Clip chaos

I’m a new Clip owner, however, I have already read a lot about the Clip here, and on other forums. I assume, my problem is related to the often blamed id3 tag sorting. I transferred some music and some audiobook folders to the clip, just to get to know how it works, but found several irritating problems. One of these was that one of the audiobooks was a single file and, as I wanted to listen to it in repeat mode (it is a relaxation “audiobook”), I put it in the Music folder, because the Audioobooks folder does not have a repeat option. However, as the file is tagged as an audiobook, it ends up listed among the audiobooks, and thus I can’t listen to it in repeat mode. Another problem was that one of my music albums is displayed as “unknown” and another single file audiobook is also displayed as “unknown” and the clip inserts the single file into the album. Third, and, so far, final problem, and the most irritating of all, I copied a complete Sherlock Holmes audiobook collection to the Clip and it was one folder including several subfolders each containing 4 to 5 files, and again some files disappear from their folders and end up in an other one.

It just sounds like you need to fix the ID3 tags.  Easy to do and the norm with players nowadays.

The clip and similar higher end devices index using tag data. Legitimate music comes with tag data intact and will include at least album, title, genre, artist and probalbly most important of all track#. Within an album, titles will play in track# order. This probably doesn’t matter much for some albums, but symphony music and opera just don’t sound right when played out of sequence!!.

You can readily add or change the imbedded tag data, I use mp3tag.exe but there are others, even windows explorer for a single file. Basically, if tag data exists the player will just ignore any folders you create. There’s something funny about voice recording for the clip, it doesn’t seem to like files being renamed or converted. This wasn’t the case with my M240.

If songs lacked any tag data, my old M240 would use windows folder names for album, windows filename for title and (this is very important) will play in the order in which the files are physically stored in the folder, this may or may not be the way windows displays them, but rather the way they would be displayed in a dos window using the ‘dir’ command without any switches. Since I haven’t actually confirmed this on my clip (only had it a short while), I won’t say clip behaves same but willing to bet it does. No idea what it does with subfolders when there is no tag data. I never use subfolders.

If you want those audio books to play in the music folder, try editing the tag album field to books and place in music folder (my guess is place them anywhere and get same result). You should then see in an album ‘books’ or whatever name you use.

I don’t know why Sansa omitted repeat function for audiobooks (which I’ve never played) and for recordings, but then there’s a lot of things I dont’ understand.

Thanks for your replies, in the meantime I realized that the “autoM3U” program, posted on this forum, not only enables folder browsing, but also solved my tag problems.

Great!  You may want to fix the tags regardless, so that the correct info. displays on the display.  Also, just good to keep things tidy for when you might need them.

Well, it looks like you’re right, tags have to be fixed, even when using the autoM3U program.

Well, the folder of music will play, and in the folder order; but the Clip’s display just won’t show the tunes’ correct info., if the ID3tags aren’t correct.   :wink: