Songs load according to Windows Media Player, but do not appear in Clip + menu

I apologize in advance if I am posting this in the wrong place.

I have a new  4GB Clip+ with a 32 GB micro SD card. I synced about 29 GB of albums via WMP to the SD card and all looked fine until I tried to access the albums on the Clip+. Perhpas a quarter of the albums transferred do not show up in either the album listing or in the artist listing. I have tried every possible  variation I can think of to get themto appear. Deleting then reinstalling via WMP, dragging and dropping to the Music folder of the external card as files or as album folders using a sample album - nothing worked. The sample album is a rip via WMP from a CD to wma files. It previously synced toa Zune without incident. I have a variety or files, some mp3, some wma, some ripped, some assembled into albums from previous downloads. I have also used a tag editor with the mp3 files to make sure all the artisit, album, and genre tags were consistent within each problem mp3 album. I can only assume that the wma metadat is OK since all the CDs rips were made with the same computer and WMA, and some sync to the Clip+ just fine. The most frustrating thing is that there is no consistency, some albums of each variety work, other won’t work no matter what I try. Any help with this issue would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance for any thoughts on the subject.

Steve 

I seem to be having the same problem with an 8 gig external.

When I go into folders it shows “empty” but I did the same as you and loaded the music several ways - Its there, just not recognised

@segce wrote:

I seem to be having the same problem with an 8 gig external.

When I go into folders it shows “empty” but I did the same as you and loaded the music several ways - Its there, just not recognised

Answered in your duplicate post:

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/Clip-External-micro/m-p/254974#M39806

OK, I have done more work on the initial isse. I removed from the Clip+ memory all Music and Album files that were indicated as synced by WMP but not visible in the Clip+ menu. I ws then able to successfully reload some of the albums, but I hit a roadblock when I had about 24 GB of the 32 GB card filled. In response to the comment about tags being the key, I was careful to make sure that all tags in a given album were consistent and they are all ID3V2.3. It also doesn’t seem to matter whether the music coding is wma or mp3.

So the key question: How do I get the Clip+ to accept more than 24 GB in a 32 GB SD card?

By the way, I can sync successfully to the 4 GB internal memory independent of the problem with the external SD card. I also have the latest version (16) of the firmware loaded.

Again, all suggestions gratefully received.

Steve

How many tracks are we talking about betweeen the card and the internal memory? There is an 8000 track database limit, but it’s dependent upon several factors, such as file name (or ID3 tag) character lengths, folder-nesting, etc. Some have hit the ceiling at less than 5000 tracks.

That is the reply I have been dreading. There are 5300 songs recorded on the 32 GB card, and no matter what I have tried, I haven’t been able to imcrease that. I filled the internal memory after hitting the limit on the external card, and had no problem doing that. It’s a very frustrating situation, because the key reason for buying the Clip+ was to increase the capacity from my current 30GB Zune to 32 + 4 GB and I have ended up with a net loss of 2GB (24 + 4). I travel a lot and like to take my entire music library with me.

Is there any possible work-around?

I thought it might just be a limit on the searchable database, so I dropped a few albums into the Music folder hoping I could access them throught the Folder menu selection, but that didn’t work either.

Lesson learned, I guess - don’t buy old technology!

Steve

One possibility would be to install Rockbox on your player and to use that operating system–Rockbox’s file limit is 10,000 or so.

Like you, I really wish that SanDisk would expend some energy in modernizing the Clip’s operating system, to increase or even eliminate the file limit (with 32GB microSD cards readily achievable nowadays price-wise, the current file limitation simply is too unrealistically low); and to eliminate (or hide) the database refresh hindrance, a real irritation.

Try getting rid of embedded album art if there is any. Some have reported that the player can access many more songs after embedded album art is removed.

You could also try removing any comments and all other tags besides the ID3v2.3 ISO8859-1 tags which the player uses. Also remove album artist tags since the player doesn’t support these.

@miikerman wrote:

One possibility would be to install Rockbox on your player and to use that operating system–Rockbox’s file limit is 10,000 or so.

 

Like you, I really wish that SanDisk would expend some energy in modernizing the Clip’s operating system, to increase or even eliminate the file limit (with 32GB microSD cards readily achievable nowadays price-wise, the current file limitation simply is too unrealistically low); and to eliminate (or hide) the database refresh hindrance, a real irritation.

Also solved by Rockbox. :wink:

@marvin_martian wrote:


@miikerman wrote:

. . . .and to eliminate (or hide) the database refresh hindrance, a real irritation.


Also solved by Rockbox. :wink:

While this sounds like the Holy Grail, I found this feature annoying and confusing when I played with Rockbox on one of my old e260’s. Maybe you can enlighten me if I’m interpreting this wrong . . .

In Rockbox there’s an option to refresh the database in the background, right? So how does one know when it’s complete? There’s no pop-up message or anything. And what if I want to listen to a song, album, whatever that I just loaded. When will it be available for me to do that? How long does it take?

Personally, I don’t mind waiting for the database refresh in the OF. There’s plenty of other things I can do while waiting the few minutes in takes, and I can be sure when it’s done, it’s done unlike Rockbox where you’re playing a guessing game.

Again, maybe I’m mis-understanding the way this works. Am I?

@tapeworm wrote:


@marvin_martian wrote:


@miikerman wrote:

. . . .and to eliminate (or hide) the database refresh hindrance, a real irritation.


Also solved by Rockbox. :wink:


While this sounds like the Holy Grail, I found this feature annoying and confusing when I played with Rockbox on one of my old e260’s. Maybe you can enlighten me if I’m interpreting this wrong . . .

 

In Rockbox there’s an option to refresh the database in the background, right? So how does one know when it’s complete? There’s no pop-up message or anything. And what if I want to listen to a song, album, whatever that I just loaded. When will it be available for me to do that? How long does it take?

 

Personally, I don’t mind waiting for the database refresh in the OF. There’s plenty of other things I can do while waiting the few minutes in takes, and I can be sure when it’s done, it’s done unlike Rockbox where you’re playing a guessing game.

 

Again, maybe I’m mis-understanding the way this works. Am I?

In some themes there is a little icon that appears that  indicates memory activity. Also, if you go to the database and try to select it, if it is not finished refreshing,  you will see numbers flashing by on the screen. As far as I can tell, even my 36GB Zip, loaded to capacity, the db refresh is less than 5 minutes.

Regardless of that, anything on the player or card is available instantly in the file browser…so one can easily select an album you just added and play it while the database refreshes.

A problem, unfortunately, with the Clip’s database refresh is that with a 32GB microSD card in the Clip, a refresh can take 15-20 minutes or more (even up to half an hour). If I don’t think to “warm the player up” in advance (like my Dad’s old Ford Mustang left in front of the house overnight in a below-freezing night) and just grab it as I’m heading out the door, I can be at my destination before the Clip ever allows me to play it. Again, irritating and frustrating, and not the way these things should be, IMHO. As to Rockbox, I haven’t put it on my Clips, but on my iRiver jukebox player, the database refreshes in the background, during which the player still may be used. As noted above, some of the screen options have a symbol showing that something is going on; otherwise, I believe that at least in one Rockbox version, a small message appeared on the screen saying that the database refresh was complete (I may be misrecalling this). But in the end, it really didn’t make a difference, as the player is playable in the meanwhile (as it should be, SanDisk . . .).

@miikerman wrote:
A problem, unfortunately, with the Clip’s database refresh is that with a 32GB microSD card in the Clip, a refresh can take 15-20 minutes or more (even up to half an hour). If I don’t think to “warm the player up” in advance (like my Dad’s old Ford Mustang left in front of the house overnight in a below-freezing night) and just grab it as I’m heading out the door, I can be at my destination before the Clip ever allows me to play it. Again, irritating and frustrating, and not the way these things should be, IMHO. As to Rockbox, I haven’t put it on my Clips , but on my iRiver jukebox player, the database refreshes in the background, during which the player still may be used. As noted above, some of the screen options have a symbol showing that something is going on; otherwise, I believe that at least in one Rockbox version, a small message appeared on the screen saying that the database refresh was complete (I may be misrecalling this). But in the end, it really didn’t make a difference, as the player is playable in the meanwhile (as it should be, SanDisk . . .).

Well, why not put it on even one of your Clips? Especially the one with a 32GB card? Rather than complain about something that is unlikely to change, why not  take action and eliminate the problem for yourself…especially on a Clip+ that is probably done getting any meaningful firmware updates.

There is no album art in any of the album folders (assuming that is where it would be), as there were all synced via WMP. Could you guess how much I would gain if I deleted all the album artist tags? I could do it fairly efficiently using mp3tag but it would still be quite time consuming, and I have already spent way tto many hours chasing this issue.