SanDisk Clip+ Sort Problem

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Clip | Sansa® Clip+
1

Hi all, I’ve read the previous forum posts on this problem but nothing there helped me.  I name my music mp3’s (over 2000 of them) beginning with a 3 letter acronym for the band and then a number which equals the order I want the song to play in for that specific band (ex: Frank Zappa songs = ZPA 01 first song name, ZPA 02 second song name, ZPA 03 third song name, etc).  A lot of my albums are structured with 1 song merging into another so it’s vital they play in the proper order.  This works just fine when I go to “Music”->“Play All” on my clip+.  Problem is if I go to “Music”->“Artists”->“Play All” they’re in a competely different order!  Same when I do any other type of sub-selection like “Music”->“Genres”->“Play All”.  

I need to be able to select a specific artist and have control over the order of songs within that artist, so, can anyone tell me:  

  1.  Why this occurs?

  2.  What can I enter in which specific MP3 tag to force this to sort the way I want? 

Thanks!

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Artist, Album, Genre are all labels. Not folders. The Clip finds those labels in ID3 tags.

But if you click down Artist, Album, etc. you will see Folders. You can play the folder in the order of the track names.

Play All probably goes into Music and, I think, plays through each Album in alphabetical order by album title.

Or you can fix the ID3 tags. 

Get the free program mp3tag. http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

When you install it let it add itself to context menus (an option while installing).

After it installs, open it and go to Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg and under Write  choose ID3v2.3 and ISO-8859-1. (ISO-8859-1 is how Windows displays English language text.)  Make sure those are saved.

Right-click on an album and look at the tags. Click on the Filename header to put them in order–since you did the filenames–and then fill in the other fields correctly. You can label the whole album at once by highlighting everything and putting Artist, Album, etc. in the box on the left.

MP3 tag also has other nifty functions. One is Tools/Autonumbering Wizard. Make sure the files are in playing order, top to bottom, and choose the Leading Zeroes option. If an album has more than 10 tracks and they are labeled, 1, 2, 3, etc., the Clip will play 1, 11, 12, 13, before 2.  Maybe that’s what’s happening to you. Leading Zeroes fixes that.

Under Convert you can convert your filenames into tags.  It’s pretty obvious how it works, each field is shown by %Artist%, etc.  So in the Convert box you could type  ZPA  %Track% %Title%  and it should ignore ZPA  and fill in the other fields. That might be your easiest option, but mp3tag is very flexible and you should figure something out.

It’s best to take problem files off the Clip, fix them on the computer and send them back. You might also delete MTABLE.SYS from the Clip–that’s the database from the ID3 tags–and when you unplug it will make a fresh shiny new MTABLE.SYS from your new tags.

Going forward, it takes about 5 seconds to run the Auto-Numbering Wizard on each album before you add it to the Clip and it will avoid a lot of problems.

1 Like
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Thank you for such a quick response!  I’ve just d’loaded mp3tag and will follow your instructions.  I’ll reply back when I finish checking this out.

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OK, after extensive testing, I’m very happy to say you solved my problem!  I simply loaded and ran MP3Tag and here’s the steps I took:

  1.  Did the setup exactly as you recommended in the Tools->Options->Tags->Mpeg->Write screen

  2.  Clicked on Filename and then Artist to get the filenames alphabetically ordered by artist

  3.  Highlighted the album songs and used the Tools->Autonumbering Wizard to create the Track number entries

  4.  Deleted the existing songs off the Clip+

  5.  Resynced the playlists to the Clip+

I can’t recomment MP3Tag highly enough, if I had made these changes by hand using file manager folders and properties it would have easily taken a few days.  

Thanks Again!

5

Mp3tag is better than zircon-encrusted tweezers.

6

@black_rectangle wrote:

Mp3tag is better than zircon-encrusted tweezers.

Bu tis it worth more than gold-pressed latinum?  :stuck_out_tongue:

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…or a bowl of Lumpy Gravy :laughing:

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“Mp3tag is better than zircon-encrusted tweezers.”

Or a bowl of Lumpy Gravy and a quart of Finnish champagne :smileyvery-happy: