Trying to understand playlists

Having been an Iriver user for 5 years, I just switched to the Clip and am trying to understand playlists.  On my Iriver, I organized my music just like I would organize any files (text, excel, music, whatever) on my hard drive.  I organized music on the Iriver according to Genre.  On the Clip, I can’t do this and I have to organize by playlists (I guess).  I thought that a playlist would be just a list of songs to play in a particular order. Using WMP, I filled my Clip with songs by drag an drop, then tried to make and sync playlists.  The sync gave an error saying my Clip was full.  Yes, I knew it was full, but I thought that playlists were just lists and not the actual music files.  When I sync a playlist from WMP, does it try to transfer the music files, too?  If this is the case, then I don’t understand playlists.  My original plan was to fill the Clip with all my favorite songs, and then to make a dozen or so playlists that would play the songs in the list in the order I specify.  When I got tired of the playlists, I planned to make new ones, but assumed that all my music would still be on the Clip undistrubed.  What don’t I understand about playlists and transferring them to the Clip?  Do I have to transfer all music to the clip in the form of playlists if I want to play the music using playlists?

Any help appreciated

Doug

If you fill up your device with music…then you can create a golist using the device music options without having to transfer anything…however, playlist does take up space and required you to plan ahead before you sync it to your device

Your Sansa organizes all music files by their ID3 tags.  This is the way to go, once you get used to it.  At least there’s a standardized way to catalog MP3 / wma files that’s portable between devices.

To see how this works takes a few minutes sitting with your Clip.  Navigate to Music > Genres. Now, you can see your music, automatically separated by type, just as you would do in a manual folder.

You can separate by artist or album too, and even the big list > songs.

In “songs” mode, you have the option of adding songs to your on-the-fly Go List.  (In ANY other mode, you can add songs to the Go List by using the submenu or programming the center button to “add to my Go List”.  For generating a Go List, check here

Bob 

What you said about playlists is true, it is just a list of songs.  However, when you sync a playlist to the device using WMP, it does also attempt to sync all the songs in that playlist.

You are not required to use playlists on the Clip, though - that is only required to use the ‘automatic sync’ stuff in WMP.  You can just manually copy files to the Clip and on the actual device you can play by Artist, Album, Genre, etc - assuming that the files have the proper ID3 tags (if not, there are several programs out there that will help you tag them - I use ‘mp3tag’).  Or, if you do want to use playlists, you just have to make sure that your playlists only contain songs that you want copied to the Clip.