Slow when skipping tracks

[sivadom]

I got a (used, v2) fuze today and i'm disappointed with the speed of changing songs. I'm playing ~1000 songs on an 8gb uSDHC and when i go in the list to select one, it takes about 3.5-4 seconds to start. When i click right on the wheel ( >>| ) the current song stops, and again I get about 3.5-4 seconds of silence before the next song starts. I have a clip+ that does not have this annoying delay using the same set of songs on the same memory card. I read somewhere that album art can slow down the fuze, so I stripped album art out of all the id3 tags of the songs on this card. No noticeable improvement. Is this normal? Any ideas? Thanks in advance

[sivadom]

update: I found this thread on sandisk's forums:

http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/boar...cending&page=1

and tried the following:

formatting the card with various sector/cluster sizes using format in windows and mkdosfs in linux

formatting the card with panasonic's sdhc formatter

removing all embedded album art

converting all tags from id3 v2.4 to id3 v2.3

removing all tag data except album/artist/song title

banging my head against the wall repeatedly

no success with any of these options. Ive ordered a new uSDHC card but class 6 this time (my current one is class 2) thinking maybe the card is just too slow? Its hard to believe that this problem isnt more common. Any clues greatly appreciated.

[JK98]

Which firmware are you using? Later versions of the firmware might help speed up file access. How large is the internal memory on your Fuze? Have you tried formatting the player's internal memory using the player's menu? Is your player set to MSC for the USB mode? How are the files arranged on the card? Are they deeply nested in folders, or is the file structure simple?

[sivadom]

Originally Posted by JK98

Which firmware are you using? Later versions of the firmware might help speed up file access. How large is the internal memory on your Fuze? Have you tried formatting the player's internal memory using the player's menu? Is your player set to MSC for the USB mode? How are the files arranged on the card? Are they deeply nested in folders, or is the file structure simple?

I'm using the latest firmware (.31)

My fuze has 4gb internal

I'm using MSC forced

I dont have any folders on the SD card, all mp3s are in the root. (i tried putting them in the music folder that the fuze creates, but it moves them back to the root)

[sivadom]

I've 'solved' this problem by splitting the card's contents into many small subfolders. It doesnt make sense to me given that its building a little database with (presumably) addresses for different songs and then using these addresses instead of the file system during operation, right? In any case, this worked for me, maybe it'll save someone some frustration down the line.