This Thing's Going Back

I had a 16 g creative zen die on me after 3 years and I absolutely loved it. The only thing I found annoying was not being able to resume on the sd card. This the whole reason why I bought the clip zip. I thought it would be great to have 8g + 32g of memory that I could pause/stop and then resume later. I finally put 17g of albums on my sd card and it’s a complete mess. Half of the stuff I can’t find on it and the other half I’m finding some through song, album, folder… they’re all over the place! I never had this problem with my zen. I would just drag and drop and everything was there. Also it takes about 45 min. to refresh every time I turn it on! Absolutely unacceptable! What I’m I doing wrong???

  1. What condition are the tracks ID3 tags in?
  2. The player does not sort (or display) by file name in the Music menu’s lists (Artist, Album, Track, Genre, etc.). Is this what you were expecting?
  3. If the player cannot read the ID3 tag, it cannot sort/file it. Therfore, it will creat a new “Artist” named UNKNOWN. This is where many people new to these players find their ‘missing’ music.
  4. At the bottom of the music menu, there is a FOLDER option. Maybe this will help you recreate your ‘Zen’ experience.

Thanks for the fast reply. For each album I have the name of the album listed in the album column. So I figured I could just access my music that way. I like to access my music through the album selection. If I drag and drop my folders to the cz, It should have all my folders listed there right? Wrong. It only has some. I’m not an expert on id tags but I figured enough out to make everything work on my zen. On my zen I just looked up everything through the album option and it was all there and and the sd card had all my folders on it, just clicked on it and everything was there. Any suggestions?

First and foremost, you’re forgetting that you are not dealing with a Zen, so just because things “worked” on the other device, there are differences between platforms.

This would be the same situation if we were talking about using an iPod (well, forget that, they don’t like expandable memory), but the concept is the same.

With “drag and drop”, the user is taking control; the device has to deal with the data _as it can interpret it, in the format “dropped” to the card.  _Alternately, if you use a music manager like Windows Media Player, Rhapsody, or Media Monkey, for example, the data surrounding the music files can be edited to be more readily interpreted by the device.

You must corret the information, the metadata embedded in each file.  Luckily, there are utilities to do this, like MP3Tag  and others.  Once this is corrected to a standardized format, the files should play and index on either device as they should.  You can use MP3Tag to correct the information and even embed album art.

Alternatively, go to Music > Folders > External card and you can navigate the songs manually.

Personally, fix the tag data, exporting it as ID3v2.3 ISO 8859-1 (Latin-I), the standard format used by Windows Media Player and many other managers, and you should have far fewer problems with your collection.  I use MTP mode on my devices, making that database refresh necessary only when new music is transferred to the Clip Zip.

Bob  :wink:

Whether under USB MTP, MSC or Auto mode, the refresh should only occur when files are added or subtracted (or, perhaps, when the microSD card is removed/installed). 

@shadow0421 wrote:

Thanks for the fast reply. For each album I have the name of the album listed in the album column. So I figured I could just access my music that way. I like to access my music through the album selection. If I drag and drop my folders to the cz, It should have all my folders listed there right? Wrong. It only has some. I’m not an expert on id tags but I figured enough out to make everything work on my zen. On my zen I just looked up everything through the album option and it was all there and and the sd card had all my folders on it, just clicked on it and everything was there. Any suggestions?

That’s correct; you’re wrong. This isn’t how the Clip Zip (or any Sansa mp3 player for that matter) works.

As I said (and Bob too), the player reads (and displays) the info contained in the ID3 tags and in the specific Artists, Albums, Tracks folder/file heriarchy; not by the folders you create. It will ignore these.

If you’re dead-set on making your own folders, and wish to view and/or play them this way you have to use Folder mode (at the bottom of the Music menu).

Thanks for all the replies. The Zen has been the only mp3 player I’ve had so that’s all I really know. I’m not used to having this kind of frustration with an mp3 player. I sometimes do make my own folders and I tried to use the folder function but that’s that working right either. I have a folder of LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring and just dropped it into my external. I used the folder option and it shows only 2 songs from the soundtrack. I did download the mp3 tag software, so I’ll have to play around with that. Hopefully I can figure it out. Maybe that will solve all my problems. I switched to MTP mode (I was in auto detect) so hopefully it won’t take 20 min. to refresh next time I turn it on. Thanks for the help. If I can’t get this figured out within the next week I may have to send this back. Don’t be surprised if I come back with more questions!

Zip will not see my PNY micro sd card. I have a Clip, 2 clip +'s, and a fuse. Micro sd are Sansa and PNY. Sansa Micro sd cards work in all interchangeably.

Zip refuses to see the PNY.

My sd is sansa so that’s not a problem but thanks for the heads up! I’ll stay away from PNY

ok it I turned off my cz waited a few minutes and turned it on. I got the “refreshing your media” screen and it took 36 minutes to finish. I didn’t add or remove any files. I switched to MTP mode but I guess it doesn’t matter what mode it’s in. I’m assuming this is due to not having correct id tags?

If the database constantly is refreshing even though you haven’t touched the files on it or removed the card, it could be that the connection is loose with the card, and so the player thinks the card has been removed and replaced.  This could be a card sizing issue, or the Clip–does this happen with other cards?  If so, an exchange for a replacement Clip Zip could be warranted, through the seller or SanDisk customer service.

Let’s see if we can isolate the issue.  First, remove the microSD card.

Load some files to the internal memory, disconnect, and let the database refresh.  The refresh can take much longer if your music files contain data that the device is having trouble parsing the metadata and images from your music files.

MTP mode  has many advantages, the primary one in your case is that the database refresh happens only if there has been a file transfer while connected, or if the microSD card is removed / inserted.  Using the microSD card and navigating by folder , you will see some file names have numeric codes appended to the beginning of the file name (this is done to speed up the parsing process), so if you prefer using folder mode, this is a disadvantage of MTP.

If your microSD card was loaded using MSC mode, that will help you right now, since MP3Tag prefers MSC for access to the card.

Bottom line: fix the ID3 tags on your collection, and everything will work batter, regardless of teh device used.  Repair the tag data in your collection on the PC, and life will be much easier!

Bob  :smileyvery-happy: