Fuze Album Play ignores track number

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
1

Yet another disappointment with my new Fuze.

I normally just use my playlists for listening to music with my Fuze.

I typically have most of them simply duplicating the actual album order.

What I just found is that the Fuze can not play an Album in order by default.

All my files are tagged properly but the Fuze want to play albums in alphabetical order instead of by track order.

There needs to be an option for playing an album by track order.

Even my Sirius Stiletto SL2 can play an album correctly.

Message Edited by tmarkoski on 09-30-2008 05:06 PM

2

if your files are tagged correctly it will play albums in the correct order.

here is what i did to test it.

music>albums>select the ablum of your choice>songs will be in ablum order

just verified on my 4GB fuze firmware 01.01.11A 

3

They are tagged correctly.

The problem is the Fuze.

The album play perfectly on every other player I have.

4

really dont think it is the fuze like i said just verified and all my albums show in the correct order when browsing through music>albums. 

does anyone else have this issue with their fuze?

try posting a few screen shots of you id3 tag info maybe we can find the culprit that is causing your issue.

5

I’ve verified  the tag info is correct with MP3TAG.

I do a sort by track number and it shows up correctly in MP3TAG.

This is a screen capture directly from the folder on the Fuze.

The files are tagged correctly but the Fuze simply ignores the track number in Album mode.

My Stiletto SL2 and my iRiver T30 play the Albums correctly but my Fuze does not.

The problem is most definitely the Fuze.

6

@drlucky wrote:

really dont think it is the fuze like i said just verified and all my albums show in the correct order when browsing through music>albums. 

 

does anyone else have this issue with their fuze?

 

try posting a few screen shots of you id3 tag info maybe we can find the culprit that is causing your issue.

drlucky, I can confirm that this behaviour is also present on my 8GB Fuze. I do not yet have a fully reduced test case, but here is a short explanation of why this is happening (and why it’s not as bad a problem as it sounds).

The original poster did not mention whether the files were transferred via MSC or MTP, nor whether they were stored on internal memory or an expansion card, but I strongly suspect that the files were copied in mass-storage mode to internal memory.

The FAT filesystem has the odd property of storing names in the file allocation table in the order that they were created. This means that if you select three tracks (“One.mp3”, “Two.mp3”, and “Three.mp3”, for example) and copy them to your player in alphabetical order, they will actually play in 1-3-2 order, as per alphabetic sorting.

The Fuze appears to group files according to their tags, but it uses the FAT ordering rather than the ID3v1 tags to determine the order in which to display them.

I do not know whether this is a problem in MTP mode, nor can I test it.

The stopgap solution here is to adopt an organized naming convention and stick to it. The better solution is to lobby SanDisk to respect the ID3v1 track number tag.

7

ah ha MSC might be the culprit. i use only default MTP mode and i do not nor ever have seen this issue. i will test in MSC mode tomorrow (will be partying tonight :smiley:) and see if i see the same issue.   

tmarkoski,

try syncing some files in MTP mode (just for a test not trying to convince you MTP is better) and see if the files show up in the correct album order. 

Message Edited by drlucky on 09-30-2008 07:07 PM

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Gnomon,

I did indeed copy all the folders over in on shot.

My Fuze is set to MSC and it appears that the Fuze uses the Windows File index

based on the local file sort view in Explorer.

The fact that Sansa can’t get something as basic as Album play based on Track Number correct really ticks me off.

Yet again we have another example of Sansa players being a day late and a dollar short.

DrLucky, I’ll give it a shot.

Message Edited by tmarkoski on 09-30-2008 06:14 PM

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Try renumbering them with leading zeros.  See if leading zeros, ie. 01 for track one makes a difference. Use MP3 tag to automatically renumber them.

10

tmarkoski wrote: 

 

The fact that Sansa can’t get something as basic as Album play based on TrackNumber really ticks me off.

 

 

 like JK98 said try updating the id3 tag to 01, 02 ect see if that resolves the issue.

if not humor us and try syncing the files in MTP mode and let us know if you still see the same issue. i use exclusively MTP mode and i have never seen this issue. (not trying to convince you MTP is better but if we can narrow the issue down to MSC mode we are more likely to get a fix in firmware from sansa)

Message Edited by drlucky on 09-30-2008 06:16 PM

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tmarkoski -

I noticed in your screen shot that your ID3 tags were set to ID3v1. Try re-setting MP3Tag to write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags & see if this solves your issue. This seems to be the preferred ‘flavor’ of ID3 tags most easily read by the Sansas.

They can sometimes be stubborn little buggers! :smiley:

12

@tapeworm wrote:

tmarkoski -

 

I noticed in your screen shot that your ID3 tags were set to ID3v1. Try re-setting MP3Tag to write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags & see if this solves your issue. This seems to be the preferred ‘flavor’ of ID3 tags most easily read by the Sansas.

 

They can sometimes be stubborn little buggers! :smiley:

 

good point i did not even catch that one 

13

Is this the only album it occurs with, or does it occur with other albums? 

As an experiment, you could try reriping the CD using Windows Media Player, delete the the album on your player, and tranfer the new set of files. Then see if it plays correctly.

My tags say ID3v2.3(ID3V1 ID3v2.3)

Message Edited by JK98 on 09-30-2008 09:58 PM

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@tapeworm wrote:

tmarkoski -

 

I noticed in your screen shot that your ID3 tags were set to ID3v1. Try re-setting MP3Tag to write ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tags & see if this solves your issue. This seems to be the preferred ‘flavor’ of ID3 tags most easily read by the Sansas.

 

They can sometimes be stubborn little buggers! :smiley:

We have a winner!

Thanks for the solution.

All my Albums were ripped with the Nero Media Player from Nero 6 and the tags are ID3v1.

<rant on> 

This did indeed work but I’m still rather aggravated that Sansa can’t read ID3v1 tags properly and play albums properly.

This is BASIC PLAYER FUNCTIONALITY!

Sirius and iRiver can get it right but Sansa can’t?

It wouldn’t bother me so much if Sansa actually bothered to document this ANYWHERE!

<rant off>

15

So much isn’t documented about the player. What is the album folder for?

16

tmarkoski, 

 glad to hear everything is working now. btw love the rants :smileyvery-happy:

tapeworm,

great catch, cant believe i missed that one lol

17

Wow . . .What’d I win? A 510MB SD card? Ooohhh! :wink:

All I can say about the tag issue is that it’s been discussed ‘ad nauseum’ on these boards and they just won’t read v1 or other versions of tags right. It’s not in the User’s Guide, but a lot of what I would call important or critical information is surprisingly missing from there also. Other mp3 players (maybe older?) and computer media players (WMP, Winamp, etc.) are more forgiving and will read a variety of tags.

But at least you now know how to fix it and prevent the problem in the future. It’s never a bad day when you learn something! :smiley:

18

@tapeworm wrote:

Wow . . .What’d I win? A 510MB SD card? Ooohhh! :wink:

 

 

they make 510MB SD cards? i thought it would be 512 :wink: 

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@tapeworm wrote:

Wow . . .What’d I win? A 510MB SD card? Ooohhh! :wink:

 

All I can say about the tag issue is that it’s been discussed ‘ad nauseum’ on these boards and they just won’t read v1 or other versions of tags right. It’s not in the User’s Guide, but a lot of what I would call important or critical information is surprisingly missing from there also. Other mp3 players (maybe older?) and computer media players (WMP, Winamp, etc.) are more forgiving and will read a variety of tags.

 

But at least you now know how to fix it and prevent the problem in the future. It’s never a bad day when you learn something! :smiley:

Thanks again for the tip.

It is much appreciated.

It’s all these little things that really tick me off when you look at them in their totality.

None of them, by themself, is an earth shattering problem but there just seem to be so many of them.

End users are essentially stuck with trial and error and web surfing as the first line of support

because the documentation is about as useful as screen doors on a submarine.

With my e280, I had to use trial and error to find out that *.pla playlists MUST be UNICODE files

or the e200 series won’t recognize them.

With my Fuze I find that the *.pla playlists no longer work in MSC mode.

Furthermore, converted *.m3u playlists do NOT support the extended ASCII character set so

I had to manually change “Motörhead” to “Motorhead” after converting the *.pla playlists.

Naturally, NONE of this is ever documented ANYWHERE!

I could go on forever.

I just get the feeling that SanDisk is run by a whole lot of C- students who just don’t care.

It wouldn’t surprise me to find that all SanDisk managers actually used iPods.

Message Edited by tmarkoski on 09-30-2008 07:38 PM

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Oops! You’re right. My bad!:stuck_out_tongue: