I was very disappointed to find that the Sansa player (mine’s a Clip) would not allow me to search through my music by filename. As I’ve ripped and accumulated my songs, I’ve spent quite a bit of time making sure my titles were named as “artist - song.mp3”. I use a very simple but tremendous little player called 1by1 for listening to music on the computer while I work, and the Folder/Filename convention it follows allows me to quickly find what I’m looking for. Unfortunately, many songs have either missing, incomplete, or corrupted ID3 tags, so this makes the Filename mode preferable. Editing the ID3 fields for each song is a potential solution, but is yet another lenghthy project. I want something NOW…
Since Sandisk has not provided this mode of searching, I’m using a couple of different workarounds. Neither is ideal, but they’re relatively simple to impliment. Basically, they involve the use of m3u Playlists. I use 1by1 for that, as well, since it presents all the songs in a directory and allows me to easily sort, tag, and create or add to playlists.
The first thing I did was create a single playlist. I sorted by filename, then created a playlist called “( Filenames ).m3u”, without the quotes, in the MUSIC folder. The parentheses in the name makes it show up at the top of the Playlist folder. Then I used a text editor to add #EXTM3U as the first line in the file. That’s it. Now I can go to Music, Playlists, ( Filenames ), click >>, then rather quickly scroll through the playlist for a particular song.
Here’s where the first ‘problem’ crops up. Scrolling through a playlist is slower than scrolling through the list of Artist, Albums, or Songs, etc., so it may still take a while to find wht you’re looking for. So I tried another idea. That was to create several playlists named [A].m3u, [B].m3u, … [Z].m3u, all in the MUSIC folder. Each playlist will have the sorted list of filenames that start with that particular letter. You’ll need to add the #EXTM3U at the top of each one. Obviously, creating a ‘directory’ of playlists like this makes it faster and easier to find what you want.
Unfortunately, whenever you add or delete songs on the player you’ll need to edit or re-create the appropriate Playlist(s). The single-sorted-playlist is easy to recreate. I like the [A] through [Z] idea the best, but it’s the hardest to maintain. Which raises a question…
Is there anyone willing to write a small program that will scan through the folders on the Sansa and create the necessary m3u files automatically? I’m certain it would be greatly appreciated by many Filename-deprived Sansa users. :>)
I hope this helps some…