I don’t get it… i have 2 folders here of my own produced music… i edited the ID3 tags in windows media player (artist name, album name, song title) and the songs all have numbers at the front… (ie: 01 - Despair in C… 02 - The Art of Letting Go… etc…)
doesn’t matter how i go about dragging these things to my sansa express, it keeps playing them in REVERSE ALPHABETICAL ORDER! (ie: first track 9, then 8, then 7, etc…)
does anyone have a solution to this? I am getting quite annoyed with this little device.
Check the Track Number Field in your ID3 tags; it’s probably blank. Insert the track numbers into the fields then try again. I believe if your track numbers are blank, Sansa Express will sequence the files on a last in, first out basis.
Good luck
no the fields are not blank. The internet is full of people complaining about this exact problem. This is seriously the most inane defect i’ve ever seen. Otherwise it’s a nice mp3 player but this one problem IS ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. No firmware updates have fixed it. I even tried a new id3 tag editor and now the stupid player won’t even detect the artist name or album info.
I will be SMASHING THIS DEVICE WITH A HAMMER at 5pm today, sharp! Enough is enough.
THANK YOU FOR SELLING US A DEFECTIVE PRODUCT. WAY TO QC YOUR JUNK.
THANK YOU FOR SELLING US A DEFECTIVE PRODUCT. WAY TO QC YOUR JUNK.
Spot on description.
I’ve had this problem before and it is the id3 tags that will be causing it. From what I can remember, there were two things that might cause this:
The “Total Tracks” field in the id3v2 section contains information (yes that’s right any figure). Depending what media player you use you can find this out quite easily. (e.g. in winamp, I think it says “3/12” for the third track on a twelve track album. I presume that certain tag editors will allow you to just clear the field on all tracks on a given album. Personally, I use foobar2000 and it allows me to do that. )
The id3v1 tag is empty or not activated.
I have to confess that I don’t fully understand why they should’ve programmed like they did but then there’s little about the crazy thinking that went into the express I understand.
A fix I just tried was to reverse the track numbers. For instance, I ripped a disc with 10 tracks and my Fuze always played them 10 through 1. Changing the track names, etc., did no good, but I thought I’d use it’s idiosyncrasy to my advantage. In Windows Media Player I edited the track numbers (by right clicking on each track number, choosing edit, typing the new number, and then hitting the Tab key to advance to the track name). Then it almost worked right. The problem then became that it still played the 10th track after the 1st, as in 1, 10, 2, 3, 4 … I’ll have to experiment some more, maybe using two digit numbers (00, 11, 22, etc.) or something like that.
What a pain, though! Fortunately, it only seems to affect certain audiobooks.
Follow up: I tried the two digit number technique and it worked perfectly. Just realize that, in this situation, the Sansa reads numbers like 10 as being the number following 1 (if that makes any sense). Anyway, I used track numbers from 11 to 99 with no numbers such as 10, 20, etc. Original track 1 became 99, track two became 95, track three became 88, etc., and track 10 became 11. A little more experimentation would probably show that numbers such as 00, 01, etc., might work as well as long as you remember to use track numbers that are in reverse order from their originals. (It helps if the track titles are also numbers because when you edit the track numbers, the order of the list in Media Player immediately shifts.)
