"Refreshing your media" time

Just a data point here for you MSCheads …

In MSC mode, I transferred 2773 MP3s to my newly-formatted 8GB Fuze; 1232 to the internal memory and 1541 to an inserted 8GB MicroSDHC card.  It took 28 minutes to refresh the database.

Take that for what it’s worth :wink:

Message Edited by PromisedPlanet on 03-28-2008 08:12 AM

Ouch.  It might be faster in MTP mode.  Hope you wont have to go thru that again. 

Just dont pop the card out and you should be OK for a while. 

It’ll go through the refresh if I modify the contents, though.

It’s a painful story as to why I even bothered using MSC.  In case anyone’s interested, ha ha … I generally use MediaMonkey to sync my players in MTP mode.  Unfortunately, MediaMonkey doesn’t see expansion cards in players while in MTP mode, and the contents of my expansion card are unlikely to remain static … my library’s always changing …

So I’ll be using WMP now, but argh … I’ve tried to use WMP in the past, and have always encountered problems with maintaining my library and especially syncing.  And it’s auto-playlist capabilities are nowhere near MediaMonkey’s (nor are Winamp’s).

Ah well … I’ll figure out my life and get this all under control someday.  :wink:

That Funky Monkey!  They need to support the external cards in MTP mode!

@sansafix wrote:

That Funky Monkey!  They need to support the external cards in MTP mode!

 

Yeah … that would make my MM bliss complete.

@sansafix wrote:

Ouch.  It might be faster in MTP mode.  Hope you wont have to go thru that again. 

 

Just dont pop the card out and you should be OK for a while. 

 

I synced the same set of songs in MTP mode … took a very short amount of time to get through the first half of the “Refreshing your media” phase, then took about 15 minutes to get through the second half.  If my guess is correct that the first half is the refreshing of the internal memory, then it appears that syncing in MTP mode doesn’t effect the time it takes to read the card.

 

What was more disturbing was that after using WMP to delete a few songs out of the internal memory (yes, not the card), the refresh phase took exactly the same amount of time.  Huh?

Message Edited by PromisedPlanet on 03-28-2008 08:11 AM

PromisedPlanet wrote:

 

What was more disturbing was that after using WMP to delete a few songs out of the internal memory (yes, not the card), the refresh phase took exactly the same amount of time.  Huh?

 

In case this was an WMP issue, I tried deleting a song from the Fuze’s internal memory using Windows Explorer.  Same thing … about a 15 minute refresh database time.

 

This could be a deal-killer for me.  I don’t want to wait 15 minutes for my Fuze to be ready, every time I modify the contents of the internal memory.

 

Any chance that a firmware update could fix this?  Recognize that the internal memory’s contents have been changed, but not the expansion card’s?

Sounds like you found a bug.  I thought the database refresh would be necessary, solely for SD card data changes or transfers.

Though you have a lot of tracks, the refresh is indeed slow.  But a refresh on transfer to the resident memory?  I don’t think that’s supposed to happen.

Bob  :wink:

I’m wondering if other Sansa players do the same thing … I don’t want to spam the other “device” forums, though.  :wink:

The one to look at is the e200v2- same processor at least.  I don’t have any handy SD cards, or I’d do an experiment for you right now!

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

Message Edited by neutron_bob on 03-28-2008 06:16 AM

The issue is the uSD Card .  If you remove the card,  refresh will be fast in MTP mode.

To enable card contents to be swapped and visible under MTP and preserve the Album ART we need to enumerate the card contents, and copy the information to the MTP database…

We can look into speeding up the cards refresh and detecting if content on the card has not changed. 

  

Message Edited by sansafix on 03-28-2008 10:22 AM

I know that the issue is the MicroSD card.  I just didn’t see why the card’s content should be re-read when the internal memory’s content has changed, but not the card’s.

I change the contents in internal memory fairly often, so if this can’t be fixed, I’m really bummin’.

It will be fixed in a future firmware update.  Ill check this on my Fuze with a 8 GB SanDisk uSD card, filling it up with alot of songs.

Message Edited by sansafix on 03-28-2008 10:36 AM

Fixed before Best Buy’s 30 day return period, I hope … :wink:

Im getting refresh time of about 5 minutes for a full 8 GB card and 8GB internal storage.  Any chance you are using a non-SanDisk card?  Have you tried Formatting the card?

I checked with our QA team and the largest refresh time they have seen with a SanDisk 8GB card packed with 1900 songs is 7 minutes.  So I suspect you have a problem with your card.  Perhaps the card should be returned . . . :wink:

At any rate, we will modify the firmware to not refresh a card that has not had its content changed.  It wont be in the upcoming release,  but the following one.  It will take a month. 

Message Edited by sansafix on 03-28-2008 02:56 PM

Message Edited by sansafix on 03-28-2008 02:58 PM

It’s a SanDisk card, freshly formatted.

One issue may be that I have the songs organized into subfolders, Music\<artist>\<album>\<title>.mp3.  This was so that I could store album art (is there some way to associate an album art jpeg with an album when all the songs are stored in one folder?).  I think I read in another forum that that can slow down the reading of media off the card (makes sense).

Still, even a 5-7 minute refresh rate is unacceptable when the card’s contents haven’t been modified.  I’m glad it’ll be addressed in an upcoming firmware update.

Thanks.

Message Edited by PromisedPlanet on 03-28-2008 06:15 PM

@sansafix wrote:

Im getting refresh time of about 5 minutes for a full 8 GB card and 8GB internal storage.  Any chance you are using a non-SanDisk card?  Have you tried Formatting the card?

 

 

I checked with our QA team and the largest refresh time they have seen with a SanDisk 8GB card packed with 1900 songs is 7 minutes.  So I suspect you have a problem with your card.  Perhaps the card should be returned . . . :wink:

 

 

At any rate, we will modify the firmware to not refresh a card that has not had its content changed.  It wont be in the upcoming release,  but the following one.  It will take a month. 

 

I no longer have my Fuze, but am considering getting one again.  Has this bug been fixed?  Thanks.

@sansafix wrote:

[snip]

At any rate, we will modify the firmware to not refresh a card that has not had its content changed.  It wont be in the upcoming release,  but the following one.  It will take a month.

[snip]

Is there any chance of having the mtable.sys file format documented? If the contents of the card and of the internal device memory are known, there’s no reason to force an on-device read and sync if it can be compiled offboard and copied on with the batch of updated files.

My tests indicate that only id3v1 tags are honoured anyhow, so the file format should not be that complex.

Of course I realize that this is not a general-purpose solution, but it would definitely meet the needs of some users of alternative operating systems and file formats. (on that note, I am quite curious to see the differences in the format between the current firmware revision and that which incorporates Ogg Vorbis and FLAC support. I imagine that adding support for the Ogg tag standard inovlved a nontrivial amount of work. I’m particularly curious about the UTF-8 support that the tag standard requires…)

@gnomon wrote:

My tests indicate that only id3v1 tags are honoured anyhow, so the file format should not be that complex.

Typo? I thought Sansas had a problem reading v1 tags; they want v2.3 :wink:

Bump … has this bug been fixed yet?  (Modifying internal memory contents causes refresh of expansion card?)

Thanks.