I have a Sansa Express. Now, don’t get me wrong – it goes a long time on a charge, it holds a gig, and it was *very * reasonably priced. It could be so cool.
But, I want to play my songs in a particular order. I want to keep them in separate folders for each band, & then play all one band’s songs in my own chosen sequence. I don’t want them separated by album or ridiculous permutations of the same band’s name. (“Queens of the Stone Age,” “Queens Of The Stone Age,” “queens of the…” etc.)
I have gone into the properties of each song’s file one at a time, & cleared all the tags except for the title. I have then preceeded each title with a four-digit number followed by a space. The numbers are in numerical sequence. The resulting fancy-groomed files I then copy to a folder called “QOTSA” which I copy and paste to the Sansa drive. Before I copy, I make sure to sort the songs inside the file by file name, so that they appear in numerical order, aka the order I want them to play in.
WHY will the freakin thing not play them in that order? Yes, I know they want me to make a playlist, but why does it not work this way? What possible rationale could there be to insist on playing them in an entirely random order? – not numerical, not alphabetical, not by album title or release date or even key signature, dammit!
Incidentally, the device is not set to “shuffle;” and its default behavior is to play all the songs in a given folder & then shut off. The playlist making process is arcane and mediaeval, best left in the eldritch depths whence it came.
If nobody knows the rationale for this behavior in the software, perhaps someone might know the criteria by which it picks the play order? Maybe that would help me subvert it.
I also hate this about MP3 players. It’s very annoying listening to a book-on-tape (ripped from CDs) when the tracks don’t play in order. Fortunately, I got my Memorex to play correctly by overwriting the artist/album/title tags in the files.
The only suggestion I have is to write your numerical sequence into all those tags you cleared; maybe it will order off one of those non-title tags.
I’ve found that my little mp3 player will only play songs in “date created” order. So when I copy them to to player, I have to be extra careful about the order I copy them!
…you mean there’s third-party playlist writing software? As far as I know, with the native app you have to run through the songs in a given folder as if to play them (and remember that they occur in no particular order at all), then press something to add them to the playlist. I’m not sure what you press, as I’ve only managed to do it by accident.
I have cleared everything in the tags except the title, as I said, and I have already put the number into the title on the tag. However, EdwardLost has an intriguing suggestion. I’m actually frustrated enough to try it. I’ll let you know if it works.
Assuming that your player mounts as a drive, and that it takes .m3u playlists, you can create them with any number of media player type programs. Winamp is the easiest to use, but you’ve presumably already got Windows Media Player. I like mp3tag, though, because its an awesome tag editor as well.
FYI, I have a Sansa Express too and it works GREAT with Windows Media Player. Playlist editing is a breeze: You just pick the songs you want and drag them to a separate list on the right (in the order that you want) and save it. Then sync your Sansa and the playlist should work flawlessly.
You don’t have to do it by syncing, though. You can use the media player program to “open” or “load” files already on the player, arrange some of them in a playlist, then save the playlist directly to the player.