I can create a playlist with music but cannnot with podcasts – the podcasts sync okay in that they end up in the podcast folder but the associated playlist shows up as empty. If I change the genre from podcast in the podcast mp3, the file will show up on the playlist. Is this a bug with playlist for the Clip plus? It would be very cumbersome to do this everytime I want to listen to a playlist of podcasts.
I don’t think podcasts are designed (in SanDisk’s firmware) to be playlisted. If you want to do this, you will have to change the genre in the ID3 tag as you’ve discovered.
Everything should be able to be playlisted. My previous Sansa Clip was able to do that. The reviews were right, the plain old Clip was a better player. 
A quick search revealed several other threads on this subject:
It seems the general concensus is that podcasts are not playlistable, unless you play games with the ID3 tag fields and/or place the podcasts in the Music folder. You may want to browse through these discussions to see if you can glean anythiing worthwhile from them. 
Thanks. I found one work around but am interested in others. Still puzzled as why podcasts can’t be playlisted when in the previous model (Clip) it could be.
P.S. I emailed tech support looking for a more difinitive answer and their response was unhelpful and unrelated – showing me, albeit politely, how to change audio recording from acc to mp3s.
Podcasts can’t be playlisted since they aren’t in the song database. If they were in the song database, then they would play randomly when you shuffle your music.
To play podcasts as a series, give them the same album tag and assign track numbers to them so they play in the order you want. When assigning track numbers, don’t forget leading zeros, ie. 001, 002, etc. If you don’t want to bother with leading zeros and there are under 900 files in the series, start numbering them at 101.
