Needhelp with finetuning the playlists on MTP

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
1

Thanks for your help so far.

Just to remind anyone who would be kind enough to answer - I am a complete novice and need any help in very very basic instructions!! :smileyvery-happy:

Two small questions now I have managed to work out how to add a playlist on MTP by right-clicking:

  1. When I was getting very frustrated trying to sort it out, I had a ‘Practise playlist’ which I tried to add. I did manage to add but was playing about and clicked on ‘Hide playlist’ (I though this might stop the tracks also being shown in albums as well as playlists). So now when I open up the Fuze on the computer - obviously this list can’t be seen. But it is still on my Fuze. I have deleted the tracks from it - but I just wondered if I can get rid of the name of the playlist from my Fuze - how I can effectively ‘unhide’ it?

  2. How do I add tracks to a playlist already on the Fuze? The playlist on the Fuse doesn’t have the symbol of a folder next to it - it has a small play triangle symbol. So when I click on it, the playlist opens up in another box - but I don’t seem to be able to drag tracks into it. My feeling is that maybe I have to delete the playlist, add the track into the folder on the computer, and then copy it over again. Is this right or is there an easier way?

Thanks a lot

Sarah 

2

I see a fair few number of people have looked at this thread but no answers… :frowning:

Again - I am not being lazy - I have searched and searched for the answer!

Hope you can help!

Sarah

3

@scaree wrote:

I see a fair few number of people have looked at this thread but no answers… :frowning:

 

Again - I am not being lazy - I have searched and searched for the answer!

 

Hope you can help!

 

Sarah

I’ve looked, but I have no answers. Then again, I don’t use playlists. Hope someone can help you out though. :wink:

4

 … how I can effectively ‘unhide’ it?

1. Connect the player to your computer. Ideally, this would be in ‘MSC’ mode so your computer sees the player as 1 or more USB drives, but this should work either way.

  1. Open any folder, anywhere.

  2. In the open folder window, follow this path: Tools –> Folder Options –> View (tab).

  3. Under ‘Advanced Seetings’, scroll down to the line item ‘Hidden Files and Folders’ –> Show Hidden Files and Folder, and click (activate) the radio.

  4. Continue to the line item ‘Hide Protected Operating System Files (Recommended)’ and click (activate) the check-box to disable hiding.

  5. At the top of the ‘Folder Options’ window, in the ‘Folder Views’ area, click the ‘Apply To All Folders’ button.

  6. At the bottom of the ‘Folder Options’ window, click the ‘Okay’ or ‘Apply’ button.

  7. Close the ‘Folder Options’ window if it’s still open.

  8. Navigate to where your ‘hidden Practice playlist’ is located (or use Windows’ ‘Start –> Search –> For Files or Folders’ function). The ‘Practice playlist’ should be visible-but-faded in either case.

  9. Right-click the file, and choose ‘Properties’ for the file.

  10. At the bottom of the ‘General’ tab, under ‘Attributes’, deselect the ‘Hidden’ attribute. Your file should display unfaded and unhidden.

  11. Go back and, at least, re-hide the ‘Protected Operating System Files’. I would also re-hide the ‘Hidden Files and Folders’.

webbit

5

“How do I add tracks to a playlist already on the Fuze?”

Configuration is a factor, so pay attention:

I have a 4GB Sansa Fuze + 8GB Sansa microSDHC cards (which are tiny!) I store all of my music on the uSD cards.

I always run in MSC mode, so Windows sees the complete unit as two independent USB drives.

I struggled with playlist creation using Windows Media Player for a while, and had some successes and failures, including the dreaded ‘double files’ problem (a real pisser!).

Then I discovered a little utility called ‘PlayList Creator’, which makes and arranges .m3u playlists using drag & drop. ‘PlayList Creator’ is available from our friends at oddgravity.de. It’s freeware, and can be downloaded from soft32.com at this link (if moderators let links through):
Playlist Creator 3.5.0

It’s interface is English, German, and perhaps others. If you can’t work out how to make .m3u playlists using this tool, you don’t deserve to have anything as cool as a Sansa mp3-etc. player.

A .m3u playlist file is actually just a specially formatted text file, and can be built by hand, if you’re patient. For example, I always use my Fuze in MSC mode (see above), and all of my music is sorted into [drive letter] X:\MUSIC [folder]\A [folder] or B [folder], etc. Under the alphanumeric folders, I further sort them into band/artist names; e.g., Aerosmith [folder], Alice In Chains [folder], etc. if I have >1 song. If only 1 song by an artist, the song just lies in the A, B, C, etc. -level folder. So the physical structure is sort of like this:

X:\MUSIC\A\Aerosmith\Aerosmith - Dream On.mp3
X:\MUSIC\A\Aerosmith\Aerosmith - Rag Doll.mp3
…
X:\MUSIC\A\Alice In Chains\Alice In Chains - Heaven Beside You.mp3
X:\MUSIC\A\Alice In Chains\Alice In Chains - Rooster.mp3
…
X:\MUSIC\A\Aqualung - Brighter Than Sunshine.mp3 <– Note: No Aqualung folder; only one by this artist

Back at the top-most level, I have a folder called Playlists:
X:\Playlists <– contains all playlists

Given this file structure, an individual .m3u playlist using only these songs is formatted thusly:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1,Aerosmith - Dream On
…\MUSIC\A\Aerosmith\Aerosmith - Dream On.mp3
#EXTINF:-1,Aerosmith - Rag Doll
…\MUSIC\A\Aerosmith\Aerosmith - Rag Doll.mp3
#EXTINF:-1,Alice In Chains - Heaven Beside You
…\MUSIC\A\Alice In Chains\Alice In Chains - Heaven Beside You.mp3
#EXTINF:-1,Alice In Chains - Rooster
…\MUSIC\A\Alice In Chains\Alice In Chains - Rooster.mp3
#EXTINF:-1,Aqualung - Brighter Than Sunshine
…\MUSIC\A\Aqualung - Brighter Than Sunshine.mp3

The #EXTM3U is header, and must be first line of the file.

The – > -1, <– after each –> #EXTINF: <– set is normally the song play time in seconds, so numbers like 163 or 155 aren’t unusual. The –> -1, <– value is intended to indicate streaming audio (like over the 'net), but can also act as a default null-value song length. If you use a tool like ‘PlayList Creator’, the tool handles all of this. The thing is, it’s all irrelevant, because everything following –> # <– makes it a comment line, although the value after the length is the title to be shown by the player, which is generally the same as the location of the file which is on the second line.

All you actually need are the paths to the target files. The path line can be absolute or relative. Mac and Linux use Linux format. So, …/ refers to the parent directory, in this case, because my playlist is 1 folder below the topmost directory, in a ‘Playlists’ folder, so it refers itself to the topmost/parent directory, then follows an absolute path to the file.

No special termination is required. That’s the entire playlist. Name it with a .m3u file extension, and it goes into an X:\Playlists folder.

But I *strongly* recommend ‘Playlist Creator’ …

Have fun!

webbit

[Edited link description after checking.  Looks like an interesting application.  -µsansa]

Message Edited by microsansa on 06-21-2009 09:36 AM

6

As for question #2: SADLY you can’t add tracks to a playlist on the player.

Apparently there are only 2 people on this planet that want to be able to create and manage playlists on the player itself.

You and me. :wink:

7

Thanks webbit for the hidden playlists thing. It wasn’t quite the way you said but you gave me enough info to help me sort it!!

I am probably not cool enough for the Sansa Fuze then! I will try what you’ve said when I’ve got some time!! BUT if I do switch from MTP to MSC and it doesn’t work - will I have lost everything I have loaded on to MTP if I then switch back again?

I have sort out figured out a way to add a song to the playlist. I added it to the named playlist in my Music folder on the computer from Media Player. Then I copied it to the Fuze into the named folder that I right clicked onto to create the playlist. You delete the rightclicked playlist and then save the folder again by rightclicking and give it the name you had before. A little long winded but only took me a couple of minutes to save some extra songs.