my 2gb clip will not read some mp3’s, they are on my clip, but it says no songs. I even re-encoded them at 128 with sony soundforge pro 10.
i have a broken right wrist, i appologise for the ugliness of this post.
Do they have ID3 tags? And are they of the correct format (ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1)? The Clip only reads the tags, not the files names and therefore cannot ‘see’ or display the song information if the tags are missing or the wrong format.
according to the program mp3tag they are id3v2.3, it does not say if it is iso-8859-1 complient
phutres wrote:
according to the program mp3tag they are id3v2.3, it does not say if it is iso-8859-1 complient
You can set this to the ‘Write’ default in the Tools menu of MP3Tag. Then just re-save those files with the new settings and see if they work. Most prefer to delete the files on the player, edit the tags on the files on the computer, then transfer over the edited files back to the player.
I had to remove the tags and then re-create them from the track names for it to work.
Thank you for the help.
Glad it worked out for you!
i’m having a similar problem but i don’t understand the solution or it is not working for me.
i have an 8 gb clip+ v01.02.15A. it is not recognizing some mp3s which work on my PC and on my old sansa player. i downloaded the mp3tag program and saw that some of the tags were not ID3v2.3 so i tried to remove the tags with the intent of reinstalling them in the right format. i was able to remove the tags, but i wasn’t clear on how to reinstall them. i tried to copy a tag from an mp3 that was working, but that copied all the info which was unique to that file. so i undid that, after which all tags appeared as ID3v2.3. unfortunately they still weren’t recognized by the player.
i also downloaded a new mp3 of the type which hadn’t been recognized (and had previously not been ID3v2.3) after having set the default write to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. it appears as an ID3v2.3 tag (can’t verify the ISO), but is also not recognized by the player.
All information about the songs will be remove if you remove the tag, if you want to put back the tag, just fill up the information on the left pane and save it 
After removing the Tag of Robin Thicke
After saving the information for Robin Thicke song
See the difference? It automatically set the tag to ID3v2.3
That makes sense. Thank you. But is very time consuming to have to do this for each track which used to play on my old Sansa and isn’t recognized by my Clip+. Also it doesn’t seem to solve the problem. The clips still aren’t recognized by the player although they do appear and play in Windows Media and on my older Sansa player.
I wonder if the IDtag issue might be a red herring in my case as all of these tracks appear to be ID3v2.3.
Of the above the Harvard Business Review Podcast, KUOW’s Speakers’ Forum, and ESPN’s BS Report are all recognized and play. Everything else is unrecognized by the Clip+…this includes podcasts from the NYTimes, the CBC, and NPR
here’s a link to that screen shot as i seemed to have floundered using the insert image feature:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41402846@N05/5007252938/
Can you try to download Gspot so that you can get more codec information from your audio files.
Here is a screenshot of the software
@monkeychart wrote:
here’s a link to that screen shot as i seemed to have floundered using the insert image feature:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41402846@N05/5007252938/
This doesn’t appear to work either.
I guess the problem is that those songs w/c are not showing have ID3V2.2 Tags. Clear the tags and set them to ID3v2.3
@jamieson wrote:
I guess the problem is that those songs w/c are not showing have ID3V2.2 Tags. Clear the tags and set them to ID3v2.3
Or just highlight them all in MP3Tag and hit the SAVE icon (floppy disc under File). If you have it set to Write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 it will save them with the new format. No other writing or editing needed.
Thanks for posting the image Jamieson.
Jamieson wrote:
I guess the problem is that those songs w/c are not showing have ID3V2.2 Tags. Clear the tags and set them to ID3v2.3
Or just highlight them all in MP3Tag and hit the SAVE icon (floppy disc under File). If you have it set to Write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 it will save them with the new format. No other writing or editing needed.
Thanks for posting the image Jamieson.
Okay. First off, thanks for all your help as I muddle through this. Per your advice, I did re-save all these mp3s in MP3Tag and they appeared to save in the ID3v2.3 format, although some of them have different parantheticals:
some:
ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3)
and others:
ID 3v2.3 (ID3v2.3)
But some of each are recognized by the Clip+ and some of each are not. (And importantly the same mp3s still aren’t recognized by the Clip+)
So, following the next piece of advice, I downloaded Gspot to get a better look at the Codecs. Here’s a screenshot from an mp3 which is recognized by the player:
And here’s a screen shot from one that isn’t:
Does this offer any clues?
Thanks again for your help. Just in case I screwed up the screenshots again, here are the links:
just tried the same files/playlist with my girlfriend’s older clip (non-plus) running version 02.01.16A firmware. all mp3s are recognized and play. just as they are on my old sansa c150. is this helpful in isolating the issue?
Somehow, by dumb luck, I figured this out on my own. The problematic mp3s contained the term “Podcast” in the Genre field of their tag. Which caused them to be put in the Podcast folder of the Clip+. Which would be fine, except items in the Podcast folder don’t appear anywhere else on the player (under “song” or “album” for example) and aren’t playable as part of a Playlist (which others discuss on this forum and is monumentally stoopid…how dare someone want to play two or more podcasts back to back or in a specific order).
The solution was not as easy as it should have been. Batch <blank>ing the Genre field using MP3TAG and using the save icon resaved them in the ID3v2.3 format which some of the podcasts lacked. That may have been important but did not cause all the files to become playable. Oddly, I needed to use the Advanced Tag Editor feature in Windows Media Player to blank the Genre again…and this time it was really blanked and not put in the Podcast folder. I speculate that this may have been a residue of Windows Media not rechecking changed Tags of items already in its library. In which case batch adjusting them with MP3TAG first and then adding them to the Windows Media Library would be the way to go.
More experimentation is required, but I’ve already done so many write and erase operations just trying to figure this out, I’ve probably shortened the lifespan of my Clip+ by 10%. I’ll post more when I determine the best procedure. Other work arounds for this might include changing the name of all Podcasts to a single album, but keeping them in the Podcast Genre so that you can play them in some sort of order and still keep them seperate from your music. Others have detailed this approach on this forum.
Sansa support had suggested that some items were not playing because their bit rate was too slow. (They suggested that bitrates under 128 were not supported in the Clip+.) This is false. Files with the bit rates as slow as (32 Kbps) play fine. They also suggested that something must be wrong with the original MP3s. Also false. If I hadn’t been able to attest truthfully that I could play all of these files, in a Playlist, on both an older Sansa Clip (not plus) and a Sansa C150, they wouldn’t have believed it was possible that I was actually having a problem with my player.
I’d appreciate more attention to greater compatibility with different file types and genres (particularly for the minority of us who do not primarily listen to music) in future firmware updates.
Thanks for all who tried to help me. I’m just glad the issue seems to be resolved. Hopefully I can pare down the minimum operation to download files and make them compatible with the player. When I do, I’ll post it here.
