Move tracks AND album art from internal memory to microSD

Thank you SanDisk for the great Sansa Connect and its integration with Yahoo! Music Unlimited. I’ve had my player for several days internal memory is almost full!

To free up space, I learned in this forum that I can drag and drop subscription tracks from internal memory to the expansion card (in my case, 6GB microSDHC) using Windows Explorer. It works; however, the album art is lost in the process.

How can I transfer both the songs and the album art? Clearly the Connect is storing the album art in internal memory somewhere, because the pictures show up even when WiFi is off.  But I don’t see any images on the Sansa Connect when I browse or search it from “Computer” in Windows Vista; I only see .wmv files.

What guidance can Greig or any other community members offer? Is there a utility or some other trick to copy the album art? Thanks in advance!

Rob

OK. You aren’t going to like the answer much when it comes to the file system management on the SD card. It seems to be a minimum MTP implementation.

If you use Explorer to look at the card memory while in the Connect, you will see music, photo and video folder. No matter what you copy into the folder, it will sort them into those three folders and any folder structure you copied in disappears. If you put the card into a card reader, you will only see one folder called mtp and all the files will be in the root of the mtp folder. There may be some mtp db files in the actual card root. So the Connect is just copying everything to the mtp folder and representing it in the music, photos and video folders in the Connect. Not really nice for managing the files.

The internal memory is managed with better structure.

So bottom line is you are stuck using YMJ or WMP to really manage the music in the expansion card (with some semblance of sanity).

Even then, I have noticed some issues with getting the Album Art to show up. But I noticed this on the internal memory as well.

Transferring some albums with Yahoo! subscription using YMJ, I noted that the album art didn’t show up. But it didn’t in internal either. However, transferring just one of the songs established the album art link. I deleted and transferred the album again. What do you know the album art linked correctly. But this isn’t anything that I can reliably repeat.

I noticed this and started to use the expansion memory to leave room for mixes and WiFi downloads on the internal memory.  On a related note, the fact that YMJ/WMP sees the internal memory and expansion memory as seperate devices, you need to be prudent in organizing your music with regard to playlists.  Even though the Connect aggregates all the music files from both memory sources into a single list, when you create a playlist and go to transfer it to the Connect, it will look for the tracks only in the memory bank you sent the playlist to.  So, if you sent playlist 1 to the internal memory, but most of the songs on the playlist are on the expansion memory, it will download another copy into the location of the playlist, in this case the internal memory.  You need to match the song location to the target location of the playlist.  Once you have a few playlists established, its fairly easy to manage.  It causes a few duplicates to be created, when you have a case where a song is in multiple playlists located in different memory banks.

With regard to the album art, I, too, find it necessary at times to try more than once.  My guess is that YMJ goes out to Gracenote once for the art, and if it doesn’t respond in time, no art is downloaded.  Seems like the timeout needs to be longer.  I’ve found that potentially quieter times of the day, like the wee hours of the morning, my success rate for getting art on the first download try is better.  A tag editor or a utility to scan for missing art would be a handy addition to YMJ.

Greig,

Thanks for your advice. After messing around with copying files in Windows Explorer and getting errors (as well as losing album art), I can see that you’re right that YMJ is the way to go. The chief downside is that it requires downloading the tracks all over again to “My Music” on my computer before transferring to the expansion card, but I can live with that.

Since a Connect with an expansion card looks like 2 portable devices, and since my wife has her own player too, I worry that the DRM will soon say I’m using too many portable devices. I don’t know if anyone has experienced that.

Thanks also for sharing your tricks for getting album art in YMJ.

Cheers,

Rob

GnisiBrianJ25us,

Thanks for alerting me to the limitations of using playlists with the expansion card. Better to know these things in advance. :slight_smile:

I can see that my biggest wish list item for SanDisk, if they do another firmware update, would be to treat internal memory and expansion cards as one big memory space (similar to the way adding a RAM module to your computer’s motherboard expands available memory).

Rob