Open mp3tag. Look for Tools, click on it, click on Options and you’ll see Tags and Mpegs under that. Click on Mpegs and you’ll see Read and Write. Let it Read everything and Remove everything–check them all–and for Write change it to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. Click OK. Now whenever mp3tag saves a tag it will save it so the Sansa can read it most easily.
Right-click on one of your problem albums. You should see all the files listed–hopefully in order of play, not alphabetically. It’s going to depend on how the files are named. (If they’re alphabetical, because nobody put numbers in the filenames, click on the top of the Track column–assuming they have track numbers.) Now you can change all of their tags at once, by highlighting them all and putting Artist or Album in one of the boxes at the right, and going to File and Save Tag.
Once the Sansa can read the tags, it can sort them in the ways you see under Music: by Album, Artist, Song (title), Genre.
You can do whatever you want in any of the tag boxes, and that’s what the Sansa will read. If you want to change all of your The Beatles albums to have Beatles as Artist instead, you can do that.
But I recommend keeping the original album titles. On the Sansa you can then turn to Artist and get the albums listed alphabetically under that.
If you have multiple albums by one artist and also change Album to be the same as Artist, you’ll get a jumble. Track one of one album will play, followed by track one of another album, etc., followed by all the track 2s.
But you can really do as you please. Some people add the release year to album titles, like 1963 Meet the Beatles, 1964 A Hard Day’s Night, 1965 Rubber Soul, etc. Then under Artist you get the albums listed in career order.
I strongly recommend that when you’ve done whatever else you want, that you highlight the tracks–again, in playing order, top to bottom–and go to Tools and the Auto-Numbering Wizard. Tick the Leading Zeroes option and run it. Otherwise, the Sansa is going to go by the first digit of the track number, so 1, 11, and 12 will play before 2 and 3.
As for WMP 10, don’t worry about updating it as long as it works. What is your computer’s operating system? (Windows 2000, XP, Vista, etc.)?
