I’ve used Sandisk mp3 players for five or so years now. For the last few of those, I’ve kept one for music and one for audiobooks and podcasts - a Fuse v1 and a Clip Zip respectively, both Rockboxed. A few weeks back my Zip took a dive into the washing up bowl. I thought about getting another Zip or Plus, then decided to try something new.
I read up on the Sport and the Jam, and it seemed like the concerns (song limit, main/card division) mostly applied to music listening. I thought the podcast and audiobook experience would be the same as previous Sandisk players. I bought a Jam. It seemed less fussy. More fool me.
I use WMP to synch files. Just make sure the genre was set appropriately, and they’d be loaded to the right folders under the Sansa firmware, allowing easy resumption and not losing my place. Rockbox would bookmark whatever I was playing anyway. They’d always be in the right order.
Now, using WMP with the Jam puts the files in the Music folder. I’ve tried moving them from the Music folder to Podcast/Audiobook, and also normal drag/drop straight to the folders, and nothing puts them in the right order. I’ve tried FatSort and DriveSort, both to no avail.
Where a podcast, or part of an audiobook, is longer than about 30 minutes, I can work with that by manually navigating to the next one in a series. It’s a pain and a faff and pretty much undoes any usefulness from having the bookmark/resume feature, but at that length of time, it is workable. But where shorter, and particularly where an audiobook has been ripped from a CD - so 25 tracks at 3 minutes each - or has been divided to match with book chapters (and so of varying length), it becomes essentially unusable.
Is there any hope of a fix in the future, or any workaround other than those I’ve tried? The sound quality is good, and the extra battery life appreciated.
Do you have a track number in the ID3 tag? others have reported that if track number is present in the ID3 tag the files will not be sorted correctly. If you remove the track number from the id3 tag it should sort alphabetically.
I think I’ve tried that, with no luck. What I did:
I have Vista, and no tag software. I right clicked on the mp3 file and selected ‘properties’. I then clicked on details, and in the track number field - represented by ‘#’ - I deleted the number and left it blank. I tried this on six files, which were episodes 7-12 in a lecture series. Each file’s name begins with ‘Lect’ and then the lecture number. So, ‘Lect 07: Socrates on the Examined Life’, ‘Lect 8: Can Virtue Be Taught?’ and so on.
I dragged these files, none of which now showed a track number, to the Podcast folder. When I navigated to them on the Jam, they appeared in the order 7, 9, 11, 12, 10, 8.
I notice you sat one file is Lect 07 but the other is Lect 8. If this si the case try renaming Lect 8 to Lect 08 and see if that corrects the sorting. also since you have one that is 10 you amy need to add an additional leading 0 like this Lect 007, Lect 008, Lect 009, Lect 010 etc
If the sorting is the same can you upload those files to dropbox and post a link here. I would like to test with them and see if we can figure out whats going on.
If I’ve been doing the ID3 thing right, I’ll have a bit more of a playabout with a variety of files, including the extra zero renaming, and post back later. My broadband is slow uploading, so it’ll take a while to get things on dropbox anyway.
I gave up in the end and brought a Clip Plus. I now use my Jam for music, which it does very well.
I will say that, when I put music on I left a few podcasts on, too. I use Windows Media Player 11 to synch music and, when I had done, found the podcasts were now arranged in the correct order. It may have been a fluke, or there may have been something in the synching that adds some data to the files or just arranges things on there properly.
I’d drag-drop them to the podcast folder, and they’d present as higgledy piggledy despite all my faffing with tags. I synch things to the Jam using WMP and suddenly they’re in order. It may have been a fluke or coincidence, but it may be something worth trying.
I had the same problem…It’s a REAL PAIN but put the number at the beginning—1-Lect 1 XXX 2- Lect 2 XXX and it will sort correctly. I HATE that because it’s very messy but does work
