Cuts-out / Skips During Playback
 

A few days ago my Fuze started cutting out during playback. To give you an idea of what I mean, if I was listening to a podcast, every third would would be replaced by silence. It was either caused by me disconnecting it without doing a safe eject or when my computer went to sleep with it still connected.

I tried reinstalling the firmware, but that didn't fix it. I thought I fixed it by formating the device, but it only worked for a few days and then came back a few days later when I added some new files.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

If the "cutting out" (as you stated) came back when you added some new files, I'd check the files you put on it, also you might have to format and re-firmware again if those files corrupted something in the firmware. Try Foobar2k w/File Integrity Verifier, it's free software.

I checked my files as you suggested. I got a number of errant files, but all were either "Suspiciously large peak", "Reported length is inaccurate", or "Multiple ID3v2 tags encountered." Would these errors be enough to cause this problem?

Those types of errors, especially suspiciously large peak, caused me all types of headaches in the past. I found the same files that played on a PC with no audible errors would skip or even freeze a portable player.

I ran 2 other foobar2000 utilities ,Fix VBR MP3 header... and Rebuild MP3 stream and it fixed quite a few of them. I also used MP3Val to rework the files. There were a few that were too far gone to fix but that was less than a dozen out of several thousand.

I also used the MP3 Tags types context box that pops up when you right click a MP3 file in foobar2000 to eliminate the multiple tags. I found that if I got rid of the APE tags I stopped getting that error message. If you set MP3Tag properly it will eliminate also eliminate extra tags.

Eddit: About those APE tags. I came to find that APE tags should work with no problems in MP3 files after I had eliminated the ones that were in the files I had. I don't know if they were written improperly by other software or they really needed to be removed. I just was doing anything I could think to get rid of the foobar2000 error message. Removing the APE tags cleared that up.

Thanks for all the great info on MP3 file verification and the introduction to Foobar2000. This will be really helpful as I work with files in the future.

Unfortunately, it didn't fix my issue. After doing a reformat and factory reset, I reinstalled the Fuze firmware (to make sure I was working with a clean slate) and then copied some verified files. Still the same problem - the sound cuts out every 1-2 seconds for about 0.5-1 seconds.

It would seem to be some component in the OS that isn't getting rewritten when the firmware is redone. Is there something like that?

Also, another possibly pertinent piece of information: when this whole thing happened, it appears to have messed up the microSD card that was in the player at the time as well. I can still read / write with the card on Windows using a card reader, but then I try to use it in my digital camera, I get an error.

This would be easy enough to test, if it's a v1 or v2 you could try to rockbox it and see if it fixes or does the same. If it does the same "cut out" then it's hardware related problem that most likely can not be fixed. If it works fine then you should be able to fix the issue once identified properly.