Genre problem

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

Hello all -

A few days ago I bought a 2GB Clip and I’ve been experimenting with it. Very cool little device, significantly better in many ways than my old Rio. However…

I can’t figure out how to get the genre labeling to work properly. I read several of the threads on this, and installed MP3tag to try to fix the problem.

One thread states: “I found the cause for the problem with a hint from another thread about the tag format. The tags were in UTF-8. Changing them to ISO-8859-1 fixed the problem.”

http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=clip&message.id=5919#M5919

Another thread recommends: “You can resolve the genre issues by retagging ALL your MP3s consistently with v2.3 UTF-16 text encoding.” http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=clip&message.id=4234&query.id=68533#M4234

I tried resetting the tags as the ISO-8859-1 via MP3Tag, but although it produced some improvement it didn’t really work overall. I didn’t try the other fix yet.

It’s also not clear to me whether it matters if you use MTP or MSC for file transfers. If it does, I’d appreciate hearing about it from anyone who knows. (I could also use an explanation as to why different folders show up in the clip depending on whether you’re set to MSC or MTP; e.g., with MSC I don’t see an “Albums” folder as I do with MTP, but I do see an “Audiobooks” folder." )

The tagging/genre problem is frankly a pain. With my old Rio, I could sort content easily by selectively filling in or leaving blank artist / album / genre tags. When that system works, it makes it relatively easy to sort through different kinds of content. With the Clip, it’s difficult to keep content sorted. For example, I have complete albums (no single tracks, just the whole album), radio shows (several different categories), and a number of albums (both whole albums as one file and whole albums with all the separate tracks as separate files) sorted according to different kinds of music. This was comparatively easy to manage on the Rio, but is difficult on the Clip. I can probably work around it, but the more content one adds, the less easy it is to manage it. For me, with more than 2GB it would get close to impossible.

Anyone grappled with the genres problem and come up with any better or solid solutions?

I have a few other comments and quibbles that I may post in the future, when I’ve had more more time to experiment with the Clip. This little player has a lot going for it. If Sandisk would improve the firmware, this thing would be exceptional.

Thanks.

2

Welcome, and good to hear that you’re liking the Clip.  Could you explain the Genre issue you’ve been having?  My music is similar to yours and I haven’t faced a Genre issue, apart from the Clip not liking the genre name “Audiobooks” but allowing “Audiobook” (singular) instead.

3

Since you use mp3tag and it’s what I’m most familiar with, here’s some suggestions. BTW, the reason for my preferring UTF text encoding is that certain ISO encoded tagging absolutely grenaded the database sorting in firmware .18 and before. UTF-16 did not. Anyway:

1.) Make sure when you retag your files, you REMOVE (replace) the old tags (not just append to them). mp3tag has an option for this.

2.) If your MP3s have both id3V1 and id3V2 tags, there can be conflicts that cause genre replication. You can actually delete the id3v1 tags (the Clip doesn’t need this legacy tag support) and use just v2.3 tags.

I’ve discovered that WMAs introduce yet another genre sorting issue (when present along with MP3s),  I’ve posted in detail on that before and won’t go into it again here, search if you’re curious about the reason for this.

Anyway I expect the “coming soon” firmware will fix all these sorting issues. We’ll see. 

4

Milkerman - Thanks for the reply. 

The problem is as follows. When the Clip sorts by genre, it then requires one to drill down in the menus via Artist and Album fields to the individual tracks. But with Genre, having then to sub-select according to Album or Artist isn’t necessarily helpful and in some instances is meaningless. For example, if I’ve loaded podcasts or mp3 files of radio talk shows, or radio dramas, or speeches/lectures, forcing one to navigate via Album or Artist makes little sense.

Offering other fields as sorting tools would be helpful (my old Rio also had a “Year” field).

Basically, I find the Artist / Album / Genre sorts on the Clip clunky. There are so many “Unknown” hits when you haven’t filled in specific fields in the tags that it requires many button presses to drill down to all the content. It’s not a deal-breaker, just annoying and sometimes confusing.

Message Edited by Earthman on 04-13-2008 09:28 PM

5

Click -

Thanks for the information. I had found your messages when I searched the forum re this problem.

It’s a little disconcerting that you advocate UTF-16 tagging. As I mentioned, someone else had advocated ISO-8859-1, so I re-tagged accordingly and, as I stated, it improved matters but didn’t solve them. I also do have a mix of mp3 and wma files, so that probably is compounding the problem. But as I wrote in my reply to Milkerman, part of the problem is the way the Click menus are implemented and organized hierarchically for the Genre field that I find clunky, including the ever-present “Unknown” that’s always forces one into more menus. 

Thanks again for the reply.  

6

I agree that tags can be a pain–why I like simple folder view available on some players so much.

Perhaps helping here, new firmware is coming shortly (this week?) that will allow simple drag and drop playing for podcasts and audiobooks–seemingly, tags not needed (info. will be picked up from the filename).  Will be interesting to see.

7

Earthman  - stating the obvious here, but the “ever present” unknown is only there because some of your music files are missing information in the genre field. That’s what it’s for, a placeholder in the database sorting routine. Not trying to offend, just trying to understand 100% of what your issue/complaint is.

No firmware update will ever “fix” missing information. Yes, the sorting algorithm could be improved to jump past fields with missing information, but…in order for this to work it would need to ignore ALL instances of that field, in all files, if ONE is encountered during sorting. This would result in missing genre info in a single MP3 causing the Clip to skip past the genre level in the drilldown menu for ALL files. Or perhaps I misunderstand, in case please explain how you think it should work??

If you want “unknown” to go away, the best way is to bite the bullet and retag all your files so they are consistent (i.e. have all “necessary” fields populated). I went from hating tags, to realizing the power of using them consistently, and spent hours updating my library. Well worth it.

In defense of UTF encoding, Unicode is required for multilanguage support - and “disconcerting” as it may seem - it was the only effective workaround for the pervasive and truly disconcerting “Refresh Database” lockup issue. There are of course personal preferences regarding encoding, perhaps partially driven by the very real (but IMO, insignificant) added byte count to MP3s, when using Unicode tags (2 bytes per character in UTF versus one in ISO).

Anyway, any valid encoding should work equally well in FW version .20 or above so no worries. 

8

Hi Click -

What I hope is a quick question. I just got a new 4GB Clip which I’ve yet to load. I’m planning on installing the latest firmware first.

Are you still recommending UTF-16 as the best file tagging format?  I’ve been using MP3tag (but could use any of the free tagging software). I also load both wma and mp3 files, and use the genre field.

Any minefields out there I should be aware of?  Thanks. 

9

@earthman wrote:

 

Are you still recommending UTF-16 as the best file tagging format?  I’ve been using MP3tag (but could use any of the free tagging software). I also load both wma and mp3 files, and use the genre field.

 

Any minefields out there I should be aware of?  Thanks. 

Unless you specifically need international character sets, I’d suggest going with id3v2.3 tags in ISO-8859-1 format.  However, it quite easy to switch back and forth with MP3Tag, so you can try it either way.  And definitely get the latest FW as you mentioned.

@earthman wrote:
It’s also not clear to me whether it matters if you use MTP or MSC for file transfers. If it does, I’d appreciate hearing about it from anyone who knows. (I could also use an explanation as to why different folders show up in the clip depending on whether you’re set to MSC or MTP; e.g., with MSC I don’t see an “Albums” folder as I do with MTP, but I do see an “Audiobooks” folder." )

There shouldn’t really be any difference between MSC and MTP as far as the tags go.  If your tags are messed up you’ll have problems in either mode.  The deciding factors are if you need DRM support or want to use WMP to sync.  In those cases you want MTP.  Otherwise, MSC is a much better option because you are free to use whatever tools you want to mange your content.  MTP does not mount the player as a drive letter, so only tools that explicity support MTP can manipulate files on the player.  MSC mounts as a standard drive letter so any tool can be used.  I use MSC exclusively.

As for the folder structure, with MTP it’s defined as part of the protocol and you don’t have much control over it.  With MSC, the folder structure is completely up to you.  Most people will use a MUSIC\Artist\Album style structure, but you can do pretty much anything you want.  You can put your files pretty much anywhere and the Fuze will find them.

The Audiobooks folder has special meaning.  Any files you put in there will have the additional audiobook functionality (enhanced bookmarking, etc.).  Setting the genre tag to Audiobook will also have the same effect even if the file is not in the Audiobooks folder.