How to play songs in Alphabetical Order???

Probably a dumb question, but I did look for the answer…

I’ve got a 2GB Clip+ (8GB MicroSD added on) and I have about 900 songs on the card. I use mp3tag to tag Artist, Title and Album (keeping Year, Track, Genre and Comment Blank). I set the album for every single one as ‘mp3’ because I don’t really care to have it broken down by albums, just artist and title. 

Listing by Artist works fine, but if I scroll down the list and pick, say, Aerosmith, it will show me that I have 13 songs by them. However they’re not in alphabetical order…all the way. Some are, and then some aren’t. It looks like this:

F.I.N.E.

Fever

Last Child

Mama Kin

No More No More

One Way Street

Same Old Song and Dance

Shut Up and Dance

Sweet Emotion

Train Kept Rollin’

Walk This Way

Back In the Saddle

Dream On

It appears to throw a couple of the earlier ones at the bottom (12 and 13) when they should be numbers 1 and 2. I’ve noticed that it’s like this with other artists too. How can I get the tracks by each artist in correct alphabetical order?

By any chance, do the titles that are out of order have a space in front of the title?  That might be throwing the ordering off (a guess here).

Do any of your titles have the track number at the beginning? If so, you will probably have to edit these out and/or use leading zeros (01, 02, 03, etc.) in MP3Tag.

It’s the strangest thing…no spaces in front of the titles, nor are there any numbers. I used mp3tag to eliminate every single tag except artist, title and album. It’s like that for about every artist…sometimes it will start at G and go through Z and then start over again and put more songs.

I was thinking i might have something to do with the creation/modification date…like if I had put a certain number of songs on at one point in time and then a few months later put another batch in there. I hope not though, because that would mean every time I’d add new tracks they would be out of order. I am going to try copying everthing out of that folder and then back in to see what happens.

Another thing to check is the tag version. Sansas work best with ID3v2.3 ISO 8859-1. MP3Tag lets you set which version it writes, so check there and resave the tags if you change the setting.

(I don’t know that different tag versions will cause the problem you’re experiencing, but it can’t hurt to update your tags to what the player likes best.)

By the way:  these glitches are not you: I’ve heard of them before.  Sometimes simply resaving the files under MP3Tag can fix matters (seemingly, by putting all the files on an even par).  But indeed, frustrating.

Well…I got it to work. Here’s what I did (and my files were tagged with the ones you guys suggested - thanks):

on my MicroSD card, the songs were in the my_music folder. It had a bunch of directories by default. I took them out of there and then deleted all the directories on the card. When I plugged the card back in, it gave me a MUSIC folder, which had AUDIOBOOKS and PODCASTS underneath it. I put all the songs in the MUSIC folder and after it refreshed, it now works properly. Man I love the Clip+.

BTW, I also moved my podcasts and audiobooks to the card as well. The clip itself is empty but it has 217MB taken up…is that how much space the firmware occupies?

Thanks for reporting back.  Yet another computer idiosyncrasy–sometimes it just seems best to leave them alone to do things the way that they want …

Am not sure about the space issue.  What you could do is reformat the Clip+ under its System Settings–that will clear anything unneeded (such as old content) away.