The Sandisk Media Drive messes up my audio albums

[allardb]

In WMP i have my albums neatly organized: album art, name and songs - even old albums that I coudn’t find on the internet.
I led WMP synchonize with the Sandisk.
All albums and songs appear in Sandisk, but messed up:
Album art is applied for only very few albums, sampler albums appear multiple times (I guess as many times as there are different artists), some other (older?) albums are split for unknown reasons.
It all became rather unusable.

Is there a solution?

allard

[tj61]

Do you mean that you have your music files organized (into folders, etc.) when looking at your WMP contents as its connected to your computer, and then when you go into the Music part of the SanDisk app you see something else?  If that’s your concern, I think it’s because the Music app doesn’t look at your folder structure.  The music app gets all the organizational info it needs from each music file (Album, Artist, Cover Art, etc), and uses that to organize your music,.  If something’s not organizing like you expect, it’s either because the metadata is wrong, or the SanDisk app is not reading it correctly (or at least not how you expect).

The issue with sampler albums is especially common.  iTunes will separate these, too, if you don’t use the “Compilation” tag.  I don’t know if the SanDisk app recognizes such a tag.  I think the SanDisk apps, in general, are very rudimentary.  Maybe there’s a better Music app that can access the drive, like there are different (vastly better) Video apps that can.  This is where SanDisk really shines, in that they actually partner with 3rd party developers (at least for video) to make their hardware accessible.  Offboard storage hardware is only as good as the apps that can access it, and it’s hard to expect the hardware mfr to make the best of all such apps.

Regards,

Tom (not affiliated with SanDisk)

[jrsforums]

What are the iOS video apps that Sandisk has partnered with?

[drlucky]

http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10539/ 

[tj61]

Also, nPlayer works well with the WMD, and while not on the list provided by SanDisk, I prefer it over It’s Playing Pro.

[allardb]

I found the solution to my own problem.

In each audio album, the ‘Contibution Artists’ field had to be identical.

For example in a sampler album, changing this field in all the songs to ‘Various artists’ results in one single album instead of multiple ones.

I used Mp3tag from Mp3tag.de. It would have been easier to read the above field and the ‘Album artist’, swapped the two and wrote them back in a program. But I couldn’t find the (VB6) code to read both tags on the Internet. So I did it manually.

I consider this audio problem a programming mistake. I don’t see for whatever reason this SanDisk app should be rudimentary (as Tom wrote). This app is their product!

Without using the SanDisk app, the Media Drive is useless.

Realplayer and It’s Playing are crap. They do nothing for audio, video (ts or mpg) were playing jumpy.

I converted the video’s to mp4, using Handbrake.

One final word about the Media Drive. The Internet connection through the device is clever.

allard

[tj61]

Quote:

>>  One final word about the Media Drive. The Internet connection through the device is clever.

Not to rain on your silver lining, but keep in mind that this feature means that anyone else on the network has full read/write access to your device.  I only use it on my home WiFi network for this reason.

It would be nice if they had a WiFi setting for not broadcasting the SSID.  Having a cryptic, unbroadcasted SSID would be enough security for me.