OK, I’ve done some investigation and - even with a hangover - I can say that formatting the device is NOT the answer. And how this could possibly help is beyond me. So please, don’t waste your time. And to dispel another erroneous assumption, the number of files has nothing to do with this issue, other than the fact that the probablility of copying a BAD file is HIGHER when you are copying MORE files. Rudimentary statistics…
What DOES appear to the actual issue at hand is the Clip firmware balks at the ID3 V2.3 “TCON” tag (and likely other Text tags) where the text content payload begins with a left parenthesis (hex 28). There may well be other invalid characters that can trigger a Clip lockup, but I found that, without any doubt, this causes the database refresh lockup EVERY SINGLE time and removing the offending character in the tag (or replacing it with another character, even a right parenthesis) causes it to work - EVERY SINGLE time.
*** EDIT - apparently the use of parenthesis in these text tags is a somewhat common practice and in the TCON tag it refers to the genre’s index in the standard list of genre (the linked page below shows that #79 refers to “Hard Rock”). The file/tag in question had this content: “(79) Hard Rock” and all the ID3 tag utils I have do NOT display the "(79) but are rather stripping the “(79)” when parsing the ID3 header. So the Clip is not dealing with this somewhat redundant but apparently not unusual tag structure . OK, now THAT’s all the clues I have and should be enough to get a Code Warrior on the right path, post haste…***
If you don’t know what an ID3 tag is, feel free to learn. If you do know and want to better understand tag structure, go here: http://www.id3.org/d3v2.3.0
I’m posting this in hopes that it can assist the developer community at Sansa in correcting this issue ASAP. The Clip is a great player, aside from this annoying little bug.
Here’s the final clue, Team Sansa - when the tag is in Unicode, it works fine on the Clip - with the parenthesis. When the tag is constructed as ISO-8859-1, it bombs. Definitely a parsing issue and should be less than one day’s work to fix this
Thanks to everyone on this thread. Indeed there was found a bug in the handling of the Tags. A fix is in the works and should be released within a month!.
I see you got me by a couple hours on the genre tag parenthesis thing (I didn’t see your post until now, can’t search everything!). That’s a 2nd-order symptom of the issue.
Let me say first that there are of course many capable individuals here, all working toward a common goal - and I certainly don’t aim to trivialize anyone’s efforts - but I did do additional differential research after my own independant discovery of the () genre tag clue - and so achieved primary discovery of the root cause…an issue related to the Clip’s “preference” for UTF text encoding for ID3 V2.3 tags.
Reencoding your MP3s “en masse” to employ UTF tag encoding will suffice for now, as I suggested here:
Eheh right, Click :-). I don’t feel we’re all racing to be the 1st in reporting issues or fix. IMO the best we can do (here or on other forums) is sharing knowledge and eventually contribute fixes, tools, etc., it’s up to Sansa developers to filter out the best and do their job w/ it, for the sake of the users of course.
While I’m thankful that we know what the problem is, how do I get to the point where I can actually load good files onto my sansa if it is frozen and my computer doesn’t recognize it?
thanks for the help just got one tonight…froze up and wouldnt get past “sandisk” part and i did ur step 3 the hold and middle button and i got it working …thanks again
Thanks I was having probs b/c I wasn’t holding down the middle button when in LOCK position. That made it possible to load the file and it is now working fine.
Download latest firmware update and install it as below. Worked for me like a charm!
NOTE: I had to format the clip from windows by right clicking on the drive letter in my computer and select format then copying the .bin file to the root, then unplugging from usb and allow to reset on it’s own. For some reason the update wouldn’t run till I did that.
The sandisk auto updater would not work for me at all.
SanDisk has just released the 01.01.20 firmware revision for the Sansa Clip. Download links and the release notes are available below.
Extract the .zip file into a folder on your computer.
Once extracted, drag the file to the root directory of your Sansa Clip.
Disconnect the Sansa Clip and let it restart.
The firmware update will now begin.
Once it finally finishes doing its update, it will boot back up. Once its back to the main menu, head to “Settings” > “System Info”, and verify the “Version” is now 01.01.20A.
