Songs don't show up on player or computer after installing sd card

Hi,

My brother in law installed a 2gig sd card in his 8 gig Fuze. Now, only 40 songs show up on the player and while connected to the computer in explorer. When I check the properties, it shows that 6.85 gigs are used, with 791mb of free space.

Is there anyway to retreive the songs? I went through live chat support and was told to format the player and start over.

There is no way he can ever replace the 1200 plus songs that have been put on there.

Can any of the guru’s out there help?

First, what happens if you take the card out and let the player refresh its database upon restarting? Do the ‘missing’ song listings return?

Second, do you know that there are 2 USB connection modes, MTP & MSC? And that your computer can’t see what was loaded to the player while connected in the other mode? Go into Settings > System Settings > USB mode and switch it to MSC mode. Now re-connect and see if you can see those ‘missing’ tracks. If not, disconnect and try MTP.

Of course, it might just be a database refreshing error. While your player is in MSC mode, connect and look for a file (in Windows Explorer) called MTABLE.SYS. This is the database file. Delete it. Don’t worry, your player will build an entirely new database upon disconnecting instead of merely refreshing the existing one. This may uncover those tracks playing hide-and-seek.

Thirdly, I’m concerned when you say “There is no way he can ever replace the 1200 plus songs that have been put on there.” Have you (or he) ever heard the term Back-Up? And I’m not talking about putting it in reverse. Tell your brother-in-law to do himself a favor once you/he get this sorted out and do it! :wink:

Thanks Tapeworm for your input.

Nothing changes with the card in or out of the slot. I have tried both MTP and MSC, still not able to locate all the songs. I tried deleting the MTABLE.SYS file and disconnecting the player, then restarting the player, still no change.

Lastly, yes, I have mine and my wifes and father in laws players backed up, but for whatever reason, my brother in law never backed his up. Live and Learn…

I wonder if a computer shop could retreive the files, ,much like they do when a system crashes or is reformatted and the files appear to be gone?

Bummer. :cry:

So if I understand you correctly, you’re saying you cannot locate the files either on the player (while disconnected) or viewing the content in Explorer while connected to your computer?

First, try looking on the player for an Artist called “Unknown”. If the files are there, but the ID3 tags cannot be read by the player for whatever reason, they will all be lumped into this category. As far as the computer (Explorer) goes, try changing your Windows settings to “show hidden files and folders”. This was an issue with the older Sansa players, but I wasn’t aware of it regarding the Fuze.

This suggestions may or may not help, but are worth a shot anyway.

That is correct Tapeworm, the files are not visible on the player while disconnected or trying to view them in Explorer.

There are no “unknown” artists on the player. I changed the Windows settings to show hidden files, and still can not see all the music files.

Thanks for your suggestions, I appreciate your time. I am befuddled as to how this could happen just by installing a memory card. It also makes no sense that I can not see the files despite the face that Windows shows 6.85 gigs of memory used. Lastly, It is hard to believe that this is the only instance of something like this happening, and that the only answer is to wipe everything and start over.

Thanks again for trying, you had more ideas than tech support.

Sorry nothing seems to be working for you. Frankly, I can’t understand it either. There’s one more thing you could try; re-applying and/or updating the firmware. Formatting would wipe the memory clean, so I understand you hesitance in doing that, but re-installing or updating the firmware wouldn’t affect the files on it at all.

You can find the latest firmware versions here. You’ll have to check whether you have a v1 or v2 version (if you don’t already know) so you download and install the correct one for you hardware configuration, but that’s easy. Go into Settings > System Settings > Info and read the top line (which is the firmware version currently on the player). If it starts with a 01, you have a v1 model; if it starts with an 02 you have a v2 model. Click the link that says All Regions (don’t bother with the Updater) and follow the manual installation instructions. Basically, you download the .zip file, extract it and save it (your Desktop is a convenient location) and then drag & drop it to your player (connected in MSC mode).

Be aware though that updating the firmware will revert the USB setting back to Auto Defect, so after you will have to choose either MTP or MSC manually. You may need to do this anyway to look for your missing files.

Good luck . . . let us know how it goes.

Are you sure the songs are in a format the player supports?

Hi,

Well, after trying all the suggestions here to no avail, I decided to google a program that would recover lost mp3 files. First, I tried 3 free ones which did not work, all showed different numbers of music files. Then I found one that let you try before you buy, and It found over 1600 music files that the program told me were recoverable. I am now in the process of buying the program for $39.00 and hope that that works. After I recover them, and format the players memory, I will reinstall them.

Thanks for the input, I will let you know how it turns out.

Well as mentioned before, I ended up buying a program for 39 bucks that found all the missing files. The problem was that a lot of the files were named file 01 idz. and a bunch of gibberish instead of the real names. From there, I was able to download an excellent program thanks to a suggestion on here that extracted most of the names of the songs etc. Once I had that done, I formatted the player and sd card, and installed the new firmware, the loaded all 1650 songs back on the player.  I made a couple of back up discs for the bro in law and gave him the whole thing for his birthday. It took four nights after work of tinkering and etc. but it was worth it to get his music back for him.

Thanks again for the help with this issue, I hope no one else has to go through this!

Those gibberish filenames  may have been copied  from an iPod. When I borrowed one recently I was pretty shocked to see how iTunes renames things and throws them into arbitrary folders when it transfers them, making it impossible to understand the contents of the iPod via Windows Explorer. Apple’s plan for world domination calls for incompatibility with everything else. Maybe other music library software does similar things.

Have  the bro in law rip his music to plain old mp3. And if he has any computer savvy, have him install mp3tag, save the Write default as ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1, and simply open and Save each album before sending it over to the Fuze. That gives the Fuze readable tags.