I converted over 100 songs from Cds to Flac format. I then copied these to my SansaClip plus. When playing back only a few of the songs will play. The player skips thru most of the songs before settling on the few that will play. All o0f the songs I converted play fine on my computer. Also, the songs have no names on the player. Only track numbers. Anyone else have this problem?
Since FLAC is open-source, there are a lot of varieties of FLAC and unfortunately Sansa can’t handle all of them. It depends on your ripping software. See if you can figure out the difference–quality? bitrate?–between a song that plays and a song that doesn’t.
You may have to re-rip. (Foobar and Exact Audio Copy are good rippers.) But not necessarily–read on.
Your other problem is song names. Unless you go all the way down to Folder view, the Sansa reads the tag information in the files–no tag, no name. Your ripping software has to find the tags online or you have to put them in. Again, there’s a lot of variation.
There is free tagging software for Windows, mp3tag: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
(If you’re on Apple, kid3 is a free tagging program, but I’m more familiar with mp3tag.)
Download the mp3tag setup file, not the green garbageware Download buttons.
When installing, allow mp3tag to add itself to Context menus. Open it, go to Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg and Write and make the choice ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1, the best format for the Sansa.
OK, right-click on one of your FLAC albums and use mp3tag to open it. Highlight all the songs. Go to Tag Sources at the top of mp3tag. You may be able to get automatic tags from Amazon or freedb. If not, you’ll have to do it yourself–you can tag Artist and Album for all the songs on the left. Or if the filenames are consistent you can go to Convert and Convert Filename to Tag. It uses fields like %track% and %artist% and it’s pretty easy to figure out.
The bonus is that once you’ve done the tagging, mp3tag might also fix the headers of your problem FLAC files so the Sansa can read them. It’s worth a try for one album. Best to delete the problem files from the Sansa, fix the tags on your computer and send the album over again.
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