WMP 11
Windows XP Professional SP3
Sandisk Firmware v.01.02.15P
Sandisk Clip+ 8 GB + 16 GB Sandisk microSDHC card
USB Mode set to MTP
First of all, I have searched this forum for answers about my problem but I’m not finding anything that seems to respond to it so I apologise beforehand if I’ve missed it and am double-posting.
I had the Sandisk Clip+ 8 GB without the microSDHC card at first. I added playlists to the Internal Memory through WMP 11 and there was no problem.
Then I inserted the microSDHC card and added playlists to the External Memory. The songs in the playlists
copied to the card and are visible via the Sandisk Artists/Song/Album menus. When I look at the External Memory
in WMP, I see the songs, and I see the playlists as well (there are seven different ones in all).
If I change the USB mode to MSC I can see the playlists listed on the microSDHC card in the playlists folder (there are two files per list: playlist1.pla and playlist1.pla.refs. The first of this pair seems to be empty).
Now the problem: only the very first playlist appears in the Playlist menu (from Music) of the Sandisk itself. All of the playlists (3) that are on the Internal memory are listed there as well.
Does anyone know why the other playlists on the microSDHC are not showing up in the Sandisk Music Playlist Menu choice?
I also notice that it takes a very long time (nearly an hour) for the Sandisk to Refresh media after I disconnect it from my laptop, though both memories are fairly full so I’m assuming this is why. I was wondering if perhaps the refresh isn’t working properly but I don’t know how to fix that. Is there a way to refresh the media from the menus or only by connecting and disconnecting.
Thanks.
Solution
Though no one made any reply here, in case someone comes across this and has had the same problem I did, I have found a solution that works for me and might help someone else. It is based on a lot of information I pieced together from other posts here and from other blog sites.
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Firstly I have discovered that MSC is the best USB setting to use. It allows for the most flexibility. You can copy, edit and delete your mp3s and playlists directly on the player by accessing it via whatever drive letter is assigned to it and you can still use WMP or other players to sync. Also I was finding a lot of the folders were getting strange numbers added to their names with MTP but this has never happened with MSC. I realise there is an issue with DRM and MSC, but if that doesn’t affect your music collection, I’d advise using MSC.
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I decided to move away from WMP to MediaMonkey. Again, I find it more flexible and also, more importantly for the Sandisk, it uses MP3Tags directly to organise itself. WMP also uses these tags but it also maintains its own database. And often what you see in WMP is the data from its own database not what is coming from the tags in the MP3s. I found a number of my mp3 files came into MediaMonkey with different information that what I had in WMP and when I examined the files using MP3Tag I noticed that that WMP was not pulling its info from the tags for these files at al but from its own internal database. What the Sandisk will use to show artist, album, genre is what is in the MP3 Tag.
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MediaMonkey also allows you to decide how your folder structure will look when syncing. You can use any of the MP3Tags to create your structure: <Album> <Album Artist> <Year> <Genre> <Track#>. This extends to the filename of the mp3 as well. You do this by device so if you have an External MicroDisc you can have a different default structure there if you want.
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Using MP3Tag is also great because you can edit your mp3s directly on the Sandisk, so if you wnat those files to have different Genres than what’s in your main library, e.g., you can do that. I believe you can create M3U playlists with MP3Tag as well, though I haven’t done this myself.
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As for playlists. When you sync files from MediaMonkey by selecting a playlist, or genre or some other grouping, it creates a nonstandard .M3U playlist which just lists the path of the files as they are found on the Sandisk. The only problem is that it starts each row of information with *\Music* (and then your structure and file name). If you have this file copied to the playlists folder on the Sandisk, you’ll need to go in and edit this with a text editor and add the relative path *…* before each Music. Then the lists will be usable, otherwise they will appear on the Sandisk as empty because it can’t find the files without the *…* relative path.
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.pla lists are very similiar to these non-standard files as they are simply lists of the mp3s with full path but they include a reference to whether they are on the main internal hard disk or on an external MicroDisc. This is good for having one list which pulls from both disks BUT you will have to edit these yourself. At least I have not found a way to pull the two together through any other program. The rows in this type of file start with /mmc:1:/Music/ (and they use / slashes instead of ** , though I don’t think this matters so much). mmc1 refers to the External disk. while mmc0 refers to the internal disk. Another feature of these pla lists is that the listing of the path and mp3 is actually stored in a file called playlistname.pla.refs. But there needs to also be an empty file called playlistname.pla with it. Don’t really know why.
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One last thing I discovered by accident is that the Sandisk must require a certain amount of free disk space to work with these playlista because I found that when my External disk became very full (with just a few 100MB free) the playlists no longer appeared in my Sandisk menu even though they were visible on the disk with Windows Explorer and had been in the playlist menu with less files on the disk. When I moved them to the Internal disk, which had a few GB free, they appeared under the menu choice and worked fine. Since they were .pla lists it didn’t matter where the actual files were because they pointed to the files using the mmc designator. This would not have been true of M3U lists. Then need to be on the same drive as the mp3 files.
Anyway I hope this is a help to anyone else who is trying to use playlists to organise their music on the Sandisk Clip+.
Kevin
