I have a strange problem with my Sansa e250 v2. When I add a micro SD card and then copy an album or a music folder over to the extended memory, it seems to work just fine - the windows explorer shows all files and data in place and correct. Upon disconnecting the player from the USB cord, it goes through the database update, and then the artist and album information is lost. The songs can be found under “unknown” artist, the albums just do not appear at all. This, of course, creates an extremely long list of “unknown” artist songs.
Upon reconnecting to the computer and looking at the files I note that the data still is there on the external memory, but the artist name is indeed replaced with “unknown”. If I examine the data in the Windows media player I notice that all the album names and artists are replaced with Chinese or Japanese hieroglyphics. The data, as transfered originally, shows correctly in either Windows Explorer or Windows media player. It only gets corrupted when the USB cable is diconnected and the “database update” action tales place.
Strangely, I can take exactly the same folders and load then into the internal memory, and everything works just fine - both the artist name and the album name appear on the player. I have tried both a 16 and an 8 GB card (from San Disk) in the player and the results are the same.
Another odd thing is that when the card is removed from the player and plugged into my computer via a USB adapter, it says that the card is write protected, and I am unable to unprotect it. However, back in the player it is writeable again! My computer runs Windows 7, and the player has the latest firmware.
Sorry for the long post, but any suggestions would be welcome.
“Unknown” means the player cannot read the ID3 tag of the files. It sounds like the tags are the wrong format. Download the free MP3Tag software and change the default Write setting to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 in the Tools menu. Now you can open the folders in question and simple hit the SAVE icon to save them in the newly-changed format.
Note this is better done with the files on your computer, so delete the ones on the card and re-transfer them over once you have made your changes.
“Unknown” means the player cannot read the ID3 tag of the files. It sounds like the tags are the wrong format. Download the free MP3Tag software and change the default Write setting to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 in the Tools menu. Now you can open the folders in question and simply hit the SAVE icon to save them in the newly-changed format. Of course, if there are any other changes you need or want to make you can do this now too.
Note this is better done with the files on your computer, so delete the ones on the card and re-transfer them over once you have made your changes.
On the other issue, maybe your adaptor is faulty. You can always just load the card with it in the player.
Thanks for the help. Using MP3Tag with the suggested format seems to do the trick. Still I find it strange that the requirements for mp3 tag are different for the internal vs. external memory… I had been using Roxio Creator 2010 “Edit Song Information” feature to edit the tags, but I guess it does not save them in the required format.
One issue with MP3Tag software: if the tag is not in English, but some other alphabet (like Cyrillic), it replaces the names with a bunch of ??? marks.
