NPR MP3's not recognized

When I drag certain MP3 files, specifically the podcast downloads for NPR’s “Car Talk” and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”, to the player’s “Music” folder from my PC, the player skips over them in the Music view once I disconnect it from the PC. Other files in the same folder are visible and can be played, but it’s as if the player doesn’t think the NPR files are valid MP3’s. The files play fine in Windows Media Player on the PC. The player is in MSC mode, though I have tried MTP and had the same problem. How can I get these files to be recognized so I can listen to them on the Clip Zip?

Are they listed (and able to play) in the Podcast (Under Music) menu?

Are they listed (and able to play) in the Podcast (Under Music) menu?

You may have to edit the ID3 tags so they are recognized.

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I might try dragging and dropping to the player’s Podcasts folder instead–my guess is, it’s an ID3 tag issue, which the Podcasts folder might be able to handle without more.  

I wish I could help, but maybe it’s helping to chime in and say I’m having the same problem? I download mp3 files from NPR, drag them to my “News & Talk” playlist, and synchronize to my Clip Zip. I’ve done this for years with my old Sansa YP-7J, no problem. This is a brand new Clip Zip to replace it. Windows Media player says it synchronizes. If I browse the player’s internal memory in Windows Explorer I see the files there. If I double click on the playlist in WMP it opens to show all my files listed. But if I go to the playlist in the player’s own menu, it says [Empty]. This is very annoying. If there’s no fix, I’ll have to return it. The thing is, I HAVE had this work, sometimes, even with the new player. I’m not sure what has changed. Did NPR recently change something in their format?

Actually, Tapeworm was right. Even though I listed all items in a playlist, my non-NPR downloads go into the playlist and my NPR one’s go into the Podcasts list (under books, not under music).

At least I can find them, but this is something of a loss. They’re listed in the podcasts section in alphabetical order. When the playlist thing was working, I could arrange to listen in whatever order I wanted. Now my playlist gets split into 2 separate places, and the order of part of it–the “podcast” part – gets scrambled. Is there a fix for that?

Edit the tags. ‘Podcasts’ cannot be part of a playlist. Edit the Genre field of the tag to something else. You can use something unique to indentify it to you, but it cannot say “podcast”.

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Thank you. Deleting the tags worked. It’s too bad podcasts can’t otherwise be part of a playlist. [Note to SanDisk software engineers if any are watching: why the heck not? It was possible on the older YP-7J, so obviously this is a software limitation, not a limitation ordained by nature.]

Give the series of podcasts the same album name, then assign them track numbers(starting with 101 if you don’t want to deal with leading zeros) so they play in the order you want. This is actually simpler than making a playlist.

I wonder if it’s something to do with the way NPR formats its podcasts. I often download them at work and then drag and drop into my Podcasts folder, and they sometimes freeze the Clip so I have to disconnect it and perform a soft reset. Only NPR’s podcasts seem to have this problem. Once they do transfer, they show up fine on the player.