Beginner's questions

MP3 players Sansa Clip | Clip+
1

Hi!

I just got my new Clip. Why battery chargerging takes so long? It showed 80% charge for quite a long time, until it got to 100%. When full, it even does not say battery charged or something, like all other gadgets.

When plugged in to the computer, I can’t navigate the menu system?

The auto radio station search seems to not find anything.

2

You need to have the headphones plugged in to autoscan for stations. The headphone cord is the FM antenna.When the battery is new it may take quite a while for the battery to charge completely. After a few charge cycles it won’t take so long. The charging icon on the player will go off when charging is complete. The player buttons don’t operate while the player is connected to the pc. If you want to use the player while charging, then get an AC USB wall charger.

Message Edited by JK98 on 08-08-2009 12:43 PM

3

I actually listen to a lot of stuff which are sorted in directories with a proper name, but in the directory only named like track01 and so on. I didn’t feel the need to tag them, since usually I listen to them onece, then delete.

Sansa seems to use tags only, so how shall I optimize my listening experience?

I tried to get to know foobar2000, maybe it is also good for easy tagging needs? But actually it is a little bit complicated. Do you know of a good guide to learn basic useful features of foobar2000? Or is it for the geeks only?

4

I use mp3 Tag for editing tags.

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

It is free and easy to use. With one command it can set all the tags in a folder equal to the file names.

Don’t forget to use the save tag command after tag changes.

6

Thank you for your replies.

I already figured out I better have a wall charger.

By changing my location I was also be able to scan for more FM stations. Is there a way to also name them?

The thing is with the Podcast and Audiobook folders is the following: I have some podcasts or audibooks in the following format:

folder\track01

folder\track02

…

and so on.

If I copy folder in the Audiobook or Podcast folder, track01, track02 and so on will be placed in the main Podcast folder. It is quite annoying. How shall I play these podcasts? I only want to listen to them once, so I may not want to tag them.

How compatible is the player with .wav files? If I record them with the player, it plays them. If I upload one to the voice memos folder, it does not recognize it. Strange. 

7

I posted same problem with files I uploaded to voice folder. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with them being .wav. A renamed file was also not recognized. This was NOT the case with my earlier M240. I suspect the clip is indexing the voice files as they are recorded and doesn’t recognize renamed or uploaded files.

I’ve not used the podcast, audible or audiobook folders.

8

I need some functionality between the Music folders and Audiobook/Playlist folders. Eg. I would like to resume Music too, if I forgot at which track I stopped listening an album, but the GoList feature would be useful for podcasts as well. I see some unnecessary artifical limitations within the system.

On the other hand, in which exact format can I manually upload playlist files to the Clip to understand them?

I tried two type of m3u files, the traditional relative

track01.mp3

track02.mp3

track03.mp3

And the

#EXTM3U

#EXTINF:

absolute path\track01.mp3

(Which format ■■■■■ big times, anyways, compared to the old one. Or it’s just me who don’t get it?)

So none of them worked on my Clip. Please help me, which one does? 

9

When the only option is to charge through the computer’s USB port, after awhile the screen of the Clip becomes dark, blank. What does it mean? Charge is still continuing or disrupted?

10

Thank you for your replies guys between the lines. However I still can’t consider the topic “solved”, as newer questions arise on the go. Cheers!

11

@market wrote:
When the only option is to charge through the computer’s USB port, after awhile the screen of the Clip becomes dark, blank. What does it mean? Charge is still continuing or disrupted?

The display shuts off after an hour, but the charging continues 'till it’s full.

13

Thank you for your feedback on the screen. When it finishes charging, will it say anything like chage is complete? I didn’t get to that phase yet.

Can I see the file names when they don’t have tags in the podcast folder only? Actually I only get “Unknown” in the music folder.

When I put something in the podcast folder like

Podcast1\alpha

Podcast1\gamma

and also 

Podcast2\beta

Podcast2\theta

then I will see them in the main directory, not in Podcast1 and Podcast2 directories like

alpha

beta

gamma

theta

Is that normal? Is that you are refering to?

15

Thank yo for your reply Miikerman.

It seems I need to fill out the ID3 tags even on the files I want to listen to only once.

And the new question: with which software can I add ID3 tags to .wav files? Actually I want to listen to some voice recordings, and compressing those .wav’s to another format worsens the quality anyways, so it’s better to keep them a .wavs. But I need the ability to play them repeatedly, and in order to do so, I have to put them in the Music folder and hence tag them. What is the solution to my problem?

16

I needed to do exactly what you are doing to make a contact list. You can’t add tag info to .wav files (or at least, I don’t know a way). You also apparently cannot rename files in the record directory or convert to mp3 and keep them in the record directory.

The best I can come up with is to convert to mp3, tag with album name and filename and have them show up in the music directory. Actually, while it’s not quite as good for me as having it in the voice record folder, the way I’m doing it does work quite well. Using mp3tag makes the tagging straightforward. I convert using dbpoweramp but there’s probably a slew of utilities that will do that.

18

32 kbps is fine for voice recordings. I have some 16 kbps voice recordings I downloaded that sound quite good, but not as good as the 32kbps ones from the same source. The sound quality for voice recordings doesn’t improve much using 64 kbps rather than 32 kbps. The most important factor for the quality of voice recordings is the quality of the original recording.

Always use mono for voice recordings if you have the option to do so. Using 32 kbps rather than 16 kbps also provides better compatability with other brands of mp3 players. Some other brands of mp3 players won’t play mp3 files below 32 kbps.

19

Converting the .wav voice recording even to the highest quality MP3 decreases the quality big time. But thanks for the idea, I may try to convert it to FLAC. The Clip supports the FLAC format by now, isn’t it? Though, on the official site I haven’t found any info on it.

My files taking more space on the player is not an issue for me. 

21

Thanks Miikerman!

As I said: place on the drive is not an issue. However, I see the difference between compressed and uncompressed voice. It may be due to the fact I am not audio engineer who know how to best compress voice, I just compressed it the same way as music and it was not good.

I have a new question is about playlists! I prefer playlists like they contain the following text like in this example.

track01.mp3

track02.mp3

track03.mp3 

Format is .m3u.

I use this format for all my albums. Then on the player I sadly noticed Clip says to all of them: empty. Why? What shall I do to my playlists to the clip to see? Which playlist format shall I use? I really don’t want to use absolute locations instead of relative ones, it makes things complicated.

I also don’t want my playlist to look more messy than necessary. In my format, all important text is in the playlist and no more is needed.

Thanks! 

22

So, anyone can recommend me what format of playlists work with my Clip? Without physically doubling the songs. How can I have working playlists using MSC mode and free software like foobar2000 or free and open source software like VLC media player?

Many thanks! 

23

Foobar comes with some tagging capability.  THere is a plugin called masstagger that has more functions like tagging artist and album name based on the folder names.  

For quick tag setting I usually use dbpoweramp which can access tagging straight from windows explorer (the folder browser).   

24

I used winamp to make a playlist. First time I created using files on the clip and stored in music directory. The second time I used the image of the music directory on hd (you all do keep one I hope).

Regardless, if you avoid pathnames (easy to edit out using any text editor like notepad and ‘replace all command’), if you finish up with sample .mnu file below stored in music directory, should work fine.

Note: I only use a single level directory under music, I imagine it would work for multi-level but you would have to test>

Sample playlist after editing out pathname

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:169,The Beatles - Day Tripper
Beatles\Day Tripper.mp3
#EXTINF:135,The Beatles - We Can Work It Out
Beatles\We Can Work It Out.mp3
#EXTINF:936,1812 Festival Overture, Op. 49 - 1812 Festival Overture, Op. 49 - Various
Tchaikovsky CD\1812 Festival Overture, Op. 49 - Various.mp3
#EXTINF:73,Mussorgsky - Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
Pictures at an Exhibition\Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks.mp3
#EXTINF:115,Mussorgsky - Catacombs: Roman Sepulchre
Pictures at an Exhibition\Catacombs, Roman Sepulchre.mp3
#EXTINF:661,Mussorgsky - Night on Bald Mountain
Pictures at an Exhibition\Night on Bald Mountain.mp3

Item preceeding the \ is folder name which in my case is same as tagged album title. Same for filename/song title.