On my Sansa Clip, a playlist that worked fine before suddenly stopped working. I couldn't find anything wrong with the list: it had DOS line separators, DOS directory separators and relative paths (all stuff that Sansa needs, unfortunately). I had generated proper EXTINF meta data lines, the list was called .m3u8 to singal it's UTF-8. And after all: it had worked before.

After deleting a leftover playlist, suddenly I noticed with another playlist that had worked the day before that it was now empty. Ouch. So I investigated a bit more...

At some point, I ran across a post on a similar Sansa device titled

Firmware Bug - Playlists numbers 43, 46, and 49 are always empty

This is also what I'm seeing on my device. Certain 'slots' in the playlist list don't work.

No, I'm not kidding.

The way I 'fixed' my non-working playlist was this: I duplicated the file. Now the duplicate is on the broken slot, and the old copy is working again. Unfortunately, this also has shifted the later playlists into other slots, so I'll have to repeat this for the other affected playlists. I guess I'll just write a script to keep duplicate copies of all my playlists, since apparently there are no two consequent slots affected.

Broken slots on my Sansa Clip v2: 22, 25, 28, 34, 37, 40 (I have 59 lists currently on the player, so there might be more broken 'blocks' somewhere)

[Update: Sansa Firmware 02.01.32 says in the 'bugs fixed': Playlists redirect to GoList when there are many playlists on device, so this might be fixed now]

Congratulations to all developers (DDs or not, we have sponsored uploads, Debian contributors and such, too!) who contributed to the release of Debian GNU/Linux "lenny" 5.0. I must admit that I've been largely inactive recently, I just managed to keep the bugs on my remaining packages low. Funnily, just the day lenny was released I learned about a bug in Enigma on AMD64 that is probably worth fixing through proposed updates ...