TL;DR Will the “Music > Folders > Shuffle List” feature ever be re-introduced by firmware update, or do I need to start looking for another mp3 player?
I have been a fan of the sandisk line of mp3 players for the last few years. I got a Sansa Clip+ in 2010, used it for 2 years until it broke down, but loved the simplicity and full featuredness enough. So I got a Sansa Clip Zip in 2012 which I have been using until now. Apart from some minor glitches now and than it was pretty much perfect, however the battery life by now was reduced to 2 hours or so, so it was time for a new one.
So naturally I got the newest sandisk mp3 player, the Clip Sport.
I use the player for 2 things days:
listening to audiobooks and
Shuffling music in various folders.
Audiobooks works fine on the Clip Sport, no big complaints there.
However listening to music has become completely impossible to me. On the Clip Zip I could simply “Music > Folders > Shuffle List” on any folder and it would shuffle all tracks in that folder and all subfolders. This was the only way I would listen to music on the Clip Zip.
This feature is completely gone in the Clip Sport!
All other methods of playing music on the Sport are useless to me because:
I often listen to some ‘mix tapes’ which are located in a folder (i.e. album/artist like filters are useless here).
Sometimes I have various of these ‘mix tapes’ folders in another folder and I’d like to shuffle all those.
So I am very dissapointed with the Clip Sport because I can’t comfortably use it for the thing it was made for and which was working great on previous versions of the player.
In conclusion the question: Is there any chance this will get added in a firmware update or do I have to start looking for another mp3 player?
I am enjoying good results creating playlists across several subfolders of music files inside the primary MUSIC folder on my ClipSport, using the shareware program “mp3tag”. The latest version is available at this weblink.
For example, using my “black” ClipSport (4 gb internal memory):
I have 31 subfolders inside the MUSIC folder containing 613 mp3 audio files. I can use mp3tag software to create one playlist containing all 613 audio files and save the m3u file into the MUSIC directory. (Does not work if the m3u file is saved into the PLAYLIST directory.)
Then I can use the Music Mode to select my new playlist from the “Playlist” selection. I can shuffle the playlist using the “Options Menu” after I select one song to play from the playlist.
My m3u playlists do not work using the Folder Mode (Display shows "File Format not supported.)
This disparity means functional playlists can only be created after carefully curating the ID3 tags in the music files on the player. This also means that ClipSport users who decide to try micro SD cards with 32 gb and greater will likely not be able to shuffle all files across all folders due to the 2000 file limit in the most recent FirmWares (1.29 and 1.36).
-> New user GJ is correct concerning Folder Mode.
-> Playlists of music files within all (or some) folders can be achieved using Music Mode.
I actually tried this before posting here, however when I make playlists using mp3tag either at the root of the music directory or in any other sub-directory of the music directory (on the SD card), the playlist does not show up in “Music > Playlists”.
Ah using Card Mode worked for me (Already disabled that menu from the options).
It turns out it doesn’t matter where you place the playlist. To test it I saved the playlist both in the root of the Music folder and a subfolder thereof (with the actual tracks in subfolder of that subfolder).
