Sansa Clip+ not organizing folders automatically anymore?

Hi, 

I’ve had my Sansa clip+ 4GB for over a year now and I love it. But recently I discovered that:

  1. It’s not showing newly added songs in “recently added” anymore

  2. it doesn’t recognize most of the tags anymore (and thus doesn’t sort under artist, album, etc)

  3. Doesn’t create folders in the music folder anymore like it used to. (by Artists)

Solved 1) by formatting it. Solved 2) by downloading mp3tag and removing any tags except the v2.3

What to do about 3)? When I plug it into the PC (MTP mode, the MSC shows only an empty folder), and open the MUSIC folder, I see old folders with Artist names and all their music in those folders (I didn’t create those, the Clip+ did that by itself)… but it doesn’t do that for new files… why? And am I tripping? It DID make those folders by artists itself, right?

I certainly don’t remember creating folders… especially not by Artist name :smiley:

testing

The Sansa doesn’t create anything by itself. It’s a storage and playback device.

However, since you are in MTP mode, Windows Media Player or whatever music-library software you are using is organizing your music.

How are you getting music onto the computer? Are you ripping CDs with Windows Media Player or iTunes? Then that software is making folders–which are probably on your computer somewhere too.

If you have changed your method of transferring music to the Sansa, then that would explain different folder behavior.  Since  you were getting unreadable tags, it suggests that something changed.

You are talking about actual, computer-visible folders, right? Because the Artists list has nothing to do with folders–it’s gathering that info from the tags.

The reason your computer sees an empty folder in MSC mode is that it can only see files that were transferred in one mode at a time–MTP or MSC.

MTP (via Windows Media Player or other software) does some funny things and is only necessary if you are using files with hidden Digital Rights Management unlocking codes that have to be sent by MTP–library audiobooks, tracks from the Rhapsody subscription service, etc. If you have files like that, you need MTP.

Otherwise, if you want more straightforward interactions with the Sansa, cut-and-paste your Music folder back onto the computer (or a hard drive), Format the Sansa again, switch to MSC and copy the Music folder back over.  MSC sees the Sansa as a standard flash drive and doesn’t  have MTP’s quirks.

Thank you for your reply. Frankly I don’t recall ever having used anything but drag and drop to transfer music to Sansa. It’s always been just drag and drop. But somehow, when I open Sansa in MTP mode in Windows Explorer, I see that many songs got categorized into folders, by Artists. And that doesn’t happen anymore.

The tag-problem obviously was some malfunction, since it dissapeared when I formatted Sansa and deleted all other tags except the v2,3 ones on the problematic tracks. Not it sees the tags I create via Audioshell, too.

So yes, I am talking about actual computer-visible folders and I don’t know how they came to be. They’re organized by Artist, and then inside those folders by albums of the artist (and it’s clear that it was categorized by info pulled from the tags… but how did it do it if it doesn’t do that?)… and I always used MTP. And I like it especially because it lets me make playlists in windows explorer just by clicking right click and “create playlist”… I don’t know if it works like that in MSC.

As for audiobooks - DId I understand you correctly that I have to use MTP to transfer and play (correctly) audiobook-files?

Thank you!

Well, what I’m saying is that the Clip doesn’t alter anything on its own. It takes directions from your computer and your music-library software–apparently WMP.

Let’s go back one step. You drag-and-drop from the computer to the Sansa. But how did the files get on the computer? And how do they appear on the computer if not in  Album/Artist as  folder/subfolder? Are they in WMP’s library? Take a look inside that folder. (Look in WMP’s settings or options or whatever to find where it is actually stored.)  How are they organized?

If you stick a CD in your computer and rip it  on iTunes, for instance, iTunes gets tag info online and makes a folder from the Artist tag with the Album folder inside it. This can be a PITA because if the artist tag is is Artist featuring Guest, iTunes will make a different folder for Artist Featuring Guest 1, Artist Featuring Another Guest, Artist Featuring The Guest You Hate, etc.  It’s probably the same with WMP, which also gets tag data online. If you’ve bought music from an online store, individual songs will have tags and I don’t know if WMP builds partial albums from them. If you’ve downloaded music from shady places…well…

I don’t use WMP, but people have written here that it also playlists in MSC mode. Maybe someone else will chime in.

As for audiobooks, if you bought the audiobooks, or if your audiobooks are plain old mp3 files,  you can do whatever you want with them. Sansa does play .aa and .aax files from Audible. If you get the books from a library, they have Digital Rights Misery codes that have to be unlocked, and those have to go through MTP mode. But putting audiobooks in the Audiobooks folder gives you some extra control, like bookmarking.