Tags problem---Edited tags displayed in Clip as unknown tags.

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

I edited artist and album tags using Mp3tag, then copied and pasted music files to the folder “music” in sansa clip. But clip still displayed unknown tags in some files. I tried again but it still showed unknown tags. Later I copied the files one by one and it showed the right tags. This is time consuming. Any helps? Thanks.

2

I can’t see why the number of files copied would affect how Clip reads and processes the tags.  Were you consistently in one USB mode or the other (MTP or MSC)?

Also, I believe the Clip reads ID3V2.3 tags (as opposed to ID3V1, ID3V2.4 etc.) so make sure you’re using Mp3tag properly.

3

I had this issue with a lot of the international music I buy.

It is caused by the tags being saved in a non-unicode character set. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry.

There is a very easy fix.

I used the application called MP3Tag to fix it. Here are the steps I took.

  1. Install MP3Tag

  2. Launch MP3Tag

  3. Open the directory where the troublesome files are located

  4. Select the troublesome files

  5. Click the Save icon in the top left corner

No need to change anything. The act of saving the files is enough to fix the character set.

WHY THIS HAPPENS

Basically this can happen when you have any tags that have accented characters like those found in French and Spanish or non-latin characters like Chinese or Korean. When a person tags an MP3 with these types of characters, that person’s computer uses the default character set for that computer.

Most modern computers now use a Unicode character set. Unicode is a good thing. It gives us a standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. That means when you use Unicode, your text can be read and shared most anywhere.

The problem we see with tags occurs when someone uses a non-unicode computer to tag an MP3 with double-byte characters (that’s what we call characters with accents or characters from other writing systems like Chinese).

Without the standards of Unicode, lots of software and hardware cannot display these special characters so your MP3 player just tosses those files into the “Unknown” folder.