I have a problem with the display of my track lists on my new Fuze - the same tagged mp3 files which display alphabetically for artist on my Walkman phone will not display likewise on Fuze, and when I attempted to put all files into one single “album” group per artist, the order in which they displayed did not make any sense to me at all. Somebody elsewhere declared that my track tags were the problem, despite my not having such problems on my other mp3 player. Nobody suggested otherwise, so I experimented by doing the following:
I cleared the tags on three groups (Artist), using my tag editor (EasyTag), each with multiple albums, and re-tagged them for Title, Album, Artist, and Genre, and no more. When viewed under FUZE’s Artists->Play All, they were not alphabetized for the Artist, but the order seemed to follow the the alphabetical list of Album titles, which they appeared to be sorted on after some study. It actually takes some study because there are no album titles, not even a freakn’ line space to separate these groups - one just runs right into the next! Hardly the mark of a product I’d pay half as much for, especially with no options to display a list of tracks alphabetized by the artist.
Anyway, I decided to try and work around this by clearing my Album field in my tracks, so that they would all display under one “album”, the “Unknown”. This didn’t work, as they were still showing out of order under Artist->Play All. Without the album titles there to compare with the tracks, I really couldn’t tell if the order was completely random, or just unchanged from the way they were displayed when the album groups existed (in this case they would still be on some level, wtf?). If you don’t transfer to your mp3 player AND play all of your tracks by the album, then you know just how ridiculous it is to have album groups, which are typically poplulated with 1 to three tracks. It’s inconvenient enough for me that I decided not having them around for reference at all would be better than not being able to sort my files around the artist in question, but something which is absolutely not apparent in my file tags is sabotaging this. If it’s my fault for not for anything which I still don’t know about tags, I knew much less about them when I got them all to display perfectly, and exactly as I wanted them to on my Walkman phone (Ericsson w580i, which you could get free with a new contract >18 months ago). Everything that I’m struggling with for the FUZE was completely unnecessary with this cheap and slightly more primitive player, which didn’t make you start playing the first track before you had the chance to make a selection. I checked only two fields before I achieved this on my Walkman - title and artist, AND the rest was a complete mess of half-populated fields, among them Album, Genre, Year, Track #. Under these conditions, the Artists displayed alphabetically, the Albums which were named did as well, and so did the Tracks, which were alphabetized perfectly around the Artists. On my Fuze, the groups have been treated much more carefully to eliminate all undesired tag items like Year and Track #, which could possibly upset the sorting of the Tracks. So if anyone thinks it’s still because of how I deal with my tracks, or something else I’m ignorant of, it sure would be good of you to clue me in on how to make life easier with the FUZE, because if it didn’t look so nice, and didn’t have better-than-expected sound, I’d be set to return mine.
Oh, there’s one more thing which may be a lead on this mystery, for those who understand such cases - there was one group which I was able to sort by track title, but it was really under an Album group (well, for book tracks it would be author). It’s mostly the audio books which I have complete groups for “albums” on, and I have never noticed the same trouble with getting tracks to display alphabetized under their origional album titles. While it is always desireable to have all of your book tracks display under the same book title (album) in order, and I have not had insurmountable trouble with this, it’s often more desireable to mix the tracks from multiple albums into a single group per artist. FUZE does not seem to offer this and sort it as a single group too, so I tried to force it to do so by eliminating the Album tags, or by giving all of one artist’s tracks the same album name. Considering that there is nothing else appearing in my tag window which would cause it to do otherwise, I’m going absolutely crazy trying to figure out how why they still won’t alphabetize under the Artists menu. Things I noticed while experimenting with groups of tracks on FUZE:
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I had initially had trouble with tags which were named with book title initials “TBW 01of50”…“TBW 50of50” They displayed as I expected them to with these names on my Walkman, as I could see no reason why it or any other mp3 player wouldn’t, but FUZE couldn’t sort them alpha to album until I changed the titles to “TBW 01”…“TBW 50”! There is definetly something about the differences in these names which causes Fuze to behave differently, even if most of us would expect both list schemes to produce the same results in order a group of 50 such items, with each increasing the first number field by 1.
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When I removed the Album entries from my tags, to merge all tracks for each Artist under one group, it should have displayed the tracks in each group alphabetical to the Artist, but this did not happen. I didn’t have the Album list to check them against, so I could’t compare the list to it’s order when the Album tags were there, so I don’t know whether the order was as if there were still album entries for fuze group my tracks against or if it was something beyond my slightest grasp, but wouldn’t it be weird if Fuze is trying to group my files against tag entries which aren’t even there, or aren’t anymore. They’re all mp3s, so there shouldn’t be any hidden stuff. Anybody got a clue on what else would cause this?
Thanks.