Sansa Fuze Firmware Update 01.02.26 & 02.02.26

@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!

@xcfan wrote:

I have noticed that with the Folder Navigation, with long album names for the folders, they appear with a string of numbers before them for example,

The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian Soundtrack

 

and

 

A Child’s Celebration of Rock ‘n’ Roll 

If you transferred those over to your Fuze in MTP mode… MTP has a bad habit of altering folder and file names by adding long numbers on the front of them. That really makes a screwed up mess to try and straighten out later if you ever need to copy the files back onto your computer. That’s just one of the reasons I will not use MTP mode and always use MSC instead now. 

If the files were transfered in MSC mode… Then it’s possible that the orginal files may have some additional numbers as part of their folder/file names. Remember, when viewing things in Folder mode your are looking at the actual folder/filename and not the Artist/Album/Title ID3 tag info like you were normally seeing before. That’s the main reason so many were screaming for Folder/File view to be added. That way they can make up whatever weird folder or file names they want to look up there music with (instead of the more proper Artist/Album/Title naming from the ID3 tags).

@tosch350 wrote:

I found a little error in the new firmware:

 

When you go to settings -> audiobook options, there is a menu item “track info” which makes no sense there.

 

(perhaps someone has noticed it before - I didn´t read the whole thread)

I don’t think that’s an error because that’s the same screen you go to when you press the down (Sub-Menu) button while playing. When you play an audiobook, then you can either press down (for the Sub-Menu), or you can go to Settings -> Audiobook options to view the “track info” of the file. So, you can get to the same info either way.

@miltst wrote:

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

 

Yes… You could see it well at i*iver. The H100/H300 series was probably the best mp3 player of that time, with Linux and Ogg support. But then I saw a picture of Bill Gates in the news where he was holding the new H10. And guess what: the H10 required MTP (which was not supported by Linux at that time), and had no Ogg support any more.

There is a very interesting article about that at Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plays\_for\_sure#Criticisms

Well, if many manufacturers try to find their fortune going the Microsoft way, it’s good for the few manufacturers who still listen to what the customers really want. I’m so glad that Sansa decided to go the right way! If they keep up their good work, they will surely keep a lot of loyal customers. Which is, when thinking in long terms, more rewarding than being a good Microsoft doggie.

@dalaug234 wrote:

Like the update. thanks for supporting the device this way!

 

Question.  The folders, which is fine, shows all my podcasts or audiobooks on my card as music.  They were taggedaas Podcasts or Audiobook.  When I was on ‘play all’ it played one of those.  Yes they do show up under Podcasts and Aundiobooks.  But also as “music”.  Same with the Audiobooks.  If I want to just listen to music and not near my player I won’t have the opportunity go to the next “song”.  I don’t have another card with me to see if it’s just this card.  I did shut the player off, take the card out, turn the player on, shut it off, put the card in and it’s the same.

Did you put the podcasts in the PODCASTS folder, and the audiobooks in the AUDIOBOOKS ? If you did, and the ID3 tags are correct, then they should not be showing up with your music. Nor will they accidently start playing when you are listening to music with shuffle on.

If you put podcast or audiobook files anywhere else instead of inside the 2 folders specified for them, then they very likely will show up in your music list (and very likely also play in between other music when shuffle is turned on).

Just as a side note: If you put an empty microSD(HC) card into the Fuze and then turn it on, it will automatically create those 2 folders on the memory card for you just in case you want to put podcasts or audiobooks on the card instead of the internal memory. However, Audible audiobooks (.aa files) will always go in a seperate special AUDIBLE folder on the internal memory. As far as I know, audiobooks from Audible can not be played from an external memory card.

@sansafix wrote:
Yes.  Press and hold in Folder navigation mode is not implemented for various reasons. 

I’m guessing that given enough time being able to add things to the Go List in Folder navigation might be possible in a future upgrade. Then, again, I could be wrong. Not that it matters to me anyway because I never saw the need for Folder/File navigation to start with, but I do understand that a few others seem to have a need for it.

Has anyone else had this happen - while listening to a specific artist or album (not all songs), when deleting one song, the player resumes playing - but a different album.  For instance I was listening to all songs from “Chicago”, which included one album and a track from another album - when I deleted one of the songs the player resumed playing a track from “Mary Chapin-Carpentar” possibly the next song alphabetically on the player, but not from the same artist…

Message Edited by CoindoorDave on 04-10-2009 05:51 AM

@shred wrote:


Well, if many manufacturers try to find their fortune going the Microsoft way, it’s good for the few manufacturers who still listen to what the customers really want. I’m so glad that Sansa decided to go the right way! If they keep up their good work, they will surely keep a lot of loyal customers. Which is, when thinking in long terms, more rewarding than being a good Microsoft doggie.

For a while there I was getting really scared that they might take the USB option setting out in this firmware release. They have done so in the past for some of the other earlier models (like the e200 and c200). They couldn’t seem to make up there mind back then. Some firmware versions had an option for either MTP or MSC, then another verison did not have any USB setting option at all (so you had to hold a button down while plugging it in to get MSC mode), and then they added the option back in again in other firmware versions. And then there’s the Sansa Express which apparently only has MTP mode.

You don’t know how really, REALLY glad I was to see that they didn’t take the MSC option out in this firmware!!!

In fact, for those that have not noticed, Sandisk actually changed it so that there are 3 USB options now instead:

AutoDetect

MTP

MSC

That way people can avoid the problems of the often referred to AutoDefect from accidently connecting in the wrong mode.

Now, I wish the Sansa View had that! Even though my View is set to MSC it seems to have a mind of its own and about 1/3rd of the time connects in MTP mode. But, than again, the View does a lot of weird things… like it will start showing the battery is charging for no reason while I’m using it, and it’s not even plugged into anything to be charging from. I do hope someone at Sandisk is working on a firmware upgrade for the View. It’s been almost a year I think since the last one and there’s still a lot of bugs that need to be fixed. Oh well, back to figuring out other things related to the Fuze (to get back on topic here).

@miltst wrote:


@tosch350 wrote:

I found a little error in the new firmware:

 

When you go to settings -> audiobook options, there is a menu item “track info” which makes no sense there.

 

(perhaps someone has noticed it before - I didn´t read the whole thread)


I don’t think that’s an error because that’s the same screen you go to when you press the down (Sub-Menu) button while playing. When you play an audiobook, then you can either press down (for the Sub-Menu), or you can go to Settings -> Audiobook options to view the “track info” of the file. So, you can get to the same info either way.

 

Yes, but when you don´t play audiobooks it should be grey (inactive) like it is in Settings -> Music options when you don´t play music.

That I can agree with. It _should_ be greyed out if you are not currently playing an audiobook file. Oddly enough, if you happen to be playing a music file you can go back thru the Settings Audiobooks options and then view the music file info.

Oh well, at least it’s only a minor screw up that doesn’t actually effect anything. I’ll assume it will most likely get fixed in a future firmware upgrade, but since it’s not actually causing any problems it might get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list for a while.

@conversionbox wrote:


@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. 

I was having the same problem, but since rolling back to the previous firmware, everything is working and behaving normally and as it should.

@hulksmashnow wrote:


@conversionbox wrote:


@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. 


I was having the same problem, but since rolling back to the previous firmware, everything is working and behaving normally and as it should.

Interesting…no issues with mine at all.

@mngrif

I have a v1 Fuze and hove checked folder mode.  It Doesn’t skip.  I did format my database before adding new songs and trying it, so maybe that will solve your problem.

Now for my problems:cry: I have found that my folders appear incorrectly on my Fuze.  The shorter ones appear just fine, but the long ones do not.  I have started another thread on this, and since it is an issue with the current firmware release, I wanted to point whoever was interested to it.

I’m having major grief with this firmware update - every time the firmware installs OK but the Fuze hangs on the “refreshing” screen. I suspect this is due to the use of OGGs of which I have many. I can successfully play these with the older firmware.

I’ve tried complete reformatting both on the PC and on the player.

Could this be due to the changes supporting images in OGG files?

Please help!

Thanks,

Mike.