I purchased a sansa clip plus recently, primarily for listening to audio book. And I LOVED it. I liked it so much that I got my wife one. Then we ran into a problem with the way audio books are played.
We both have a Sansa Clip Plus with firmware V01.02.15A and we copy audio books to the SANSA in MSC mode.
BUT, I use linux. It appears that linux always copies the files in alphabetical order. My wife uses windows, and windows does NOT always copy files in alphabetical order.
And thus the problem with the sansa clip audio book playback that *I* did not notice. Within a book (as determined by the album tag) It orders the chapters by the order in which they were copied to the player. It does NOT order them by the filename. It does NOT order them by the title tag. It does NOT order them by the track tag. I was able to reproduce this problem on my player in linux by deliberatly copying the files out of order. I reproduced this problem with different books, and on both players.
So, for example, If I have an audiobook on my computer that looks like this:
Folder:Godwin_SpacePrison
* spaceprison_01_godwin_64kb.mp3
* spaceprison_02_godwin_64kb.mp3
* spaceprison_03_godwin_64kb.mp3
* spaceprison_04_godwin_64kb.mp3
Then I plug in the sansa clip plus, and under AudioBooks create the same folder, then copy in the files out of order:
Folder:/media/SANSA CLIPP/AUDIOBOOKS/Godwin_SpacePrison
* spaceprison_04_godwin_64kb.mp3
* spaceprison_02_godwin_64kb.mp3
* spaceprison_01_godwin_64kb.mp3
* spaceprison_03_godwin_64kb.mp3
Once I disconnect the player, the chapters will appear on the sansa in the order in which they were copied. 4,2,1,3. It does not sort them by filenamet or title or track!
Like I said, on linux this isn’t a problem because (at least in all of my tests so far) if I copy a folder (or even just a selection of chapters) and paste them to the sansa, it copies them in alphabetical order. But if I boot into windows xp on my machine, or windows 7 on my wife’s machine, and do a mass copy/paste, the order in which they are copied is not entirely alphabetic and the sansa plays the chapters out of order.
Of course, the simple fix for this is for my wife to copy one chapter at a time to the sansa, but that is annoying. And it just seems strange that the sansa wouldn’t sort by filename or tag?
(and the problem would ALSO dissapear if I could convince my wife to use LINUX!)
From scanning the forums it appears that this is NOT a new problem:
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/Sort-Order/m-p/141857/highlight/true#M29448
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/Audiobook-Sort-Order/m-p/96076/highlight/true#M13959
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/Wrong-song-ordering-on-my-Sansa/m-p/112335/highlight/true#M16166
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/Sansa-Clip-8-gb-wrong-track-order/m-p/117242/highlight/true#M24220
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/How-play-order-is-determined-for-music/m-p/75185/highlight/true#M16192
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/Audiobooks-wont-download-in-order/m-p/108623/highlight/true#M15131
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/ID3-tag-help-to-fix-play-order/m-p/85845/highlight/true#M10891
But the only solutions offered here are
1: Create a Playlist
I suppose this might work, but it sounds like just as much (or more) trouble than just moving the tracks over one at a time.
2: Rename all files to have tracknumber on end of name
Ok, THAT works. But that is just… highly annoying, and again, probably more work than just copying the tracks one at a time.
I LOVE my clip+. But we did get them primarily for listening to audio books and this seems a very, VERY strange (and annoying) bug. Any chance it’s going to be fixed soon so that audiobooks will actually order by the filename or tag?
Thanks.