I didn’t see where anyone else reported this, but when I create folders in the podcast folder on the internal memory the folder names are ignored and all the podcasts in all the folders I created are lumped into just one folder when accessing them through the “books” option on the player. The name of the one folder that is used appears to be taken from the Album tag on one of the podcasts.
If I do the same thing on an SD card it appears to work OK, but of course I am not going through the book option at that point.
I only bought the player last night, but my opinion so far is that Sandisk should be ashamed of themselves for bringing such a buggy product to market. The firmware used is no better than I would expect from a beta version.
Can anyone else verify this behavior? Any suggestions to get around it?
As (I think) you’ve discovered, the player is ID3 tag-based, not file/folder-based. This is like every other Sansa player. If you want it to display your content in the way you’ve ‘arranged’ it, you must edit the tags.
The files still reside in the folders you’ve created, but since there is no Folders option on this player, it will display according to the tags in the files.
I appreciate the quick reply. I think I have figured this out. The problem is one of length. I have a collection of Car Talk podcasts. I had previously edited the tags on them making the album name “Car Talk xxxx” where xxxx is the year. That worked fine in my Clip Plus. When the Clip Sport is scanning/sorting these it must be truncating the Album field and dropping enough of it so that everything sorts into just one group. The group name that displays on the player however is not truncated. If I shorten the Album field in the tag to “CTxxxx” then each ends up grouped where it belongs. I tried just removing the spaces (CarTalkxxxx) but that didn’t help. Add one more bug to the list…
Well I discovered last night that this problem is not limited to Podcasts, nor is it just on the internal memory.
I had several albums where the name in the tag starts with the word “Billboard” on my sd card. All of them had been lumped into the same album once the player had scanned the card. To get around it I had to modify the album name so that the first 8 characters or so are unique for each album.
Extremely annoying - I am thinking about returning it to Best Buy.
As I said, this is a (ID3) tag-based player. As are just about all players, regardless of brand for the past several years.
I believe you are missing the point. When the Clip Sport is sorting music into albums it is looking at the Album Name of the ID tag. I fully understand that. By the standards that I read the album name can be up to 30 bytes long. However the Sport is only using the first 8 or so characters of the album name to identify the album where a song is going to be placed. So if you have multiple album names where the first 8 or more characters are the same all of the songs will be put into the same album.
If you would like here is an example for you to try. Pick 3 or 4 songs on your PC and alter the ID tag so that the album name is “CrappyMusicfrom1990”. Then alter 3 or 4 more and make the album name “CrappyMusicfrom2000”. When those songs are loaded into the Clip Sport they will all end up a part of the same album (CrappyMusicfrom1990). There will be no CrappyMusicfrom2000 album. This is simply because they are not using the entire album name from the tag to sort the music. My Clip Plus did not exihibit this behavior. It would sort them correctly into two different albums.
The problem as I describe it is the only one I have had with sorting (other than the already mentioned one of track order). Following the example I gave if I were to shorten the album names in the tags from CrappyMusicfrom1990 and CrappyMusicfrom2000 to just CM1990 and CM2000 respectively the songs from each would sort properly into the proper album.
I had a similar problem with the Artist names and album names showing only part of them. Check that the format of the tags is id3v2.3 iso-8859-1 and only this. I solved it in this way.
I checked the tags on my mp3s and they are all ID3v2.3 as written by MP3TAG V 2.58.
Check in tools>options>tags that it’s not ID3v2.3 UTF-16. Just to be sure…
