Clip Sport Songs Order & Album Mix-ups

@tapeworm wrote:

Not screwy at all. That’s the way they work. :wink:i


And, in fact, that’s the way the majority of modern players work–folder view is in the minority.

I’m a new owner of a Clip Sport player.  I used EasyTag to set the ID3 tags for the files in a folder.  I force-wrote changes to ensure that the tags were rewritten.  I deleted the MUSIC.LIB file, hoping that it would be regenerated using the tags.  Even with that, the files in the album view are in alphabetical order by the song name, ignoring the number that preceeds the song name on the file, and apparently, the number in the ID3 tag.  This songs in this folder are ogg files, BTW.

In the folder view, as well, the order is unexpected.  In the folder I mentioned above, the order is 16*, 02*. 04*. 03*, 05*, 06* (the * indicates the rest of the file name).

In my experience, I am unable to influence the order of the files.  I bought the device knowing some people had trouble with song order, but had read (I thought) that the folder view was conventional and I could live with that.

Hoping I could write a program to “touch” the files in the correct order, I looked at file modified, accessed, and changed dates, but none of them predict the file order.

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This is still the biggest performance (firmware) issue with the SanDisk Clip Sport.

Alphabetic is just random that doesn’t work properly.:angry:

There are several possible work-arounds that would resolve this.

  • (EASY FIX):: Don’t support all-tracks view / scroll list. This should not prevent random play, and completely removes MEMORY-constraint issue. I have only ever used this function (and only on desktop) to search or compare/edit, for standardized spelling / case, or to find obscure B-side tracks (alt. artist / covers).
  • (TRADE OFF):: Remove feature of seperate external and internal storage, to provide a larger song/track storge capability. This still needs other bugs (in sorting / near-duplicate tracks / presentation) to be fixed. At the very least, the device should then work as well as the Sansa Clip Zip.
  • (TRUE SOLUTION):: A more sophisticated memory schema, for sparse storage of track names (supporting 24-character sort, 36-character display). I am still wotking on this, including sample code, so will report back later …

NOTE: For me, this also need support for Vorbis Ogg ( .ogg ) music, as ALL MUSIC should be in correct track-order. Albums should also appear in _ date _ (year and/or month) order by default, with _ alphabetic _ only an option.

I certainly hope they fix this soon, in firmware v1.19 or v1.20. :dizzy_face:

According to this (http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/15598),,) the new firmware corrects this issue

Your link does not display anything useful.

I believe some of the track order issues were supposed to be fixed (in 1.17 or 1.18) for certain simpler/older music files types.

It certainly does NOT work (at all) for me.

Does anyone have a date / target for v1.19 (or v1.20) to be released?

Hopefully to address some of this …

(Ulp, no need to scream!  We can read you just fine . . . .)

Hi All - I just got my Clips sport and have upgraded to 1.17 firmware. I cant beleive how much trouble I’m trying to get it to play songs in order.

I drag over an album from itunes into the clip Music folder. The album which has three disc (CD’s) and each disc has around 20 songs. The file names show up in the clip folder as: 

1-01 Song1.mp3

1-02 Song2.mp3

1-03 Song3.mp3

etc

with the next album showing up as 

2-01 Song1.mp3

2-02 Song2.mp3

etc

All songs have correct tags assigned (via itunes).

However when I trying to play them on the clip via Music / Album it shows them in a weird order:

Disc 1 - Song 1

Disc 2 - Song 1

Disc 1 - Song 2

Disc 2 - Song 2

etc

How the hell can I get the clip sport to play all disc 1 songs in order then move onto disc 2?

I wish I just bought a **bleep** ipod nano!

Are you sure that this is not an ID3 tag issue, with the title and/or album fields?

You might check with good Internet freeware tag editor MP3Tag.

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

Some days ago I bought the SanDisk Sport Clip. While looking for a fix for issues with track order (for mp3 files with full ID3 tags) I stumbled upon this forum and decided to post my question in the hope of a useful reply from SanDisk support.

Out-of-the-box my player had FirmWare version 1.17 pre-installed and I can confirm that the tracks are now indeed ordered according to tracknumber. However, some very serious issues remain that make this player practically unusable as-is:

  1. In Music view: A directory structure Artist->Album->Tracks is created using the tags as one may expect any decent mp3 player to do. However, the Artist, Album and Track names are truncated at ~12 places. Since it is extremely common for album, artist (and/or tracknames) to be longer than 12 places the sorting mechanism is effectively nullified. Take this example:

Artist\Album\Track

Britney Spears\Live at Winterland Theatre 1971, Disc 1\Track 01 (etc)
Britney Spears\Live at Winterland Theatre 1971, Disc 2\Track 01 (etc)

Due to the name truncation both Disc 1 and Disc 2 are renamed to the folder ‘Live at Wint’ containing first all ‘Track 01’ files, then all ‘Track 02’ files, etc. Adjusting the Album-tag to something below 12 spaces may possibly prevent this issue, but it is simply not an option to change my entire database with many tens (read: hundreds) of GB’s worth of mp3/flac files into nonsensical-less-than-12-spaces names specifically for this player.

  1. Folder view: The folder view could have provided a good workaround for the issue mentioned above using filename=track_nr-title, except that here and with Firmware version 1.17 the files are sorted in seemingly random order (i.e. not in alphabetical order, but perhaps in order of modification/creation date?)

Due to the combination of both issues the SanDisk sport clip is effectively in a permanent pseudo-shuffle mode (under both the Music and Folder views) making it worthless whenever the track order is essential for album integrity, for example with concept albums, full-concert recordings or classical music (concider listening to the Matthaus-Passion in random order).

If I had been aware of these issues earlier I would never have purchased this player, which brings me to the question:

Will the issues mentioned above be fixed in an upcoming Firmware update?

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks.

(It would be great to receive a replay within a week, since then the warranty will approach expiration and I will be forced to return the product for a refund if things remain as they are now, with the associated breach of trust in brandname).

The Sport has engineering restrictions.  It is unlikely that the truncation will change, due to database limitations.  On the second issue, my understanding, if I recall correctly, is that the songs will be in order but by batches depending upon when they were added to the player.  Someone posted here, I believe, software that handles this, when run against the player’s contents (and so the software would need to be run periodically)–the software basically simulated a full re-transfer of the player’s contents to the player (or something like that).  You could try a search here. 

SanDisk currently is working on improved firmware, but what it might be is unknown (as is the when). 

If you have an upcoming return deadline, the Clip+ and Clip Zip are nice players, indeed, and do not have these issues, if they are important ones for you . . . .

Ja som to vyriešil vytvorením PLAYLIST. Paylist vytvorím za niekoľko sekúnd, uložím si ho do priečinka “Playlists” a pri spustení prístroja zvolím prehrávať z Playlist. Prístroj prehráva skladby v poradí ako sú skladby zapísané v PLAYLIST, to znamená presne tak, ako ty potrebuješ - v poradí albumov a v poradí skladieb, ako sú v tomto albume.

Prístroj prehráva skladby jedine v abecednom poradí, ktoré číta z ID3 Tág. Prístroj nedokáže neprehrať viacero slbumov podľa názvov skladieb.

Sorry but, you might try English here . . . .

Reply to Miikerman, ‎09-22-2014 10:45 PM.

Miikerman. Your response is greatly appreciated and has been very useful.

I’m sorry to hear about the database limitations. For my understanding: is the restriction on character length for names inherited from restrictions in FAT? If so, does this player employ an older more restrictive version of FAT than is common and would that explain why all previous players that I have owned did not suffer from this limitation?

Perhaps, given these restrictions, there is an improvement opportunity by implementing an automated unique full-filename –> short-filename mapping (something along the lines of e.g. 8.3 format) rather than the simple truncation that in practice will often amount to a many-to-one mapping.

With interest I pursued the second point that you made in your reply about rebuilding the file allocation table. I tried your suggestion and at first sight this seems indeed to have restored the alphabetical sorting in the Folder view. For me this is an acceptable situation, so I will hold on to this player (because of the other excellent specs, like battery lifetime & memory extendibility). However, since this workaround introduces extra steps after every file-update I still hope that a permanent solution will be implemented in a future Firmware version.

I do have some concerns about the impact of the repeated FAT rebuilding on the lifetime of the flash memory, because with this workaround every file is effectively copied three times. Does this imply that the lifetime is reduced by a factor three as well?

Once again thanks for the help! Cheers.

And here’s the software that can be run as against the songs on you Sport, to put it in alphabetical order (I just found it again):  FatSorter.

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/SanDisk-Clip-Sport/GUIDE-How-to-organize-your-2000-song-library/m-p/330051

Please allow me to make a small addition to Miikerman’s post.

FatSorter has an installer that requires admin rights. For people that would like to update the files on the SanDisk Clip Sport on a system on which they do not have admin rights (such as for instance at work): Do an internet search on FAT sorting and you’ll find many alternative tools.

The process is rather simple if I understand it correctly: all files are moved to a temporary folder and replaced in alphabetical order. Sounds like something that you could implement yourself in your favourite programming language … [warning: could be that I’m overlooking some subtleties here :O]

I went for a ready-made bat file:
http://www.murraymoffatt.com/sortfolder.zip
Unzip and you’re ready to go without administrator rights. It is a sufficiently easy-to-use tool that is called from the command prompt and takes about half-a-minute to sort the entire SanDisk Clip Sport 4GB memory. Open the bat file in a text editor to view the instructions.

Thanks for the info.!  But, sad that it needs to be done in the first place . . . .

As the solution is a hack, to get past limiation in the design and software bugs, I hope some this will be address by SanDisk in the next / future firmware …

Does anyone think any of the issues raised here are now addressed by v1.22?

Umm, see the Release Notes, and otherwise check it out . . . .   :wink:

Went to mp3 tag site and before download got a warning from McAfee saying site was dangerous.

Couldn’t get freeware without downloading garbage that comes with freeware.