Song order?

I’ve got a 2gig Fuze and am trying to copy my mp3 files to it but I need them to be listed in a certain order. I have the files organized in folders/albums on my computer but everytime I download them the the Fuze it rearranges them alphabetically. I know that there has to be a way to do it but I’m having no success. After reading through other posts I think I’ve found the answer but wanted some input from someone with more knowledge. Do I have to make playlists in windows media player (vista) in order for the albums to be listed in the exact order that I need?

Thanks!

You DO have to create a playlist(s) to get yout songs organised and to play in a particular order. You do _ NOT _ have to use Windows Media Player, although many people do. You can also MediaMonkey or Winamp, both free aternative media player programs that some find easier/better than WMP. You can also create .m3u format playlists manually, not using any ‘media’ software, but it’s usually easier if you do.

You DO have to create a playlist(s) to get your songs organized and to play in a particular order. You do _ NOT _ have to use Windows Media Player, although many people do. You can also MediaMonkey or Winamp, both free aternative media player programs that some find easier/better than WMP. You can also create .m3u format playlists manually, not using any ‘media’ software, but it’s usually easier if you do.

While your songs are put on and stored on the Fuze in a folder/file system as on your computer, it (the Fuze) does not ‘read’ or ‘play’ them in that hierarchy. It reads the ID3 tags embedded in the mp3 files. These tags include the Artist, Album, Track #, Track Name, etc. This information has to be correct for your Fuze to display the correct information in the menu listings and also on the screen while the song is playing.

@baddawgy wrote:

I’ve got a 2gig Fuze and am trying to copy my mp3 files to it but I need them to be listed in a certain order. I have the files organized in folders/albums on my computer but everytime I download them the the Fuze it rearranges them alphabetically. I know that there has to be a way to do it but I’m having no success. After reading through other posts I think I’ve found the answer but wanted some input from someone with more knowledge. Do I have to make playlists in windows media player (vista) in order for the albums to be listed in the exact order that I need?

 

Thanks!

It depends on what you mean by “the exact order that I need”.  If you just mean track number order, then it’s just a matter of setting the track number tags properly.  I suggest using MP3Tag to set the Track tags and make sure you use id3v2.3 ISO format.  If on the other hand you mean some arbitrary order of your own choosing, then you need playlists.

I’ve found a bit of a bug, at least with the .15 Fuze firmware - if the id3v2 tag for track number reads (e.g.) ‘01/11’ the Fuze doesn’t understand, and lists the tracks in a random order.  For the tracks where the track number field reads ‘01’, ‘02’ etc. it treats it correctly, and lists the sorted tracks at the bottom of the album list.  Since lots of ripping software seems to write out MP3 track numbers in the xx/yy format, this seems like a bug that ought to be fixed.

My music collection is stored in Artist/Album/Track Number - Song name.mp3 so I could fix my collection up for the fuze with this script:

 #!/usr/bin/ruby

require ‘find’

Find.find(‘Music_mp3’) do |f|
  leaf = f.split(“/”)[-1]
  next unless File.file?(f) && /^(\d\d) .*3$/.match(leaf)
  exit unless system “id3v2 -T #{$1} "#{f}"”
end  

Not ideal to have to do this every time I rip new tracks though - one for the next firmware please?

Tapeworm wrote:

While your songs are put on and stored on the Fuze in a folder/file system as on your computer, it (the Fuze) does not ‘read’ or ‘play’ them in that hierarchy. It reads the ID3 tags embedded in the mp3 files.

I’m new to this so please bear with me. I have the put tags on my mp3 files, but when I convert them to wma files the tags seemingly are dropped. Do wma files support tags? If not how does one manage wma files in Fuze? Or is it better to just stay in Mp3 format?

My only other player is a $10 Nextar and it lets me find the folders and subfolders just as I put them on the player, but I understand from reading this forum that Fuze unfortuneately lacks that feature.

@jimcoates wrote:

@tapeworm wrote:

 

While your songs are put on and stored on the Fuze in a folder/file system as on your computer, it (the Fuze) does not ‘read’ or ‘play’ them in that hierarchy. It reads the ID3 tags embedded in the mp3 files.

 

I’m new to this so please bear with me. I have the put tags on my mp3 files, but when I convert them to wma files the tags seemingly are dropped. Do wma files support tags? If not how does one manage wma files in Fuze? Or is it better to just stay in Mp3 format?

 

My only other player is a $10 Nextar and it lets me find the folders and subfolders just as I put them on the player, but I understand from reading this forum that Fuze unfortuneately lacks that feature.

MP3 is the most universal format…why are you converting it to WMA? :neutral_face:

I have recorded and ripped my music collection into 192kbps Mp3 files and then tagged them using the database or the Mp3tag program, but when I got the Nextar 1Gb player I wanted smaller files so it would hold more. I settled on 64kbps wma files because with my old ears I can’t hear the loss in audio quality – I can no longer hear the higher frenquencies – and I was quite happy with the wma files. From my research I felt that wma was a better format for the smaller file size than mp3. I converted using a program named Switch which apparently doesn’t support wma tags. It didn’t concern me that the tags were lost because they were just a nuisance scrolling across the little Nextar screen (when playing Mp3’s). I found it much more convenient to use the folders view and play the wma’s without the clutter of the tags. The way I have my music organized, each album is in its own folder. In the Nextar if I open a folder I can choose a song by its filename and from there it will play all the other files in the folder, which for me was a perfectly logical way to do it.

I understand that I have to rethink my method now with the Fuze if I keep it. It seems that the closet approximation is to use album names to select “folders”, but to do that I need the tag info. I still have my original mp3 files but I would prefer to continue using the smaller wma files if possible. I have spent this morning goggling trying to find out if I can convert mp3 tags to wma tags, but so far no luck. Meanwhile I tried a different conversion program called “NBFree Mp3 to Wma Converter” but it also lost the tags. Then I downloaded MediaMonkey which I am now starting to learn to use. So far I also lose the tags when I use it to convert the files, but it has a lot of options so I might not have yet found the right one. I have to say that I already like MediaMonkey quite a lot and if I end up having to retag the wma files at least it has tools to make it easier than it was using Mp3tag.

MediaMonkey has a wonderful feature-“Auto-tag from the Web” if there’s even a little info, like the name of the songs, it can usually find the rest. I can’t guarantee 100% success, but it works for me at least 90% of the time. Give it a shot, and good luck :smiley:

 Edit:If you have the original files…MediaMonkey can convert them, and that should preserve the tags too!

Message Edited by Marvin_Martian on 12-07-2008 12:38 PM

WMA files use a little different tagging system than the ID3 tags of MP3’s. Both essentilally contain the same information, but I doubt if these are converted along with the parent file. Since .wma format is the child of Windows Media Player, if you play these files in WMP and right-click on it, you can select Advanced Tag Editor from the context menu and fill in the information there.

Note that the e200v2 series and the Fuse/Clip will also read these .wma tags separately from the .mp3 tags. So say if you have 2 albums by the same artist, but one is .wma & the other is .mp3, you will see that Artist listed twice in your on-board menu listings. Everything is the same about this Artist; his name, the genre, everything except that there are 2 different ‘types’ of tags, both with the same information.

@tapeworm wrote:

say if you have 2 albums by the same artist, but one is .wma & the other is .mp3, you will see that Artist listed twice in your on-board menu listings. Everything is the same about this Artist; his name, the genre, everything except that there are 2 different ‘types’ of tags, both with the same information.

AHA!!! that explains it!:dizzy_face: I didn’t think it was a big deal, but I was curious…lol

Thanks for the tips. For the moment I have given up on using wma files. I haven’t found a way to convert the tags from mp3 to wma, and when I manually enter the wma tags using Media Monkey they don’t show up in Windows Explorer except for the usual filenames, and when using Advanced Tag Editor they do show up in Windows Explorer but the thought of redoing thousands of tags is daunting. So I bought some additional memory for the Fuze and will stick with the larger mp3 files.

Since I last posted I have been going over all of my Mp3 tags to make sure that thay are correct. So far the corrected tags are working on the Fuze the way they should. One thing that bothers me is that there are many fields one can fill in when using a tag editor, but Fuze only utilizes a few of these. I might have missed it but I could find no mention of which fields Fuze uses, either in the manual, reading FAQs here, or by searching. It seems to me that it uses the track # field to order the tracks (which is what this thread is supposed to be about although I got it off on a tangent), but it doesn’t display that field. I think it does display whatever is in the title field, so if one wanted to see the track # one would write it into the song’s title, correct? I feel as a newbie to this that Sansa is not giving enough information on how to tag for the Fuze; specifically which fields to fill in, and a few different scenarios on how to fill them in to get different results. I know that one can goggle to find generic info on tagging, but there ought to be instructions or a FAQ specific to the way the Fuze handles the tags.

Thanks for the help. I think I’m getting it now but the learning curve turned out to be way steeper than I had imsgined.

Fuze, 4Gb w/8 Gb micro card, msc, Windows XP, WMP10

Message Edited by jimcoates on 12-10-2008 08:05 PM