Disable Sorting?

Hello, I’ve read through some issues about sorting on this forum, and I was hoping there was a way to disable sorting.  Here’s what I mean.

I have a collection of music on my PC sorted in folders by artist.  In each artist folder is a subfolder of albums.  Then, in each album folder is the music track, typically .mp3.

Most of these are sorted normally, but there are a few exceptions.  For example, I have audio podcasts simply all contained in a single “podcasts” folder and all audiobooks in an “audiobooks” folder.  So, these folders are listed how I have sorted other artist folders, but there is no “album” subfolder, simply the .mp3 file of the podcast or audiobook.

When I load these files onto my clip jam and then power it on, it takes a few minutes to discover the new media, and then sorts it.  I suppose it does this according to the metadata associated with each individual .mp3.

My question is this: is there a way to disable this sorting so that I can navigate according to the folder structure on my PC?  For example, if I download a podcast, the name of the podcast might be listed as the “artist” in the file’s metadata.  This isn’t correct.  I simply want to browse to an individual podcast by navigating to my “podcast” folder.  I don’t want to have to navigate through all of the other music artists to find the podcast.

It isn’t just with podcasts or audiobooks.  I’m also in a band and I like to sort all of the songs we play live, both covers and originals, into a single folder so I can browse them quickly and play all of these songs as if they were a single artist.  This becomes impossible as the clip jam sorts these files according to artist and album.

This seems to be the case regardless of whether I load these files onto the device memory (8GB) or onto a 32GB SD card.

When I browse the SD card on my PC, the folders appear exactly how they did before loading them onto the device.  But when browsing with the clip jam, everthing is sorted differently.

Does anyone know of a way to disable this automatic sorting?  Maybe this can be done by removing the metadata associated with the .mp3 files?

Thanks in advance.

It appears to me that you are not attempting to edit the metadata in the ID3 tags of your audio files.  Music Mode and Podcast Mode rely on carefully curated ID3 tags.  I have never come across any way to turn off the automatic database processing every time the player detects new audio & deleted audio files. I guess it takes less than one minute ??

Have you ever tried using FOLDER Mode to access your audio file in your internal memory and external micro SD card?

 Here is a link to the Clip Jam User Manual

       http://downloads.sandisk.com/downloads/um/clipjam-um.pdf

      (There is a very brief mention of Folders on page 5.)

You should be aware of a complexity using FOLDER Mode on the Clip Jam (and Clip Sport).

         Folder Mode does not provide any internal sorting of files.

                 The file order displayed is a direct result of the chronological order you load the folders and files from your PC.

         Maybe check out this webpage for a detailed explanation of “FAT” sorting problems in Folder Mode.   

                     http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/File-Management/FAT-Sorter.shtml

I have not tried folder mode.  It sounds exactly like what I am looking for though.  It looks like this will allow me to browse files according to how I have them sorted on my PC

What a great and simplistic way to do this. I just assumed once the files were “scattered” they wouldn’t be in a folder but I just checked it out. Works great!