I just bought a sansa clip and I am having a problem when playing the music. I have my general music in the music folder and that plays with no problem. I want to have a folder of christmas music and tried to put that folder in the music folder. It went in fine, the folder is there but it is now shuffling in with the general music I have in there. I do have the player on shuffle. I have XP service pack 3 and the latest version of windows media player which I did not use to load the player, I did the drag and drop from explorer. If I have to turn the shuffle off I will (I really don’t want to listen to the songs in order) but I still cannot see the christmas folder on the players display to select it? Am I missing it?
One more question if I can. I downloaded the latest firmware and I went to play the music and it said there were no songs. I put all the songs back in to the player and it is fine now but will this happen every time I update the firmware??
Please try the search feature before posting, there are literally a million posts about folders/tags.
Anyway, the short answer is that folder browsing is not supported. The Clip builds it’s artist/album/genre lists from the tag info stored in the files, the organization of the folders is irrelevant.
To get your desired behavior you have two options:
Set the Genre tags on your Christmas music to “Christmas”. Then you can select Christmas from the Clip’s genre browse to play back these songs.
Create a playlist of your Christmas songs. This is the preferred method for handling custom playback scenarios beyond the built in artist/album/genre modes.
The method to create playlists depends on your USB connection mode. If you search for “playlists” you’ll find a lot of help.
If you need to edit your tags, MP3Tag is the best free tool available.
Skinjob has given 2 good work arounds, but with conditions . . .
If you re-tag all your Christmas music to a “Christmas” genre, then you can just pull up the genre “Christmas” and it will play only those songs. (Btw, you can insert “Christmas” or “Christmas Music” as a ‘user-defined’ genre in MP3Tag so it will come up in the list of available genres. That saves you from typing it in all the time.)
But in doing this, it will not prevent the ‘Christmas’ labeled songs from playing in the mix when you select PLAY ALL, shuffle on or not. To do this, you’d have to go with the 2nd suggestion of making a playlist with just ‘Christmas’ music. Even doing this will not prevent the player from finding and playing these when PLAY ALL is selected. You would also have to create another playlist of everything else on your player EXCEPT the songs in your ‘Christmas’ playlist. By selecting this ‘exception’ playlist, your player would only play what’s in this list and not songs in the other playlist (Christmas).
This though brings up another problem depending on how many total songs you have on your player; playlist limitation. I believe there is either a 250, 500 or 1000 song limit for .pla format playlists, depending on your player model. I believe the Clip was updated in a f/w release to allow 1000 songs, but the Fuze & the e200v2 series may still be at 250 (I’m going from memory here). I don’t think there is a limit for .m3u format playlists. This probably wouldn’t be an issue for the ‘Christmas’ list, but could be for the ‘everythng else’ list.
One other work around you could try is what I have done; put all your Christmas music on a separte Micro SD card. Set all these songs to the ‘Christmas’ genre as discussed earlier and use this (genre list) method of playing them when you’re in the mood to ‘be jolly’. Then remove the ‘Christmas’ card when not playing this music. This way you can keep all your holiday music on this separate card and just dust it off once a year.
The trick here though is ‘remembering’ where you put the Christmas card so you wouldn’t lose it.
EDIT: I just realized that this is in the Clip board. Sorry, sometimes I get confused. The Clip does not have a card slot, so dis-regard the last suggestion. But if anyone is reading this that has another player (with a card slot), this is a good alternative.
And people ask why folderview should be added to the Clip …
Indeed. And since the GREAT majority of the Clip’s users don’t know about this forum, in similar circumstances they’ll just assume there’s a problem with the Clip itself.
I still pine for a folder view. Even though I can use tags, folders are still much simpler for what I use the clip for. The Album view is useless to me, and the Artist view even more, because of all the songs from different albums and artists I have on the clip. And there’s that one audiobook that, however I tinkered with it with Winamp and Mp3tags, will simply not play in the right order on the Clip.
Folder view. Alphabetical order. Sweet and simple.
They really don’t make it easy. One thing though, it is only shuffling either my general music folder when selected or my christmas music folder when selected. It does shuffle through everything if I select play all but I really have to reason to do that which I am thankful for. I really appreciate all the help, I am not a wiz at this stuff and didn’t want to get into changing tags. But I have another question, LOL, how do I add a song to this christmas playlist? I tried and lost it all and had to load them all again!!
Well I thought I had it but I didn’t. I eventually had to creat 2 playlists with my general music in one and the christmas music in another. Now they finally play separately. What happened is that even the christmas music in the playlist will still load to the general music folder so they are all in there together. The only way to play 1 folder at a time is to have 2 playlists. Man I wish they would simplify this stuff.
Well I thought I had it but I didn’t. I eventually had to creat 2 playlists with my general music in one and the christmas music in another. Now they finally play separately. What happened is that even the christmas music in the playlist will still load to the general music folder so they are all in there together. The only way to play 1 folder at a time is to have 2 playlists. Man I wish they would simplify this stuff.
