When will Sandisk learn to put normal file browsing on the players?

[french_nat]

Hello to everybody,

I just read this post two hours ago and did not want to add my point of view at that time. Since then I have been trying to fill my clip in MSC mode (it’s a 4Gb clip I bought last week, french version). Well, it’s been sufficiently painful for me to decide to finally share my views.

Let us imagine a MP3 collection with 10 albums, of which one is a “best of” type (20 artists tag), + 20 diverse MP3 (20 different artist and album tags). I don’t know how you do, but I usually like to listen to one particular album. Tag browsing, be it by artist or album is just impossible. My 19 full albums are overwhelmed amongst 40 “one-file” albums. I just can’t listen to my “best of”. The only advantage of tags seems here to be to have nice homogenous display (like “%artist% - %song%”). Who cares if it means the only comfortable thing you can do is shuffle playback ??

Ok, some would say “use playlists”. I did. The only thing is I don’t want to “sync” (I would have bought an iPod…). I don’t like these funny files .alb in an hidden Albums directory (I can’t figure the purpose), neither these .wpl files which are empty when you try to edit them with a notepad. I do not use WMP, I do not want to use a another software each time I buy a gadget, I hate the tag-based library for the very same reasons that I hate them in my mp3 player (can’t find my albums, don’t want to spend hours tagging files just to be able to put some stars if I like a song).
So I tried .m3u. It’s been a headache finding the right way to do it on this forum. I figured it.

//
For those who are in the same case than me, here is the minimum to do to make it work :
the .m3u is to be placed in the “Music” folder. (The playlist folder is of no use for m3u).
It must start by the line :
#EXTM3U
Each line must have the format (exact same names than on the device) (where directory1 is the name of the directory placed in “Music” and in which the song is) :
Directory1/Directory2/…/yoursong.mp3
//

Well it worked for some directories. It didn’t for others (some well tagged, some not). Can’t understand why. Spent one hour trying to. (If someone has a clue ? I think it has something to do with a loosy handling of renaming and modifying files on the device…)

Doing so, I had to plug and unplug the device (I don’t know if other MP3 players allow USB and listening in the same time but not being able to do so is soooo boring). The clip did not like it (sometimes directories disappeared if I was too quick). It’s understandable since it’s not a true MSC mode : look how the context menu is different from the usual context menu, look particularly how you CAN’T edit you m3u files from the device, or look how you can’t drag and drop the files from the device to foobar for instance…

It’s not a matter of opinion/preferences. Could someone just tell me how you do album-browsing with a tag-managed mp3 player ??

I must say I am kind of disappointed with the clip. It’s a shame since it is very nice and quite cheap.

PS : I’m sure you will excuse my approximative English
PS2 : I was not surprised when this forum asked me one digit and one upper case letter in my password !! (It’s not like I had something so important to hide and now I am sure to forget the pass…). Nor when he said my browser was not supported (I am using Opera).

[porio]

A lot has been said, but there are a couple of things I can add:

* Obviously, the best would be to have both folder AND tag navigation. But when having only one I think this way: you can do with tags ~90% of what you can do with folders. On the other hand, you can do with folders ~50% of what you can do with tags (these are subjective, rough numbers. Don’t ask me for a feature-by-feature comparison!!!). Of course, if you really care about the 10% you can’t do with tags, then don’t buy the Clip…

* I completely agree that the greatest pitfall of the tag navigation is when it comes to compilation albums. You can find yourself with hundreds of artist and then the ‘artist’ navigation filter becomes useless!!! UNLESS the ‘album artist’ tag was more widely used. Then you would have the compilation albums under the ‘Various Artist’ category, and at the same time you would have the correct artist displayed in the screen when playing the song.

* A suggestion for MSC-people or those that don’t like WMP: Use mp3tag to make playlists, it’s really fast and simple and it works. You can open an entire folder with its sub-folders, or just the folder holding one album, select the files, clic a button, and that’s it!! It’s a small, non-invasive software that may seem more ‘transparent’ for MSC-people. Then I use TreeComp to check what was changed between the Clip and my music collection. It doesn’t force me to sinchronize everything, just the folders I want to.

[thoma]

the main problem with id3 tag is not the use of WMP or programs. its the flexibility. Because of id3v2, you now have to worry about album artist, contributing album, various artists, composers, producers, conductor, etc etc etc etc and more ETC.

that’s the biggest problem right there. because id3v2 allows you store ANY information you desire, such tags get inconsitant from program to program. the comparasion between winamp and wmp11 is probably just a few fields, but compare that to another program and another program and another program, and the varying fields overlap and differ.

Not to mention you can now include lyrics and long essay comments, it just makes id3 tagging more of a hasal. Do you really need all that information? I’d understand for maybe professional heirarchies, but even than the current online database of napster and rhapsody are only using 3-4 fields, the rest is just left blank.

really you have to look at what you personally need, and because these features are openly offered, many feel the need to use it. but really when you go through your library and listen to your music are you going to want to know who the contributing artist, varius artist, composer, producer, etc is? I think at that point, you’d have remembered all that information for that particular song and not even need the id3 tag. I’m actually just fine with the title of the song and artist and a folder specifying where its from or what genre it is. 

but everyone is different. the debate is really pointless. . . its like one side is arguing red should be blue and one side is arguing blue should be red. the end product is that you’ll have a red and blue still. in this end there will always be id3 tags and non id3 tags. at one point mp3 players did only folder view, then they did only id3 view, I think its very realistic that it will merge.

[skinjob]

The discussion about Album Artist is interesting.  When you see it properly implemented, as in Winamp, it’s extremely useful.  You have the option of browsing your library in Album Artist (Single artist, Various Artist and Tribute albums would be separated just like the actual physical media) or by Artist (any album on which an artist appears, including various and tributes, would be grouped under the artist).  Both are great depending on what you’re looking for.

This is a really good example of a powerful feature of tags that can’t be duplicated by folders.  In a typical folder organization where each album is in it’s own folder there’s no easy way to find every track by a given artist.  With tags it’s a piece of cake.

Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, most portable players don’t support Album Artist browsing.  It would be really great if Sansa players supported it.

[skinjob]

@french_nat wrote:
I just can’t listen to my “best of”.

Are you saying the “best of” album doesn’t show up in the Album list?

 

@french_nat wrote:

Well it worked for some directories. It didn’t for others (some well tagged, some not). Can’t understand why. Spent one hour trying to. (If someone has a clue ? I think it has something to do with a loosy handling of renaming and modifying files on the device…)

m3u playlists definitely work correctly.  It’s the primary way I use my Clip and Fuze.  It looks like you had the right idea.  Some of the paths or file names in the m3u must be incorrect.

@french_nat wrote:

Doing so, I had to plug and unplug the device (I don’t know if other MP3 players allow USB and listening in the same time but not being able to do so is soooo boring). The clip did not like it (sometimes directories disappeared if I was too quick). It’s understandable since it’s not a true MSC mode : look how the context menu is different from the usual context menu, look particularly how you CAN’T edit you m3u files from the device, or look how you can’t drag and drop the files from the device to foobar for instance…

Are you sure you are in MSC mode?  In MSC mode the Clip will behave exactly like any ordinary USB flash drive.  Either you are really in MTP mode or maybe something is messed up with your USB drivers.

Also, you can charge and listen at the same time.  You just can’t have an active data connection and listen at the same time.  So you can either get a USB wall charger or get another USB cable and disable the two inner pins. You can also try only inserting the USB plug half way into your computer’s port.  In many cases this will allow the outer two power pins to connect but not the inner two data pins.  I don’t think many players let you listen and have the file system mounted on your computer at the same time.

[french_nat]

First of all, thank you very much to have readen me and for having even taken the time to answer my questions.

@skinjob wrote:
Are you saying the “best of” album doesn’t show up in the Album list?

Well, you are right of course, it does appear if it is well tagged ;). It is just overwhelmed with all the single files (that is not specific to a “best of” album though).

@skinjob wrote:
m3u playlists definitely work correctly. It’s the primary way I use my Clip and Fuze. It looks like you had the right idea. Some of the paths or file names in the m3u must be incorrect.

I can assure you paths were OK. But it could be because of a strange feature of the MTP mode. The settings were on “auto-select”, and since I could drag and drop I thougth it was MSC mode. What you said next made me check and force MSC mode ; it is now a fully USB device : thank you for that and my apologize. The exact same m3u playlists seem to work now (funny some worked and some didn’t back then).

As for the pins trick, I was absolutely unaware of it so thank you for that also. However the discomfort was due to the incompatibility between mounting and listening when I was doing all sort of tests. As you say and as I said I am not sure any mp3 player let you do that…

But now that everything is clearer to me, I’ll waste less time doing tests

In case anybody would be intersted, it seems that changing from MTP to MSC mode change the folders view. “Playlists” and “Albums” disappear : clear enough since they were sync features. But the folder “Music” appeared empty even if I had 2Gb of music in Music…

Well I just formated the whole thing and started again. I’ll go through the less-painful-but-still-quite-painful work of editing one m3u for each album I want to add, wainting for a folder view…

Edit :
That’s just great, foobar uses relative paths in m3u files. There is even a component to create extm3u. Everything’s getting better.
Message Edited by french_Nat on 06-28-2008 03:22 AM

Message Edited by french_Nat on 06-28-2008 03:22 AM

[hj0001]

I don’t understand why sandisk doesn’t respect the customer wishes (file browsing additional to mp3-tags browsing) to improve the usability and firmwarequality of their products. They lose money because of the simply fact that some guys don’t buy sandisk mp3-players because there is no file browsing…