Cycling - but only in song mode

I have just bought a pair of 4GB Fuzes for my wife and daughter.  Because I am using a mac (don’t worry, I haven’t got a pony tail) I used the drag and drop method to get mp3s from itunes.

I put the tracks from each album into separate folders, together with an Album Art.jpg (as per sandisk video).

Selecting music via album, artist, or genre works fine, but for some reason selecting by song just causes the Fuze to cycle through all of the songs without actually playing them. I notice that when selecting by song all of the titles have a track number in front of them (_01.songtitle, _02.songtitle, etc) which don;t appear when selecting by the other methods, so I am guessing that it’s probably a problem with the mp3 tags created by itunes.

Has anyone else come across this problem or, better yet, found a solution? 

Mac OSX doesn’t just have the .mp3 files. It also has finder files, pointers to the real mp3 files. That’s what you’re seeing with the underscores before the track numbers. Look at the filesize–they are 0kb. Not much music in there. Meanwhile,  the underscore probably is alphabetized by the Sansa before numbers and letters. 

You need to find the real mp3s, which won’t start with _. Mac OSX usually rips them to a file folder with another file folder inside (often called MACOSX) of the finder files. When the Sansa goes to the album folder, it doesn’t care that they are nested. It thinks the finder files are mp3s–that’s what they say they are–and tries to play them.

Solution: Make sure the real mp3s are on the Fuze and delete the finder files from the Fuze. One easy way would be to connect to your computer and sort by filesize.  0kb = zero music. Or search for those MACOSX folders. Just don’t delete your operating system :slight_smile:

Message Edited by Black-Rectangle on 01-19-2010 08:49 PM

Brilliant, thanks. That did the trick. Had to connect using Windows to see them (thanks to BootCamp). :smileyvery-happy:

The files weren’t in a separate folder, but the same folders as the MP3s themselves. Fortunately they show as ghosted icons in XP, so it is very easy to select the correct files for deletion. 

Message Edited by Sooty57 on 01-20-2010 02:10 PM

Excellent!  Those wee rabbit pellets left on your player by the Finder are a royal pain.  Glad to see you have solved the dilemma.  Apple has some bizarre quirks.  I never quite liked (well, okay, I found it irrepressively stupid), having to drag a disk to the trash to eject.

Having to leave wee nuggets all over your media in the guise of “finding” them faster is the result of code designed in elementary school.  Ask the rabbit for details on the nugget content.

Cheers!

Bob  :stuck_out_tongue:

@neutron_bob wrote:

Apple has some bizarre quirks.  I never quite liked (well, okay, I found it irrepressively stupid), having to drag a disk to the trash to eject.

 

Which is probably why they changed it. Now you press the eject key on the keyboard (which you always could if you had the right keyboard) or right-click and select ‘eject’. It’s about as daft as clicking on “Start” to turn a PC off.  :wink:

Seriously though, I started using macs after more than 20 years of  PC ownership. I still run XP on the mac as well as OSX, so consider I got 2 computers for the price of one (or slightly more than one if I had bought a PC). It was a bit of a pain getting used to a new operating system, but I don’t have any regrets.

There are things about OSX that infuriate me, just as there are things about Windows that drive me nuts. Which one is better… we will never know, both have their good points and their bad. What I have noticed is that the lines are blurring - macs now share much of their hardware with PCs, and Windows is getting more OSX-like with every new reincarnation.

Perhaps, one day, we will have one operating system common to all, there will be peace and goodwill to all men, hunger & disease will be a thing of the past - yeah right!