ANSI vs. Unicode tags

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Clip | Sansa® Clip+
1

I don’t know if this is something worthy of a fix in the next firmware update.  Probably not unless it’s easy to fix.

I added some Classical genre mp3’s to my Clip, but noticed that they show up under a different genre entry from other files already there.  The genre for the old and new files all show up as “Classical” in the Clip, but there are two “Classical” entries on the genre list - one leads to the old files, and the other to the new.

Well it turns out the difference is that the old files used ANSI tags, and the new ones used Unicode tags.  When I changed the Mp3Tag default to put ANSI tags on the new files, I was left with one Classical genre entry containing all the classical files.

So I guess the Clip considers the two “Classical” encodings to be different even though it displays them the same way.  Well I guess in fact they ARE different.  But, you know, the distinction isn’t very useful to me as a Clip user.

2

It’s not only the genre tag that can be duplicated - and if you have a mix of (consistently tagged) MP3s and WMAs, there’s the potential for duplication AGAIN since the tags in these two files differ and the sorting algorithm has issues reconciling it.

This has been mentioned and discussed in some detail with Sansa personnel, recognized as a known issue, and slated for correction in a future FW release. Last I heard there’s something in test and a new much improved FW should be available in early April, if not sooner.