I just got my 4gb Sansa Clip today, but am having problems getting the id3 tags to show at all. I am coming from an Itunes/Ipod Environment, and all of my mp3s are properly tagged.
Sometimes I also use Mp3tag to tag my music, as well.
Basically, I have been dragging and dropping my mp3s in the Music folder, via Windows Explorer. All mp3s are complete albums organized in separate folders.
On my Clip, my mp3s are all present, but for Artist, Album, Genre Tags, they all show up as Unknown.
Under Songs, all mp3 files are shown not by song title, but by filename.
It could be that the tags were not saved in a language the Clip recognizes. You may want to take one of the unrecognized songs and open and save it under MP3Tag, and see if that assists. If so, simply open and save all of your music in that fashion.
There are various posts on this issue here, and the tag languages the Clip recognizes.
I’ve had the best results using v2.3 UTF-16 tags as well so you should not be too far from solving this. I mass-retagged my entire library (using mp3tag) and have zero problems with any genre, artist, etc. since doing so; several months now. The only oddities were conflicts between WMAs and MP3s resulting in some genre replication, that’s been resolved in firmware v0.29 though.
If you’re using mp3tag (or some other tagging util), make sure you replace the v1 AND v2.3 tags with the updated content. In fact you should be able to remove the id3 v1 tags completely. Do this to avoid conflicts between tags (yes the MP3 file can and will contain BOTH v1 and v2 tags if you set up the tagging util to do so) as the Clip could certainly have some remaining issue if the tags have different/missing data.
mp3tag is great for creating m3u playlists as well; once you have the tagging sorted out, search the forum for topics about that and you’ll be solid.
If you continue to have problems or aren’t sure what’s going on, PM me - if you send me one of your mp3s I can look at the tags and see if there’s some conflict etc.
Oh, one more thing; there are such evils as non-standard tags…it is possible that iTunes appends some tags that the Clip doesn’t like. Not hating on iTunes, just mentioning it as a possibility…
Thanks for the input…by “language” I assume you mean the id3 tag version and encoding.
I tried retagging some files with ID3v2.3 (UTF-16), and it did not fix the problem.
I guess I’m out in the cold on this one, any other input would be appreciated.
Yep, that’s what I meant. I’m not much help here, though, as I use CDex and The Godfather for ripping and tag encoding, and have not had any issue (apart from a single CD), and so have never looked into this–just what I’ve read here. And I can’t even tell or figure out the tag encoding language used by those programs …
The one time I had an issue, I called the files up in MP3Tag (which is set to ID3v2.3 and UTF-16) and simply re-saved–the problem disappeared.
