Again: Audiobooks and ID3 and Fuze

Hello,

I want to use the Fuze to hear audiobooks. I heared that the Sansa players are very well for this aproach. Now I have tagged all my audiobooks with ID3 tags but the player does not always play them in the right order.

The directory structure is

“NameOfAuthor_NameOfBook/CD_x/NameOfTitle”

and the ID3 tags are now containing:

Author: NameOfAuthor,

Album: NameOfBook,

Title: “NameOfTitle”

Nr: #/#s on this disk (!)

CD: x

I am not sure how the Fuze uses this information to get them in order. On some audiobooks it works perfectly well, on others he plays CD 1 - track 1, CD 2 - track 1, CD 3 - track 1, CD 1 - track 2 …

How to solve this? I do not really want to re-tag all of them - if there is any other chance to get it to work. And there must be - or why are some of the books working???

Thank you for your patience :slight_smile:

Ciao Matthias

I also had this problem - but solved it using Mp3tag [(freeware) Google this and/or search the forum].  With this program you can use its autonumbering wizard to change all the track numbers in one go.  As it is likely that you will have a large number of tracks you should tick the wizard box to ‘include leading zeros for track numbers (01, 02…)’.  If you have not used the program before set the tags to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 [tools- options]. Before you use the wizard make sure that all the tracks are loaded [i.e. include all converted CDs] and the tracks are in the correct order.  In my case this has always been simply a case of clicking filename or title until the order is good.   Good luck I hope this helps. :smiley:  If you set the Genre to Audiobook - the books will sit nicely in the Audiobook [music] option on the Fuze - giving you access to the auto-resume feature.  If you don’t want this bookmark feature then you could set the Genre to Audio Books and look for them under Music… 

I think this issue is being addressed in the next firmwre release due out in a week or two. Actually, I think it’s supposed to add multiple disc recognition for multi-disc sets (box sets) for music CD’s, but it should probably help with audio book multi-CD’s too. The Fuze doesn’t know (or care) whether the file being played is music or spoken word. :wink:

Hello,

thank you both for your posts :slight_smile:

@shimbo wrote:

I also had this problem - but solved it using Mp3tag [(freeware) Google this and/or search the forum].

I am using a Linux box so I cannot run MP3tag. But I used a similar program called EasyTAG which did a great job :slight_smile: It added the “audiobook”-genre and taged all files by name of the trackname, name of the disk(set) and author. It also added tags for the number of the disk in the set and the numberof the track on the specified disk.

I will try to explain it practically:

Let’s take a set of two CD’s,  the first with 10 tracks and the second with 12 tracks. The tracks of the first CD will be numbered 01 to 10 and the CD tag will be set to 1. The tracks of the second CD will be numbered 01 to 12 and the CD tag will be set to 2. This is because the tracks are stored in folders “CD_1” and “CD_2” on my harddisk.

 When I copy such a set of folders to the sansa fuze it ignores the disk tag and plays the two 01 tracks first. That is not what I expected :wink: I thought perhaps someone knows a workaround to this.

@tapeworm wrote:
I think this issue is being addressed in the next firmwre release due out in a week or two. Actually, I think it’s supposed to add multiple disc recognition for multi-disc sets (box sets) for music CD’s, but it should probably help with audio book multi-CD’s too.

Wow. It seems the next firmware release will “heal” all the demands of the users :slight_smile: When it really supports multi CD’s it should do this with audiobooks too. Sounds like we will get a christmas present :slight_smile:

Best regards,

Ciao banty

I also have the same problem. I tried to put each in its own folder, but it doesn’t help. How come files are listed differently when I switch from MTP to MSC and vice versa? Actually, some files I have in MTP don’t even show up when i switch to MSC.

 I’m going back to my old mp3 player.

@gurl wrote:

I also have the same problem. I tried to put each in its own folder, but it doesn’t help. How come files are listed differently when I switch from MTP to MSC and vice versa? Actually, some files I have in MTP don’t even show up when i switch to MSC.

 I’m going back to my old mp3 player.

I know that mtp and msc modes are funny in that stuff you load in one mode will not show up in the other… like a fat drive can’t see ntfs etc… for all of you old timers who remember the good old days… when we had dos and os2 or the early days of windows when ntfs was new… ntfs could see fat but fat could not read ntfs… same sort of idea from what I understand.

 Also from what I have seen the folder structure doesn’t matter as the fuze organizes based on id3 tags and not directory structure… 

Hello out there,

now there is a time when sansafix is online again :slight_smile: Perhaps you can confirm this:

@tapeworm wrote:
I think this issue is being addressed in the next firmwre release due out in a week or two. Actually, I think it’s supposed to add multiple disc recognition for multi-disc sets (box sets) for music CD’s, but it should probably help with audio book multi-CD’s too. The Fuze doesn’t know (or care) whether the file being played is music or spoken word. :wink:

Is it true that in the next firmware release the disk tag will also be considered when the tracks are played? So it no longer plays track 1 of disk 1, track 1 of disk 2, track 1 of disk 3 - instead it first plays all tracks of disk 1, next the tracks of disk 2 and so on? That would be very great! Otherwise I have to renumber all of my audiobooks by hand because my software for setting the tags does this only directory wise. The software is EasyTAG for linux.

Thank you in advance :slight_smile:

Best regards,

banty

Yes the new firmware fixes this.  The only caveat is your player needs to be in MSC mode or the content needs to be on the external card.

MTP does not support Discnumber, so the internal volume in MTP does not recognize this tag.

 The external card contents tags are fully parsed at database refresh so we can extract the discnumber info in that case, even in MTP mode.

Hello,

@sansafix wrote:

Yes the new firmware fixes this.  The only caveat is your player needs to be in MSC mode or the content needs to be on the external card.

 

MTP does not support Discnumber, so the internal volume in MTP does not recognize this tag.

 

 The external card contents tags are fully parsed at database refresh so we can extract the discnumber info in that case, even in MTP mode.

Thank you very very much! :slight_smile: I am very glad to hear this! For me it is no caveat that MTP does not support this because I never used the Fuze in MTP mode. But this may be interesting information for other Fuze users…

What I want you to know that I like the idea of this forum. And of course I hope that you will stand all that funny whishes, questions and grumbling about the sansa series. I think sometimes it is not that easy. As embedded software developement isn’t - I am doing this either :wink:

Have a nice day! :slight_smile:

Best regards,

banty

Hello,

To the Sandisk Sansa  Team: Thank you very much :slight_smile: Now can hear my audiobooks disk by disk :slight_smile: No more problems with the order :slight_smile:

Ciao banty

I’m still having problems with my Fuse not playing

audiobook files in the correct order.  The Fuse is

set up as follows:

V01.01.22A
MSC mode
40 files in external memory

The tags are set up as follows:
Filename:  001.mp3 thru 040.mp3
Path:      (keep)
Tag:       ID3v2.3 (ID3v1 ID3v2.3)
Title:     001 thru 040
Artist     (keep)
Album:     (album)
Track No.  001/040 thru 040/040
Year:      (keep)
Genre:     Audiobook
etc., etc.

The Fuse plays the files in the following order:
010, 020, 001, 011, 021, 002, 012, 022,
003, 013, 023, 004, 014, 024, 005, 015,
006, 016, 007, 017, 008, 018, 009, 019,
030, 040, 031, 032, 033, 034, 025, 035,
026, 036, 027, 037, 028, 038, 029, 039,
026, 036, 027, 037, 028, 038, 029, 039.

Any suggestions?

I’ve hade the same problem with audiobook files in the wrong order (seems to sort on the last digit?) with the same firmware. So I tried to transfer the files with MTP and now they are played in the right order… (Using linux and EasyTag for tag-editing).

I have since discovered that if I use  mp3tag  (a great program) to get rid of track numbers and titles that the files will play in the correct order.