FLAC files not showing up in MUSIC screen: they are in FOLDERs screen (but order is wrong?)

I ripped a CD using ‘grip’ : with the output format of FLAC on a Linux (Mint) machine.

When I sync’d the album (dragged and dropped) to my CLIP JAM - the MUSIC folder doesn’t show the tracks (I tried searching by Artist, Album and Track - it doesn’t show up anywhere).

The FLAC files are extracted in the folder structure of Artist\Album\<track-no><track-title>.flac (the same structure I use for my MP3s - which do work).

The FLAC files are tagged: here’s an example output from the Linux command ‘id3v2’ for one track:

$ id3v2 --list $F
id3v1 tag info for 01.who_will_love_me_now_jimmy_gomez_mix.flac:
Title  : Who Will Love Me Now (Jimmy Go  Artist: Sunscreem                     
Album  : Ten Mile Bank                   Year: 2001, Genre: Rock (17)
Comment: Created by Grip                 Track: 1
01.who_will_love_me_now_jimmy_gomez_mix.flac: No ID3v2 tag

The FLAC files play just fine if I select them from the FOLDERs view on the CLIP, but I also note that some of the tracks are out-of-order.

It also noteable that the ‘id3v2’ tool reports that there are no ‘id3v2’ tags - just ‘id3v1’ tags - could this be the problem ?

Thanks,

John

Additionally ‘easytag’ also sees the TAGS in the files.

I suggest using mp3 files on Sandisk players. First of all, you will probably get much longer battery life using mp3 files rather than FLAC. You are also much more likely to run into gliches if you use a format other than mp3. I doubt that you could hear the difference between mp3 files at 320 kbps and FLAC files played on the Clip Jam using your portable headphones or earphones.

@midijohnny wrote:

 

It also noteable that the ‘id3v2’ tool reports that there are no ‘id3v2’ tags - just ‘id3v1’ tags - could this be the problem ? 

 

FLAC files do not use the same ID3 tags as .mp3 files. If your software is writing this format to your files, that could be the problem.

@JK98 : thanks for the reply - I actually agree with your doubts - I’m not sure if I can tell the difference between an MP3 version and a FLAC version of the same track - unless I really ‘squint my ears’ (and even then - I wonder if I am hearing differences [better stereo separation, more distinction between instruments] or just fooling myself into hearing the difference).

But I wanted to experiement with different formats on my CLIP JAM - to see (aside from just the quality of the audio) how well it handles different formats etc.

It seems - unless I am not tagging the FLACs (as @tapeworm is suggesting below) in the right way  - the JAM is able to read the tags from non MP3 files (at this point at least).

I wonder if anybody else has actually tried this on their CLIP JAM - if so - what results do you get - and if you got it to work - is there some particular method you have to use ?

Cheers

John

@tapeworm - thanks for this - I’ll take another look at whether there is a different way of tagging the FLACs.

I’m fairly sure (but I could be proved wrong) the tagging has worked - since they appear to show up fine in ‘easytag’ and ‘id3v2’; maybe it is the version of the tags that need to be changed  - or it could be most people simply don’t use FLAC on their CLIP JAMs and the support isn’t as good as for MP3 - dunno.

Cheers

John

@JK98 - I hadn’t thought about battery life - but I guess since the FLACs are ~10 times larger, there is ~10 times as much storage-access, which means more (10 times more?) demand on the battery ?

Almost all of the power used on a portable mp3 player is for the CPU to decode audio. The power required to read the flash memory is relatively small, even for high bitrate formats like flac.

@saratoga - thanks for this - would that mean playing FLACs might even take less power than playing MP3s  - depending on the complexity of decoding FLAC compared to MP3 (and I guess depending on how much the hardware itself is doing the grunt-work of the decode?)

Also how efficiently written the decoding software is. The main effort to make code efficient for Sandisk players is for decoding mp3 files. Other formats are just an afterthough. So it might be possible to make software for playing other formats almost as efficient as for playing mp3 files(and perhaps in some cases even more efficient), however that doesn’t seem to happen with Sandisk firmware. I guess using Sandisk firmware battery life for FLAC might be around half that of playing mp3 files?