Bonnie–
You could either fix what you’ve got, or you could re-rip.
A little explanation…
The Sansas (and most other mp3 players) arrange the music by reading the ID3 tags. When you look at Songs, the Sansa lists Titles from that ID3 tag. Same with Genres. It did establish the Audiobooks folder so you could keep books separate from music, but that’s unusual–most everything else is from the ID3 tags.
So the ID3 tags have to be the right ones.
Your problem is that whatever underpaid human originally put the tags on the files made some strange choices. And then, to make things worse, Windows Media Player made separate folders apparently based on the Artist tag, with subfolders based on Album.
This would be fine if the Artist was Rolling Stones and subfolders were Let It Bleed, Beggars Banquet, etc. But when someone at the audiobook company decides the artist is whoever is reading the book, well…
To re-rip, insert the CD in Windows Media Player and let it get tags (online) and then fix the tags you see–make sure Album is the book title, make sure Artist is the author, make sure genre is Audiobooks (you’ve heard that one before). No wacky stuff. Then have it rip after you’ve adjusted the tags, and you’ll have the tags you want.
Or if you no longer have the CDs or feel like fixing what you already have, there is a great piece of free software for fixing tags. It’s Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)
It’s a lot easier to use and smarter than the Advanced Tag Editor in Windows Media Player. When you install it, there’s an option to add it to Context Menus–check that.
After it’s installed, open it and make it write the tags the Sansa likes: Under Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg choose Write and ID3v2.3 and ISO-8859-1. OK it, and you won’t have to touch that again.
I’m hoping that your messed-up audiobooks have filenames in track order. 01-Chapter 1, 02-Chapter 2, etc. If you can gather all the scattered chapters and put them inside one big folder–just drag the subfolders in there–you can right-click on the big folder and choose mp3tag, which will list all the files in and out of subfolders. Hopefully in order if the filenames are numbered.
Once they are in order–you can move them up and down in the list if you have to–highlight them all, choose Album, Artist, Title, etc on the left in a way that makes sense to you, and (under File) save them. Then do one more thing: under Tools is something called Auto-Numbering Wizard. Pick Leading Zeros to make Track numbers (the order the Clip plays them) 01, 02, 03, again so the Sansa can handle them. It doesn’t like track numbers like 1/18, 2/18, etc.
You could do similar things in Advanced Tag Editor, but mp3tag works faster and easier.Even if you rip with Windows Media Player, open the folder afterward with mp3tag and run the Auto-Numbering Wizard just for luck.
Message Edited by Crescendo on 12-21-2009 02:09 PM
