Folders - with a twist - open to other ideas too

MP3 players Sansa Clip | Clip+
1

Hello,

I know that there are many forums that deal with the whole folders thing - can see them in Windows Explorer, but can’t see them in the clip menus.

Here’s my dilemma, I hope someone can help me here.

My whole reason for buying my 4G clip was to take about 6 seminar courses ( containing anywhere from 6 to 12 cd’s each course - each cd containing 4 - 10 tracks each ) and instead of lugging a case of cd’s and a cd player with me to just dump them all into this cutsie little thing that weighs almost nothing and is small enough to lose ( just kidding here, but I think you get the idea )

The thing is, although the cd courses are commercially created and distributed, the tracks are not consistently labeled on the cd’s except for “track 1, track 2, etc.”. When I used Windows Media Player to rip the cd’s, it of course went out on the net, to see if the tracks might have been labeled by someone else, and would ostensibly label the tracks to what it found on the 'net - unfortunately not very consistent.

So, I figured, no problem I’ll rip the cd’s to my hard drive, and set them up in main folders for the seminar group, and then subfolders for each cd and have the tracks in each folder.

Problem is: The clip didn’t see it that way, and the listing is nothing more than a jumble. If I were to go for a walk and try to listen to these  in the order that the clip put them in, I don’t think that the course material would be understandable.

I have even tried the AutoM3U program listed elsewhere in these forums, but either I don’t understand it ( this would be my first foraging in the MP3 arena, so I’m still learning this thing ), or missed on the settings, but it didn’t help much.

I certainly don’t like the idea of going back to 500 some odd tracks and trying to rename all of them so that they are in a numbered order so that they play in the order I need them to to make sense.

I like the clip for it’s size both physical as well as the memory. Even though the order is wrong, I managed to get all of the cd’s on the clip, with still some memory left over. I’d say I got a pretty good deal. I first looked at the ipods, but the pricing on those were just obnoxious.

I hope someone has a better solution to this for me, I’d hate to think I spent all the time ripping, and have nothing for it, never mind having to find another solution for this.

I can be emailed at ronjie@netzero.net directly, if you can help.

Thank you very much, and hope you all are having a Great Holiday Season!

Ronjie

2

The Clip sorts files by ID3 tags.I suggest that you use the free program mp3Tag to edit the tags.

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

If the track number tags are present and correct, then you  need to get the disks to play in the correct order.

You can use either the same genre or artist tag for all files for a course, as long as you are consistant. Then you could have each CD as a separate album within this. choose the album tags so the disks are in the correct order. The easiest way to do all this depends on exactly what you have now. MP3Tag can change  a tag for all files in a folder in one step.

3

Hiya JK98,

I appreciate your help, but as I’ve never done this before, I’m pretty much lost here. Is there some kind of tutorial out there that could take me step by step as to how to do this?

I’d like to have my seminars in this order: Author, Course, CD, Track

Thanx, and I really appreciate this, as I’d really like to get back to listening to these courses.

Ronjie

Message Edited by ronjie on 12-27-2008 12:42 PM

5

_ Hi guys, and thank you for your responses. _

_   _

_ Something else I’m seeing now, and I’m wondering if it will make a difference. Some of the stuff I have was originally in mp3 format, and some of the stuff is in WMA format. Will this make a difference in what order they will show on the clip? If so, will converting the wma to mp3 help? What converters would you recommend? As I’ve got a dozen cd’s that I’ve ripped, I’d like to find something that is free, and will do whole folders at a time. _

_   _

_ If not, do you then feel that it’s just editing the id3 tag that will give me the sequence I’m looking for? _

_ Been using it as it is, but it’s a bit frustrating, looking for the tracks I want to play as I play them. _

_ Thanx again, _

_ Ronjie _

6

@ronjie wrote:

_ Hi guys, and thank you for your responses. _

_   _

_ Something else I’m seeing now, and I’m wondering if it will make a difference. Some of the stuff I have was originally in mp3 format, and some of the stuff is in WMA format. Will this make a difference in what order they will show on the clip? If so, will converting the wma to mp3 help? What converters would you recommend? As I’ve got a dozen cd’s that I’ve ripped, I’d like to find something that is free, and will do whole folders at a time. _

_   _

_ If not, do you then feel that it’s just editing the id3 tag that will give me the sequence I’m looking for? _

 

_ Been using it as it is, but it’s a bit frustrating, looking for the tracks I want to play as I play them. _

 

_ Thanx again, _

 

_ Ronjie _

As the Clip looks at tags, and really doesn’t care what type of file it is, it should not make any difference, as long as everything is tagged correctly.

Transcoding from one lossy format to another is generally a poor idea, as each will ‘lose’ different parts of the audio, so by transcoding, you’ve lost yet more information, and sound quality can suffer.

My advice would be to rip to a lossless format such as flac, and then transcode from there to whatever your preference in lossy codec for portable use.  Generally space isn’t a consideration on desktop PCs until your library gets pretty big.  foobar2k works well for transcoding from flac, I’m sure it can do others, as well.

Finally, and maybe this is just me, your blue font is quite hard to read.

7

@tenzip wrote:

@ronjie wrote:

_ Hi guys, and thank you for your responses. _

_   _

_ Something else I’m seeing now, and I’m wondering if it will make a difference. Some of the stuff I have was originally in mp3 format, and some of the stuff is in WMA format. Will this make a difference in what order they will show on the clip? If so, will converting the wma to mp3 help? What converters would you recommend? As I’ve got a dozen cd’s that I’ve ripped, I’d like to find something that is free, and will do whole folders at a time. _

_   _

_ If not, do you then feel that it’s just editing the id3 tag that will give me the sequence I’m looking for? _

 

_ Been using it as it is, but it’s a bit frustrating, looking for the tracks I want to play as I play them. _

 

_ Thanx again, _

 

_ Ronjie _

As the Clip looks at tags, and really doesn’t care what type of file it is, it should not make any difference, as long as everything is tagged correctly.

 

Transcoding from one lossy format to another is generally a poor idea, as each will ‘lose’ different parts of the audio, so by transcoding, you’ve lost yet more information, and sound quality can suffer.

 

My advice would be to rip to a lossless format such as flac, and then transcode from there to whatever your preference in lossy codec for portable use.  Generally space isn’t a consideration on desktop PCs until your library gets pretty big.  foobar2k works well for transcoding from flac, I’m sure it can do others, as well.

 

Finally, and maybe this is just me, your blue font is quite hard to read.

Ok, maybe you can help me understand this then ( I don’t do this regularly, I just want to get these audios in the smallest format possible and carry them with me so that I can hear them anywhere, instead of trying to carry a cd case with cd’s and a cd player. ) The file format isn’t relevant is what I’m getting from you. Ok, I’m trying to use MP3TAG, and though this thing looks like computer garbage to me ( computer hardware tech by trade, don’t do much in programming ), MP3TAG, will show a tag as either ID3v2.3 or WMA. Can you please explain to me how this works? Or can you recommend something that’s a bit easier to understand? I’m having a bit of difficulty with getting things “tagged correctly”.

As for “transcoding” as you put it, I don’t want to do that unless I have to, to have things “tagged correctly”. So no, I’d be happy to leave things as they are. Your solution to re rip them might have merit, but I didn’t enjoy spending the time ripping 20 cd’s as it were, so I’d rather just use what I have. Heck, if I was going to re rip them, I’d just rip them to MP3 and I guess that would solve my problem.

As for the font, I apologize, I won’t use it again. 

Thanx for your help so far, 

Ron V.