it again. The original conditions I found it under are under the MTP part of the Folder view mode. I was deleteing some god-awful-horrible music a friend put on it and discovered that it would skip instead of FF.

 

Maybe that uSD card has an evil spirit about it…

In the post just before this one, you mentioned the problem seemed to occur with a Kingston uSD card.

Several people have mentioned (in other posts) about there being some problems with using Kinston memory cards. So, that may very likely be the source of all your problems.

I’m not sure if there is something actually wrong with the Kingston memory cards, or if maybe they are not Formatted to the proper specification.

A number of people have mentioned using the Panasonic Memory Card Formatting Software to correct problems they had with memory cards. You might want to give that a try. Just be sure you have good (not corrupted) backups of your files so you can put them back on the card again after formatting it. You’ll have to be in MSC mode (or else use a seperate card reader) to do the formatting.

@mngrif wrote:

How’s this for *really* weird, the song skipping instead of fast forwarding thing is sporadic or has managed to fix itself! I can’t replicate it again. The original conditions I found it under are under the MTP part of the Folder view mode. I was deleteing some god-awful-horrible music a friend put on it and discovered that it would skip instead of FF.

 

Maybe that uSD card has an evil spirit about it…

That screwy Microsoft MTP mode ■■■■ could very likely be the source of the problems. I’ve had all kinds of problems with folder and file names getting changed to have numbers in them, and also file corruption problems when using MTP. In fact, I think 90% of all the problems I’ve read about for any of the Sansa player models seem to have been reported by people using MTP mode. Nothing Microsoft has ever come up with has ever worked right, so I wouldn’t trust their foolish MTP ■■■■ to work right either. Since I will never buy any music with DRM, and have no need for Rhapsody Channels, and don’t plan to every sync with Windows Media Player… I changed to using only MSC mode on all my Sansa players quite some time ago.

Since using only MSC mode I think I’ve had only one problem and that was some kind of fluke where the Sansa Media Converted produced a corrupted file. Just deleted it from the player and ran it thru again and it came out OK the 2nd time.

Unfortunately, for us that want to use only MSC mode… Just about every firmware update defaults the USB mode back to MTP (or Auto Detect). So, I always double check that setting and change it back to MSC right after any firmware upgrade (have to always change the clock setting back to 12 hours instead of 24 also).

Personally, I wish all of the portable player manufacturers had rebelled against ever putting MTP mode on their players way back when Microsoft first came up with that stupid crappy idea. It’s _not_ something that was ever needed, not even for DRM crippled music files. The older Sansa e200R (Rhapsody) models could work with DRM and Rhapsody channels in MSC mode. In fact, the “Rhapsody” USB mode setting on those players was in fact MSC mode and that’s the only way the Rhapsody software worked with those players. [The PlaysForSure mode on the e200R was Microsoft’s MTP mode for use with Windows Media Player which, of course, nobody cared about otherwise they would not have specifically purchased the Rhapsody version of the e200]

Too bad all the companies keep jumping on the Microsoft band wagon. That just keep creating more and more problems for everyone!