Windows Media Player 11 Slow Sync

I recently upgraded to WMP 11. When I go to sync files to my Sansa C140, the
process is PAINFULLY slow (I mean, it took over a half hour to sync about 1
hour's worth of music). It would seem as though the sync time is all on my
computer, since once the synchronization progress bar starts for the song,
the copying process is quick... It's all the "preparing to synchronize" stuff
that takes forever.

My machine is an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.1 GHz) with 512 MB RAM, which seems
to be above the requirements, so I'm not sure why this process is taking so
long. I've also checked to make sure the conversion cache is large enough
(it's currently at 2 GB), so I'm not sure what else I can do (besides go back
to WMP 10) to fix this issue.

WMP11 is a dog. Sync'ing was much faster in WMP10. I can't believe such a
core functionality would be fubar'ed.

I'm syncing a Cingular 2125 with 2GB memory card and it takes ~12 hours to
fill up the card.

Please make this bug a priority 1, sev 1 issue in Product Studio!

That's ridiculous. While I'm a bit relieved that it's not just me and my
setup, I would have to think that this would be something of very high
priority for them. I mean, it takes me 30-40 minutes to sync a playlist, so
I imagine that WMP11 is completely unusable for those who have the large
capacity (20GB+) hard drive players.

Unfortunately, I went and downloaded Urge and bought a few songs, so I can't
use those songs in anything other than WMP11, otherwise I'd go back to WMP10.
If anyone at MS cares to reply to this with answers as to why it's so
freakin' slow and how we can fix it, please do.

Well, 2GB is a lot of data. Especially if you shove it down a USB1.1
connection, which a lot of phones have. Then, you have to shovel it
through the device's limited CPU across it's bus to the SD card.
My advice ? Spend the $8 on a cheap USB2 card reader.
You can expect to sync to the card anywhere between 10-20x faster than
through the device.

My Sansa c140 does the same thing. I used Napster for a while and
didn't have any problems until I upgraded to Media Player 11. I
switched over to Urge to see if that would help, and still the same
slow sync times. If I put my MP3 player into MSC it transfers songs at
great speeds, go to the MTP mode and forget it.

Even with the USB 2.0 on my Sansa C140, I experience huge delays which I
know are not from file transfer. How do I know?

Well, I used Windows explorer to open my sansa and copy some music onto it,
just to see if it would work. It did, and the copying was quite fast.

It seems that the "wasted" time is before or after the transfer..
Typically, when I'm transferring, the individual progress bars move quickly,
but in between songs there are huge delays (4 to 5 minutes). Everything
else in the Media Player is fast (burning, ripping, etc), but syncing is
ridiculously slow.

My Sansa C15 does the same thing. It seem to be a problem with MTP mode. I
have noticed it when I transfer a new song from a new albumb. Like it takes
forever just to transfer the albumb info over onto the device. Transfering
the actually songs themselves doesn't take long at all. I can manually
transfer my entire library in 30 minutes. That is 1.36 GB of music. But in
WM11 it's so slow just between albumbs. When a single song from the albumb
has been transfered over already, the rest of the songs transfer quickly.

Why should I have to bother with using a separate EEPROM reader instead of
just "PnP"?

Why is it syncing to the same device is so much faster using WMP 10 than 11?

The reason we even use WMP is to be able to shuffle music and pick and
choose individual songs to download to a device. Asking users to go into a
file manager and c&p files is like telling them to buy an iPhone when it
comes out.

Don't give me the "oh it's USB 1.x and device cpu" execuse. I don't buy it
and it's unsettling to hear that from a Microsoft MVP.

It's actually an NAND Flash chip, not an EEPROM - a different chip
type. The distinction isn't important, I thought I'd mention it though

Because it's much faster, and your time is more valuable than $10 ?

I can't answer that without real world data - I don't see your timing
tests which show that to be the case.

What I said if you re-read it, is that in all cases it's much faster
to sync directly to the card using a card reader, rather than having
WMP talk to the device, and move the file to the device CPU, which
then moves it over its slow internal bus to the memory card.

There's no "excuse" made here, I don't get what you're implying.
The physical hardware here is the bottleneck, not WMP.
Buy a card reader and save yourself the hassle.

[Ackis]

Sorry for necro bumping this, however I've been experiencing this issue with WMP 11 for over a year on my Sansa C150... this was the first thing that came up with a google search.

It's not a USB 2.0/1.0 issue as mentioned before (using USB 2.0, and have done tests with copying files via explorer).

It took over 12 hours for it to sync 2 gigs of music... was very frustrating to say the least.

Hmmm the two options are Automatic and MSC, setting it to MSC didn't work (device isn't even recognized on Vista 64)

[jijusino]

Change the usb setting in the sansa menu. Change from automatic to the other available option I think is MTP (or what ever it is, there are just two options automatic and that one, the important think is not leave automatic). With this change windows will see it as a USB drive but WMP still recognize it a sansa 140c and the transfer go normal. It works for me.

I have it with Windows Vista 32. c140 works at the same speed as my other sansa e250 on MSC setting. MTP work same with Sansa e250 but extremely slow with c140. Anyway good luck with your sync.

[greggyt87]

Recently d/led WMP11 as an upgrade as well, and just today was racking my brain to solve this problem, as my synching was taking me close to a half hour which I decided was ridiculous. I found the solution. Now, I use a Sony-Walkman MP3 player, yep sony still makes walkman, just upgraded lol, and what I had to was first, go into My computer. Access the Properties for the device that's giving you trouble. Now, you should have 2 tabs, General, and AutoPlay. Go into Autoplay and specify the WMP option: sync digital media files to this device. Selecting this SHOULD, convert your MP3's storage space into an easily recognizable format for WMP11. Once this is complete, synching and copying files should be instantaneous. If not, it hasn't worked, and your search continue. Good luck, I know it's a pain!