Unknown genre, album with some tracks

On my 8GB Fuze, some tracks on some albums are ending up with unknown genre, unknown artist, and/or unknown album.  This happens whether the tracks are on the internal memory or the microSDHC card.  In all cases, it appears that the title contains special characters.  Tracks from the same album, and same id3 tags, without special characters are indexed properly.

Example albums with one or more tracks showing up as Unknown genre are Angelika’s Shivo-Ham, Enya’s Shepherd Moons and The Memory of Trees, and Dechen Shak-Dagsay’s DEWA CHE universal healing power of tibetan mantras albums.

[Update: The Angelika album may be a different issue.  While the genre is showing up as Unknown (instead of Chant), the artist name of Angelika is displayed.  There don’t seem to be special characters involved anywhere with this one.]

Tracks are synched with Media Monkey running Windows XP SP3.  Firmware is the latest - 01.01.15A.

Are there any workarounds, other than retitling the tracks?

It would be nice if this could be fixed.

Message Edited by GuyScharf on 11-22-2008 09:48 PM

You’ll probably have to retitle. Are you sure Media Monkey is making ID2v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags? (ISO-etc. instead of UTF).

Thanks.  Retitling in ASCII solved all but the Angelika album problem.   Media Monkey had been set for ASCII+UTF.  I changed it to ASCII (only).  (It would be nice if the Fuze fully supported Unicode, or at least didn’t get all confused when some field wasn’t plain ASCII.  It displays the characters on the screen ok; the problem appears to be just in index creation.)

With the Angelika album, I found that it indexed properly if the genre was set to “New Age” but turned up as an unknown genre if the genre was set to “Chant.”  I have other albums with the “Chant” genre and they all index correctly. It’s a puzzlement.

Message Edited by GuyScharf on 11-23-2008 12:17 AM

Same problem here. Sansa Clip identifies tracks / albums / artists with special characters (grave acute accent, umlaut, cedilla, circumflex, etc.) as ‘unknown’. The tracks lose their numbering, but seem to play without problem. Also, the special characters are displayed correctly on the Clip.

I’m using the latest firmware - V02.01.32F.

I’m using J.River Media Center to manage my music and transfer to the Clip. It does not offer conversion from UTF encoding to ASCII.

Is there another solution?

Are SanDisk going to fix this? It must be effecting thousands of their customers.

mp3tag can retag a whole folder at once.  Set Tools/Options/Tags/Mpegs to Write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 

THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!!!  I ran into this problem with my scandisc clip.  It happened all of the sudden and I could not figure it out.  I even chatted with the sansa company and they could not figure it out.  Your answer about mp3tag was my solution, too!  I had no clue how or what to do so I just played with it until I figured it out.  Thanks again!