Hi everyone,
I got a Sansa Fuze 8gb a few weeks back but I cannot get it to recognise playlists at all, not matter what program I use.
First I used Windows Media Player as the Help Manual suggested. I made a playlist and followed all the instructions, but no playlist appeared in the Playlist folder on the device, instead all the songs on the playlist were just re-copied to the Artists folders, so I had 2 copies of everything on the playlist on the device but no playlist.
Then I tried Media Monkey to make the playlist and transfer it to the device, nothing happened. Then after reading something on one of these forums I made a m3u playlist in Media Monkey and copied it from the folder on my computer where I had saved it to the device - the playlist appeared on the device, but there were no songs on it.
Then I tried Realplayer; I created a playlist, transfered it to the device, but it did not show up in the Playlist folder on the device, but again like WMP it just transfered a 2nd copy of everyhting on the playlist to the Artists folders on the device.
Then I tried Playlist Creator 3, having seen another post regarding playlists. I made a m3u playlist and a pls (whatever that means!), saved them to my hard drive, and then transfered them from the hard drive to the device’s Playlist folder - they showed up all right in the Folder, but there were no songs on them again.
Can anyone help me? All I want is to be able to make a few playlists to play on my Sansa Fuze without having duplicate copies of songs cluttering up my MP3 player’s disk space. Surely it can’t be that difficult? I would appreciate any help or advice, the more simple the better as I am not very techie. If anyone can suggest another application to use, or a solution to work with Windows Media Player I would be very grateful. Thanks.
pbc
Are you using MTP mode? If you are, you can create playlists without software by selecting the tracks on the device in windows explorer and right clicking, the menu should have a playlist option. You can drag and drop further tracks into the playlist.
In media monkey, have you put the playlist on the sync list? If you right click the player in the left hand side of the program and choose (from memory) either options or properties the tabs will show you what will be synced. On the playlist tabs you need to select the playlists you want to copy to the device, then sync the device. This is making the assumption that you sync all your music via media monkey.
Message Edited by summerlove on 06-08-2009 08:19 PM
Bought an 8gb one a few days ago myself, first flash based player I’ve ever owned (mini-disc for the last several years, sadly now defunct tech), see how it holds up on the bike.
Background: I use Grip w/ lame for all ripping, Fedora 9, 10, 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 boxes. MP3 format only. I don’t use VBR except in rare cases, bit rate usually at 256. Gain is leveled in most cases and boosted slightly to fight wind noise on the bike. I always use MSC mode.
Once I copied all relevant albums with cp -r to the Fuze I ran EASYtag to create a quick playlist. That worked so if you want to just use that it will work but I didn’t care for the extra comments in so I did it by hand the following way. I also don’t know if EASYtag exists on Win32 or not.
From the MUSIC folder, did an ls -alR and piped to a file called all.m3u. This gave me a list of all songs in all albums with the relative path to each MP3. Then I used VI to change the forward slash to a back slash (:%s/////g). Last I ran the file through the unix utility “unix2dos” to change the unix <LF> line terminator into the DOS <CR><LF> line terminator (i.e. line-feed only vs. carriage-return-line-feed). This works just fine and I can hand edit order quite easily anytime I want to. Lastly I take and copy all.m3u to as many different play list names as I wish (i.e. jazz.m3u, blues.m3u, trip_1.m3u, …) and simply delete the songs from each list that aren’t relevant to that playlist name. A quick media refresh and the player is all set to go.
This should also be doable on Windows from a command prompt. I haven’t tried this though since I don’t do any audio or video work on a windows machine. Instead of an ls, do a DIR /S/B in the MUSIC folder of the device and redirect to a file such as all.m3u. Edit it with notepad or wordpad and remove the leading <drive letter>:\MUSIC\ from all lines so that you have the relative paths again. Save that file and it should work as it is. Then copy to other playlist names and remove lines and rearrange lines all you want. No need to swap the slashes or change line terminator on a Windows box.
Hope that helps. I’m sure it’s not as much fun for some folks who really prefer a pretty gui but it works best for a command line guy like me.
Thanks for your help. I switched to MTP (didn’t know what that was until I read your message and looked it up!), and now Windows Media Player works fine for making playlists - it doesn’t make duplicate copies of the tracks anymore and the playlists show up on the device and work fine.
So from now on I shall keep the device switched to MTP.
Thanks a lot to the both of you for replying and trying to help, you have saved me a lot of hair pulling.
Thanks 
pbc
You’re welcome. I remember struggling with playlists in MSC mode when I got my first sansa! Most people seem to prefer MSC for the simplicity, but playlists seem so much easier in MTP.
