Doesn't Really Sort by Artist??? Well Partially

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
1

This is for my daughters Fuze. If the songs have different artist, it won’t show all songs under a specific artist. For example, if it is Ziggy Marley’s Family Time. you can’t just go to Ziggy Marley. If you do that, there is only 5 songs listed. To find the others you have to go to Paul Simon & Ziggy Marley which has 1 song. Then Willie Nelson and Ziggy Marley with one song and so on…However, my daughter is young and doesn’t always know the name of the albums so it’s hard to scroll through 100 albums knowing what they all are. Is there a way to sort more like windows would have them sorted? I want to be able to go to Ziggy Marley and see the albums that are his.

Thanks!

2

sj022698 wrote:

This is for my daughters Fuze. If the songs have different artist, it won’t show all songs under a specific artist. For example, if it is Ziggy Marley’s Family Time. you can’t just go to Ziggy Marley. If you do that, there is only 5 songs listed. To find the others you have to go to Paul Simon & Ziggy Marley which has 1 song. Then Willie Nelson and Ziggy Marley with one song and so on…However, my daughter is young and doesn’t always know the name of the albums so it’s hard to scroll through 100 albums knowing what they all are. Is there a way to sort more like windows would have them sorted? I want to be able to go to Ziggy Marley and see the albums that are his.

 

Thanks!

Download Mp3Tag it is a software that will let you edit the Tags on your songs. Just set the Artist part of the tag to Ziggy Marley. That way all the Ziggy stuff is together. The other option is to show her how to use Folder browsing, and make a Ziggy folder and then she could play everything in that. 

It may sound funny but I have some songs on my Fuze that are set to the completely wrong artist. I do this so I can remember them better. For instance I have a song on my player by Adams Ants, but the artist tag is set to Zoo Animals, because the song features lots of sounds by Zoo animals and my little cousins like them, I have a hard time remembering Adams Ants but I wont forget Zoo Animals. 

3

I just downloaded the tagging program however wouldn’t recognize anything. I can’t get it to recognize any file. If I select “load playlist” it’s basically .m3u or .m3u8 . If I select "add directory, it doesn’t find anything.

As far as folder browsing, etc…can you do that on a pc?

I’d like for her to be able to do this on the pc vs. the player

Message Edited by sj022698 on 01-14-2010 05:07 PM

4

sj022698 wrote:

I just downloaded the tagging program however wouldn’t recognize anything. I can’t get it to recognize any file. If I select “load playlist” it’s basically .m3u or .m3u8 . If I select "add directory, it doesn’t find anything.

 

 

As far as folder browsing, etc…can you do that on a pc?

 

I’d like for her to be able to do this on the pc vs. the player

Message Edited by sj022698 on 01-14-2010 05:07 PM

Yeah. You have to edit the song files themselves. So find the MP3 file that shows up as Paul Simon and Ziggy Marley, open that in the program and then change the Artist to Ziggy Marley, then click save, this can be done directly on the player depending on how you added the files to the player. 

If you have the latest Firmware on the player, go to Music and go all the way to the bottom of the sorting options there should be one that says folder. She can just choose the folder that she wants to listen to and the player will play whats in that folder. 

5

Actually the problem is with your ripping software. It’s throwing the songs into different folders based on the Artist tags it finds, and the Ziggy album has all those different artist tags.

Go into the options of your ripping software and see if you can have it group the folders by album instead of artist, so at least it will put all the files from one album into one folder. Dig around in Tools, Options, Settings and see what you can find. 

Then, once you have all the songs from the album in the same folder, you can change Artist with mp3tag.

You can also change it with your ripping software–it’s Advanced Tag Editor in Windows Media Player. Actually, you could do that before ripping, as noted in the next post.

I don’t understand how mp3tag won’t “recognize” songs.

Reinstall it and make sure you check the choice to add itself to context menus while installing. Open it and under Tools/Options/Tags/Mpegs set Write to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1, and save it so it becomes the default. 

Then find the Ziggy album folder in Windows Explorer (Computer or My Computer), right-click and choose mp3tag from the menu. It should open and display all the mp3s. You can highlight them all, type Ziggy Marley into the Artist box on the left, save them and you’re good to go. 

Message Edited by Black-Rectangle on 01-15-2010 04:29 PM

6

It’s the difference between the track artist and the album artist that confuses here. The Fuze only refers to the ‘artist’ field, which is usually the track artist. There are different approaches to solve this, depending on what is important to you. If you refer to Windows sorting the files, are you talking about Windows Media Player? Which Software does you daughter use to copy files to the Fuze?

Here is what I would do:

Overwrite the track artist with the album artist “Ziggy Marley” as recommended already by someone else. It’s the most simple and direct aproach to adress this. You will lose the information on which track e.g. Paul Simon played, but in most cases this is okay. There are a lot of better solutions but they include diving deeper into the programs used which is no option in your case, if I get this right.

It’s possible to do this with Windows Media Player, but I don’t use it so I can’t help here.

But first, tell us what exactly you are using, maybe we could give more precise instructions then.

7

This is the kind of jumping through hoops that should be solved in a future firmware update.

Another option is to save a playlist, created from windows, of files loaded in the Fuze… then you can just play the playlist(s) and not worry about tags.

There’s a reason we have had playlists for our PC based music for so long… it puts the user in control of playback order and albums or artists don’t matter then.

Maybe the SanDisk programmers could add “play by album artist” as an option, while we are wishing in one hand… 

Since I wouldn’t expect too much on that hand…  maybe you’ll find it easier to make a playlist in media player (while browsing the Fuze in MSC mode) and save it to the “MUSIC” folder on the Fuze…

Instructions are in the forums here if you care to try it and are unable to figure it out on your own.

Good luck. :slight_smile: