1 Windows Media player’s sync is terriable, cannot imagine who design that.
2 So just use a 3rd-party software to do the sync. I suggest SyncExpert or Allway Sync.
SyncExpert is a very good software, old and powerful. Allway sync have fancy interface and can do automatically sync when detected the device.
3 create a folder on you hard disc and put whatever you want to put on the fuze into this folder and sync them. whatever you do the change local will be reflected to fuze. having sd? two sync folders then.
4 you can create “symbolic link” to the sync folder so you don’t have to copy the files around and waste you hard disc space. (Yes, NTFS support symbolic link, just google for usage). The SyncExpert support this method but Allway sync does not. Imagine you have a well organized folder structure for music. when you need to put a folder to fuze, create a link in the sync folde. When you want delete them from fuze, delete the link. Nothing changes on you hard drive.
5 use MSC mode, so windows recognize fuze as driver rather than portable device, so you can sync. and a lot of problems will be solved in MSC mode.
6 use m3u playlist, the lists can be put anywhere as long as the relative path is correct.
7 about chinese or other multibyte languages, use a m3u but write in UTF-8. m3u8 is not support by fuze, but UTF-8 content m3u is supported.
8 use id3 tag v2.3(UTF-16) to avoid display problem for non-english content. mp3tag can do that easily.
9 there are some constraints in playlist, seemed that the folder’s name cannot be to long.
10 you can use windows media player to create playlist and sync to fuze, however and folder structure is fully messy and very unconvinient to delete song. You cannot see these music in MSC mode.
11 the following is a python script to create playlist for current folder, use folder’s name as filename and contain all the support files in the folder. It use UTF-8 m3u file so support all language perfectly. To run it, you need to install python. You can write another script to call this in each folder you want to create playlist. It should be very simple if you know python. It also support sympolic link folder. Perfect.
#create m3u playlist for Sansa Fuze which support UTF-8 format m3u file(m3u8 unsupported-_-#)
import os, sys
import locale
import codecs
support_file=[‘.mp3’,‘.wma’,‘.ogg’,‘.flac’];
language, output_encoding = locale.getdefaultlocale();
print ‘System locale is’+language+’ '+output_encoding;
def listfile(path,fp):
subdirs=os.listdir(‘\’.join(path));
for dir in subdirs:
if os.path.isdir(‘\’.join(path)+‘\’+dir)==True:
path.append(dir);
listfile(path,fp);
path.pop();
else:
if os.path.splitext(dir)[1].lower() in support_file:
title=“\”.join(path)+‘\’+dir;
if title[0]==‘.’: title=title[2:]
#print title;
title=unicode(title+‘\n’,output_encoding);
fp.write(title);
def createlist(dir):
print ‘Create utf-8 playlist for ‘+os.path.abspath(dir);
filename=os.path.split(os.path.abspath(dir))[-1];
filename=filename+’.m3u’;
files=os.listdir(dir);
fp=codecs.open(filename,‘w’,‘utf-8’);
path=[dir];
listfile(path,fp);
fp.write(u’\n’);#fuze bug require an additional \n to load the last one
fp.close();
if __name__==‘__main__’:
if len(sys.argv)==1:
createlist(‘.’);
else:
for curdir in sys.argv[1:]:
createlist(curdir);