Clip ignores "artist" information when the artist has a lot of albums

 I’ve tried to make this work on my own, I can’t so I come here.  

I have 100 songs of a particular artist in my collection. When I ripped them from CD, I neglected to put in album information. I did this because I wanted to organize the songs alphabetically for fast searching.

So, for instance, the song “All my loving” would be put in album A along with “A hard Day’s Night”, and so with “Blackbird” in the B folder. I would establish this by manually inputting that X song was in album “A”

I have organized each mp3 meticulously with winamp, using its Id3v2 editor. There is no ID3v1 info and “basic info” matches the Id3 tags. The only information in the tags is SONG - ARTIST - ALBUM

However, something is screwing up, big time.

The album A will show up. A has 8 songs in it. However, in the album Beatles/A/, only three of A’s songs will show up. The rest of the songs can be found in Unknown/A/. For some reason the clip is ignoring the arist information for the remaining 5 songs. I have checked the tags of all with winamp by setting the sansa clip as my media directory and looking over the tags of the files. The artist infomation for each files is identical! What the hell is going on?

Is there a limit to the number of albums a single artist may be assigned? I wish to make all artist’s collection alphabetical (potentientally having 24 albums for each) and I’d very much like to get this working.

                                                             

You might try MP3TAG, a dedicated tagging program recommended by 4 out of 5 Sansa Gurus here on the forum. It provides a bit more control over editing functions than Winamp. Set it to write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags. You can open up each of your album folders and change them all ‘en masse’ saving you time. If you need to edit the name of the track to get them in the order you want, that’s possible too.

I think you need to take into account these basic tag values. Track#, Album, Title. I don’t use Artist and Genre although they may be present, you do, so make sure these are filled in. The player is only concerned with what it finds in the tag field. If Album field is missing, stuff gets dumped into the unknown folder, so you need to double check the titles in that folder, I bet you’ll find something amiss.

The player uses track# for play order within an album. If that is missing (or all have same value), I believe it will play in directory order, but I can’t swear to that. Directory order is the order in which the system file directory stores files. It will be as originally loaded, you can check the order by issuing the dos ‘dir’ command with no switches in a dos box. 

I don’t know what happens if say artist tag is correct but other fields are not filled in. One would think the clip would still honor that and collect all the titles, but who knows.

One note: I had (and still have) the earlier 1gb M240. Sometimes after disconnecting from the computer, a few titles would finish up in the unknown folder even though all tag fields were correctly filled in and I hadn’t touched the offending titles. I could recover by deleting and reloading, but this was some sort of bug.

So far, I’ve seen no similar problems the the Clip.

While winamp is a great player and the one I use, I second using mp3tag for tagging untagged titles, although I’ve had that exhibit funny hard to define anomolies. 

I use Winamp too, but one thing I’ve noticed when using it for ripping CS’s is that the on-line database that it uses likes to assign some really bizarre genres to the music. Certainly this can be edited, but it’s another step and can be annoying.

I use Winamp too, but one thing I’ve noticed when using it for ripping CD’s for example is that the on-line database that it uses likes to assign some really bizarre genres to the music. Certainly this can be edited, but it’s another step and can be annoying. It also can’t find some very common album art, or what is finds is wrong some of the time.

Tapeworm wrote:
I use Winamp too, but one thing I’ve noticed when using it for ripping CD’s for example is that the on-line database that it uses likes to assign some really bizarre genres to the music. Certainly this can be edited, but it’s another step and can be annoying. It also can’t find some very common album art, or what is finds is wrong some of the time.

I found maybe the greatest genre name of all time in MP3Tag… Booty Bass!

 I’m leaning toward this being a bug of the sansas firmware, and it being unable to properly index too many tracks from an artist in the “index” file after as it refreshes the media file. What’s odd is that all the other files I tag and load onto the sansa with winamp display perfectly, and yet these 100 tracks have a loss rate of about 50%! Is anyone aware what the limit is for the amount of artist’s albums the clip can properly deal with?