File Structure For Manual Paste

So I’ve finally given up on trying to use Windows Media to get music on my Clip Zip - especially the 32 GB external card. What kind of directory structure do I need to create for a manual copy? I’d like to at least divide the music into categories like “blues”,“rock”, “more blues” etc.

You could set up folders such as classical, rock, oldies, Jazz, etc. Within the rock folder for example, you could have subfolders for each artist, then within each artist, a subfolder for each album. Keep in mind though that the player sorts by tags when you are choosing songs, so you will probably want to fill in the genre tag, and make sure the artist, album, and title tags are correct, and that the trach number tag is correct. Make sure the tags are in ID3V2.3 ISO 8859-1 format. The free program http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ makes it easy to edit many tags at a time. You should get rid of all other tags besides the ID3V2.3 ISO 8859-1 ones, and remove the composer and album artist tags which the player doesn’t support, and remove all comments(comments can cause media refreshes to choke or take a very long time).

If you have classical music, you might want to put this into the audiobooks or podcasts folder(whichever you didn’t plan to use) so that each classical music movement won’t be listed in your song list, and they won’t play when you shuffle all your songs.

Thanks JK98,

I didn’t really know about the tags but now this is starting to make sense. I think all I really need is to make sure the genre tag is correct and that might suffice for me. I did use Windows Media to RIP the CD’s and it must put in some tags of it’s own. That would explain why some of my Blues CDs were coming up as Jazz or Country. I will download the program you listed and give it a try. 

If you are connected to the net while ripping CDs using Windows Media Player it will usually fill in the tags, however sometimes there are mistakes in tags, or else the tags are missing from the database. MP3 tag fills in ID3V2.3 tags, but also other tags. You want to get rid of the other tags. Under tools, options, tags, Mpeg, read ID3V1 and ID3V2 should be checked. Under write, only ID3V2.3 should be checked, with ID3V2.3ISO8859-1 selected. Under remove, ID3 V1 and APE should be checked. When you select all files and choose the remove tag function, it will remove all the other tags besides the ones you need. Remember to choose save tag after this.

MP3 tag has has a tag sources button where you select all the files in an unknown(untagged) disk and you can use a few sources(one at a time) to try to find the tags for you disk.

MP3 tag takes some time to get used to. click on the help tab for instructions. MP3 tag will let you change the tags for a single file, or many files at a time. It will let you assign the title to be the filename for many files at a time, or vice versa. For tracks to play in the correct order, the player needs to have a leading zero for the track numbers under 10 if there are 10 or more tracks, ie. 01. The autonumbering wizard under tools can be set to add a leading zero where needed. When there are between 100 and 999 files though, two leading zeros are needed, or else you could start numbering at 101(as long as there are less than 900 files in the album, starting the numbering at 101 eleminates the need for leading zeros).

The best organizational folder set-up (in my opinion) is logical, dead-simple and is the same way WMP (or any music program) will organize the files/folders on your hard drive (usually in the My Music folder):

Artist [folder]

> Album(s) [folder]

>> Song 1 [file]

>> Song 2, etc. [file]

And my folder set-up is even 1-step easier: under the player’s Music folder, I just have a sub-folder for each CD, with the files for that CD in that folder. Likewise for the Audiobooks and Podcasts folders. In the end, best to do just what works for you (although having many sub-folder levels can cause issues) and what is important for you and the type of music/content you have (for me any my music, I operate by CD name rather than artist name; hence, no need for an intermediate artist folder level).

@tapeworm wrote:

The best organizational folder set-up (in my opinion) is logical, dead-simple and is the same way WMP (or any music program) will organize the files/folders on your hard drive (usually in the My Music folder):

 

Artist [folder]

> Album(s) [folder]

>> Song 1 [file]

>> Song 2, etc. [file]

This ^^  is the best way to do it.

Thanks Everyone for your help with this. Now that I know how to edit the tags my main concerns can be addressed. I’m perfectly willing to let WMP RIP the CD’s and create the file structure as long as I can make changes to the tags that will help oganize the music. I actually think my worse problem was trying to create playlists and using WMP to sync everything. Also for some reason WMP would not recognize the full 32 GB capacity of the external card and kept trying to write exclusively to the 8GB internal memory.  So somewhere along the line the external card got hosed and I had to remove it from the Clip Zip and use a USB adapter to format. After that I was able to edit my tags and copy the files over to the external drive while it was in the Clip Zip and all is well.  A very educational process and thanks again for all your help. 

Tags are everything with these players. I don’t even use playlists, except for the go list on the player.