Hopefully somebody here can point me in the right direction but I’m currently going round in circles trying to get some audiobooks on my wife’s Sansa Sport to be usable.
The firmware in the Sansa Sport is 1.29. I’m also using Mp3tag v2.75 with tools/options/tags/mpeg/write set to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.
I have ripped one book that’s spread across 8 CDs - 185 tracks if I remember correctly. (Ripped with Windows Media Player to WMA files). I’ve put these in a directory structure <author>\<title>\<files>. Using Mp3tag the files are named <disc><track>.wma (ie 101.wma,201.wma,…824.wma). The fields “artist” and “album artist” are set to the author’s name. The field “album” is set to the book’s name. I’ve set the “track” field to <disk><track> so it starts at 101 and then goes on 102,…124,201,202…824. I set the “title” field to <disc>.<track> (eg 2.08). The “genre” field is set to “audiobook”.
The other set - 33 CDs with a range of books I’ve treated in a similar fashion. The filenames are sequential being <disc><track>.wma. The directory structure is <author>\<category>\<book>\<tracks>. In this case there are only about five tracks per book. In each category the book titles have been set to “01 book title” “02 book title” and so on so that they are in the correct sequence if sorted alpabetically.
I’ve then copied the directory structure across to the “audiobooks” directory of the Sansa Sport. What I’ve ended up with, having selected “Books” then “audiobooks” is a list of ALL the titles. I would have hoped that the list at this level should just be the authors.
Selecting any of the books from the second set of CDs I find a nicely ordered list showing the 5 or so tracks in order. If I go into the book from the first set of CDs I find the list starts with 4.01 - not 1.01. After all the “4.” tracks the “7.01” tracks start but “2.01” is slipped in between “7.12” and “7.13”…and so it goes on.
Neither the Sansa manual nor Google has been any help in spelling out how the Sansa Sport goes about building its display data for the audiobooks and how it displays it. I (naively?) assumed that it would start off with a field like “album artist”, then “album”, then “title”. One would hope the last would be in track order but from other comments I’ve seen it might be in alphabetical order. My experience is that there’s an element of randomness thrown in.
I realise one solution to this would be to ignore the “audiobooks” option and just use “folder” to navigate to the right directory, but I would like to know HOW the “audiobooks” option is supposed to work. Which of the ID3 tag fields does it use? What does it do with the information it finds? Anyone know?
I hope a few more SanDisk users will provide some better advice for you.
Seems to me you can start by deciding if you will spend your effort on FOLDER MODE or AUDIOBOOK MODE.
FOLDER MODE requires careful editing of your set of subfolder names so the first 12 characters of each folder provide sufficient specificity for selecting the folder to play.
An additional requirement is copying these subfolders from your PC with the audio files all in the order you want to playback into the SanDisk device the first time you try this project. Seems like Folder Mode does not do any helpful re-sorting of the tracks. Maybe study the information at this web-link.
AUDIOBOOK MODE requires careful editing of ID3 tags. Make sure the first 12 characters in each field provide sufficient specificity. Also, I think the Clip Sport (and Clip Jam) only read 2-digit track numbers (01-99). If you have a complete book divided into 185 tracks, maybe start renumbering tracks at 01 for each CD#. So use album titles such as My Book CD1, My Book CD2, etc. With additional whole books, try to use the first 7-8 characters to identify the book name. Then CD#.
I suggest you just start with just one book from the 8 CD collection. See if you can get a working procedure for yourself before you add the second CD to the player, etc. Hopefully you will start to enjoy the Sport Clip playback features and then this learning curve will be worth all your effort.
I hope a few more SanDisk users will provide some better advice for you.
Seems to me you can start by deciding if you will spend your effort on FOLDER MODE or AUDIOBOOK MODE.
FOLDER MODE requires careful editing of your set of subfolder names so the first 12 characters of each folder provide sufficient specificity for selecting the folder to play.
An additional requirement is copying these subfolders from your PC with the audio files all in the order you want to playback into the SanDisk device the first time you try this project. Seems like Folder Mode does not do any helpful re-sorting of the tracks. Maybe study the information at this web-link.
AUDIOBOOK MODE requires careful editing of ID3 tags. Make sure the first 12 characters in each field provide sufficient specificity. Also, I think the Clip Sport (and Clip Jam) only read 2-digit track numbers (01-99). If you have a complete book divided into 185 tracks, maybe start renumbering tracks at 01 for each CD#. So use album titles such as My Book CD1, My Book CD2, etc. With additional whole books, try to use the first 7-8 characters to identify the book name. Then CD#.
I suggest you just start with just one CD from the 8 CD collection from one book. See if you can get a working procedure for yourself before you add the second CD from this one book to the player, etc, etc. Hopefully you will start to enjoy the Sport Clip playback features and then this learning curve will be worth all your effort.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. For now I have set up the clip sport to use FOLDER mode for this, and I’ll experiment with AUDIOBOOKS when i have more time.
I’m just surprised at the lack of information I’ve been able to find on what the firmware does in the AUDIOBOOKS mode. At least you’ve given me a few pointers to start with - (2-digit track numbers, first 12 characters in a field…). I’d already seen mention that things might be displayed as ordered in the directory rather than being sorted in some way first.
I do find the lack of information frustrating. For example I don’t know if the lack of filing the titles under the author’s name is just because that’s the way it works, or it’s because there’s something wrong with my ‘author’ tags in the metadata. Hopefully we can winkle out a fuller explanation of how the Sport indexes things.
I’ve just spent a little while looking at the Clip Sport. I noticed that there are various .LIB files in the root directory and assume that these are the local indexes that the clip builds after you load books onto it. I’ve just looked at the AUDBOOK.LIB file. The AUDBOOK.LIB, AUDIBLE.LIB and POSCAST.LIB files are all the same size - 188KB. That size is significantly greater than my current usage (zero for Audible and Podcasts!) so I assume these indexes are of a fixed size. If that is the case then you’re restricted to a total 766 audio tracks if using the ‘audiobooks’ menu selection.
There appears to be a 256-byte entry for each audio track. The only text I’ve found in there are matches to the ALBUM, TITLE and audio format data (eg WMA or MP3). The TITLE field is truncated to 26 characters and the ALBUM field to 12 characters. I assume this is because that’s all they bother to display. I haven’t yet checked to see how many characters they use whilst they build this index - it may well be greater. There’s no sign of any ARTIST but, of the 256 bytes, a fair percentage are set to zero. I assume (again) that the binary data in an entry is detail on where to find the track on the clip plus other data.
All in all it looks like the FOLDER option may well be the way to navigate round your audiobooks in any sensible fashion. What a pity.
Have you tried getting audiobooks from your library using OverDrive? Free books! It seems so much easier than what you are doing. I know nothing about the technicalities discussed above. I get all my audiobooks from either Audible or my nearby libraries (free). My Sport plays both once you figure out the quirks.
There is no problem using more than 99 tracks. I’ve done it before, but have found that you do need to use leading zeros sometimes (so 001, 002 and so on). However, what I have recently started to do is consolidating the MP3 files after ripping them from the library’s CDs. This means that instead of 185 tiny files, you end up with as few as you like (I normally consolidate about twenty tiny files into one file, which is about an hour in length). Less unwieldy. You still have to use MP3 TAG (or just windows file manager) to number the tracks correctly, but it’s trivial with 10 or fewer files.
Overdrive is a great choice, as someone else suggested, but they don’t have all the CDs, so the above option is sometimes needed.
