Files with non-English characters not supported in playlists? Please help!

SanDisk MP3 players SanDisk® Clip Jam
1

Was really excited to get this player, I’ve always loved the sansa players and have had many.

I find a bizarre issue with this player - if any of the songs in your playlist have non-English characters (for example cyrillic / Russian) - they are not recognized and don’t show up in the playlist. In fact, if there are non latin characters anywhere in the filepath to that song (for example if the filename is in english but the directory it’s stored in is written in cyrillic), it will not show up. The songs play just fine on the player elsewhere, and display the cyrillic characters just fine - but in playlists they are not recognized.

I’ve been trying to fix this for a while so I’ve learned a few things - I’m aware the player only allows m3u and m3u8 playlists. I’m aware that m3u playlists are limited only to latin characters (these files will turn non-latin chars to question marks), but that m3u8 playlists allow for them (it’s the unicode version of m3u files). As a result, all of my playlists are m3u8 type; if I open and edit those playlist files, the non-latin characters show up just fine. They are saved without BOM. The playlist files are fine, and work for any files consisting purely of latin characters, but any files which have cyrillic in the filepath - doesn’t show up. I have created playlist files manually. Doesn’t work.

Is there a solution to this? The majority of my library is russian, so this is a huge letdown. The player still plays these russian songs just fine - i can play them directly as music files, or can browse to folders with them, it displays cyrillic characters just fine - it’s only in playlists it can’t seem to handle them. This seems like such a simple thing - there must be a solution?

I have tried changing the language of the player back and forth from english and russian to see if that made a difference but it doesn’t. I upgraded to firmware version 1.15 (it came with version 1.0) but the problem is there. Sadly, I like to be able to specify order my songs play, so not being able to utilize playlists makes the player pretty much useless to me.

2

Hi @bik,

Please refer below link to change setting in MP3 Player:

Hope it helps!!

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Thanks for the response. This is just the user manual for the player. What should I be looking for in here? Sorry. There is no mention in the user manual about encoding or latin characters, that I can find. What setting needs to be changed exactly?

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Just to clarify - this has nothing to do with the language setting of the player. I can change the language to Russian with no problem. And the russian songs can still be played elsewhere - either via title, artist, genre, etc. This issue only exists with playlists. Playlists do not appear to be able to support files with non-Latin characters in the song titles, or anywhere in the filepath for that matter. If there is a solution, I’d truly love to know, this is incredibly limiting.

5

OK. Posting this in case it helps someone.

I have finally found a partial solution to this, after corresponding for several weeks with SanDisk and filing a ticket. Props to them for such dedication in responding back to me.

First of - the instruction manual for the clip jam, about how to add playlists, is simply misleading. The clip jam not only supports m3u files, but also regular PLA files, which you can put on the player by syncing via Windows Media Player (as I always did in other Sansa players). This is important, if you want to be able to play non-English songs in playlists.

I am unable to get m3u playlists to work for songs with non-Latin characters, but I HAVE gotten them to work now, using PLA playlists, thanks to the help of SanDisk replying to my ticket. Here is how you can do it:

(1) Change the language setting of your player , to the language you want to be able to display songs in (Russian, Chinese, whatever). KEEP THE SETTING IN THIS LANGUAGE FOR NOW.

(2) Create your playlist on your computer and sync it in to the player (the way I do this is via Windows Media Player; I create a playlist like normal, name it, then when I’m done, hook my clip jam up, open the ‘sync’ tab, and drop the playlist name in the sync tab, and sync.

(3) Once the sync is complete, unplug the player. At this point, the player will refresh and the database will rebuild (a little graphic will appear and a status bar indicating this). THE PLAYER NEEDS TO BE IN THE TARGET LANGUAGE WHILE THE REBUILD IS HAPPENING.

(4) Once the database has rebuilt, check for the playlist - you should now be able to see the playlist with the songs of the language of your choice.

NOW - you can change the player language setting back to whatever is your preferred language. The language of songs you just synced should STILL display. The ultimate fix to this, it seems , is that the player must be in the target language WHILE the database rebuilds. Just doing that once seems to be sufficient.

This worked for me for the russian language. Previously, any songs with Cyrillic did NOT show up in playlists. Only songs with Latin characters. Changing the language settings and checking didn’t work. Doing m3u playlists didn’t work nor did PLA or m3u8. However, doing this above (setting the player to Russian, and letting it stay in Russian while the database rebuilt) solved the problem. Not only did it solve the problem for the playlist I was testing out - but all my previous playlists with Russian language songs, finally showed up. I’m so happy!

Hopefully this saves someone the headache - I never would have figured this out on my own.

1 Like
6

Hi @bik,

Please contact SD Technical Support about this for best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://kb.sandisk.com/app/ask/