Mp3tag and the Fuze on Ubuntu. Album order possible ?

[sweet spot]

So following a suggestion in a different thread, I got a hold of Mp3tag and it has been serving me very well with the Fuze under Ubuntu so far, cheers ! Now however, I'm in a bit of a quandary which might determine whether or not I return the Fuze, or trade in my 4 for an 8 gig.

I'm really anal retentive about how my folder structure is ordered, and this is why I'm a huge fan of file tree browsing. While I'm finally able to tag my files so that they show up in order on the Fuze, my main problem is that I also like to have my albums listed in chronological order, according to when they were released.

With file tree browsing, I simply type a number before each album, (1-5 etc) and can then listen to say, each Radiohead album from Pablo Honey to In Rainbows, in order. With the Fuze, they're obviously all out of order, but this isn't the worst thing actually. The worst, is designated to the fact that I can't create playlists based on multiple albums in a folder (remember, this is Linux and not using MTP). If I was able to do that, I wouldn't be so hesitant to keep the Fuze, despite loving the sound quality, size and ease of use.

I really want to keep it (and upgrade to the 8 gig) but not being able to :

1. Have my albums listed in the order they were released
2. Play directories outside of the current playing artist when that folder has reached the end

Is making me think twice. #2 Likely won't get any attention in a firmware update, and neither will #1, but it might be possible to have Mp3tag take care of ordering my albums, no ?

So if anybody has any idea, as to how I might get Mp3tag to label albums with a number before the actual title, and will affect how they're ordered, I'd love to hear your input.

Doug

[CrowdAds]

[Skinjob]

Originally Posted by sweet spot

The worst, is designated to the fact that I can't create playlists based on multiple albums in a folder (remember, this is Linux and not using MTP).

Not sure what you mean on this one. Since you're using MSC mode, you can create m3u playlists containing any files you want.

Originally Posted by sweet spot

1. Have my albums listed in the order they were released

You have two options:

1. The Fuze sorts the albums by the Album tag. If you want the albums to appear in chronological order you'll have to change your album tags to include the year as the beginning of the album name
2. Create a m3u playlist for each album where the name of the playlist is something like "<Artist> - <Year> <Album>.m3u". Then they will be listed in order in the Playlists menu and you can leave the album tags alone. Alternatively, you could just create a playlist for each artist that contains all the albums for the artist in the correct order. Then when you load the playlist, you'd have to skip tracks until you got to the album you wanted.

Originally Posted by sweet spot

2. Play directories outside of the current playing artist when that folder has reached the end

Again, not a 100% sure what you mean. Could you give an example?

[sweet spot]

Originally Posted by Skinjob

Not sure what you mean on this one. Since you're using MSC mode, you can create m3u playlists containing any files you want.



You have two options:

1. The Fuze sorts the albums by the Album tag. If you want the albums to appear in chronological order you'll have to change your album tags to include the year as the beginning of the album name
2. Create a m3u playlist for each album where the name of the playlist is something like "<Artist> - <Year> <Album>.m3u". Then they will be listed in order in the Playlists menu and you can leave the album tags alone. Alternatively, you could just create a playlist for each artist that contains all the albums for the artist in the correct order. Then when you load the playlist, you'd have to skip tracks until you got to the album you wanted.

Again, not a 100% sure what you mean. Could you give an example?

I was under the impression that when in MSC mode, playlists were not able to be transferred over by any normal methods, which would stand to reason since my Ubuntu media player (Rhythmbox) does not recognize the Fuze, and therefore can not create any playlists to transfer over. I've heard that there are some "tricks" to get it to see it in MTP mode, but the only references I've seen are for the current Ubuntu build, which I'm not running (nor plan to run just yet).

As for putting the year in the beginning of the name, perhaps I can live with that if I can use only two digits ? Where is the option to create an extra field for that ? The number two option sounds like way too much of a PITA and time consuming for what I think should be a much more simple task. Plus the fact that I'm not sure if you're correct about playlist creation being as easy as you make it sound for Linux/Ubuntu using MSC mode.

To clarify my last statement, sorry... What I meant was that it would be nice to have a feature (it shouldn't be a feature ... it should be standard) like ROCKbox has, where once the last song in a particular artist's folder is done playing, you can have it skip right to the next artist's folder and continue playing through.

Doug

[sweet spot]

OK ! I Got one issue sorted, in a ghetto kind of way Rather than trying to insert another field, I was simply able to add 1, 2 and 3 before 3 album names, and just clicked on the save icon, and viola ! Albums are now in order.. cool.

Now if it were only possible to solve the last problem.. though I think I'll keep the Fuze now and get the 8 gig. Noice.

doug

Edit: OMG. Not quite. Now.. everything that I changed is messed up ! Now the Fuze shows the title of one song as being ALL the songs on all the albums (eg: Radiohead's Airbag shows up 12 times on OK computer and now all the songs are playing in mixed order again !)

edit 2: This is nightmarish. It was better before when the albums were out of order ! This shouldn't be so hard to do, yet it is and I'm feeling like taking it back. Why oh why can't there be file tree browsing.

[sweet spot]

This is what has happened:



But why ? I just don't get it. All I did was add a number and a space before the album names and then hit the save icon, that's it. And now for each of the 7 Radiohead albums I have (as well as the 3 Interpol albums) all the songs are listed much like this, but instead, they're the actual songs, but playing in random order again. Ridiculous.

Edit: Because curiosity got the best of me (and I don't like to quit) I tried something a tad different, but am not sure if it's why things seem to be working again, and the way I want, too. What I've been doing is creating folders in the music folder, corresponding with the artist's names, and then putting the albums in those folders. This time, I neglected to create a folder (Norah Jones) and simply ripped two of her CD's, tagged them with mp3tag, then put the number in front of the album again, and then copied over. And now, it worked perfectly ?!

Quirky bugger of a system this is, but if it's all sorted now, with its idiosyncratic ways, perhaps I can keep it after all.... Let's see.

Doug

[Skinjob]

Originally Posted by sweet spot

I was under the impression that when in MSC mode, playlists were not able to be transferred over by any normal methods, which would stand to reason since my Ubuntu media player (Rhythmbox) does not recognize the Fuze, and therefore can not create any playlists to transfer over. I've heard that there are some "tricks" to get it to see it in MTP mode, but the only references I've seen are for the current Ubuntu build, which I'm not running (nor plan to run just yet).

You were under the wrong impression. In MSC mode, as far as the OS knows, the Fuze is just an ordinary flash drive (works just like any ordinary USB thumb drive or external hard drive). So no special methods are required to transfer to/from the player. Anything you can do with a USB flash drive, you can do with the Fuze. You media player may not "recognize" the Fuze because it looks like just another drive. There's probably something you have to do tell Rhythmbox that the drive is a "USB Mass Storage music player" (to use the term from the Rhythmbox website).

In MSC mode, the Fuze supports Winamp-style m3u playlists. I'm not sure what tools are available in Linux for creating m3u playlists, but I have to belive Rhythmbox or Amarok or somthing similar would be able to do it. If not, they are very easy to create with a text editor or script. It's just a simple text file with a header line followed by the list of files. For example:

#EXTM3U
Music\Ministry\Early Trax\03. All Day [Ministry - Early Trax].mp3
Music\Ministry\Rio Grande Blood\09. Ass Clown [Ministry - Rio Grande Blood].mp3
Music\Ministry\Rantology\12. Bloodlines [Ministry - Rantology].mp3
Music\Ministry\The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste\02. Burning Inside [Ministry - The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste].mp3
Music\Ministry\Psalm 69\08. Corrosion [Ministry - Psalm 69].mp3
Music\Ministry\Psalm 69\04. Hero [Ministry - Psalm 69].mp3
Music\Ministry\Greatest Fits\08. Jesus Built My Hotrod [Ministry - Greatest Fits].mp3

You can put the playlist pretty much anywhere you want on the Fuze. The only catch is the paths in the playlist need to be relative to the location of the playlist . In the above example, the playlist and the Music folder would both be in the root of the player.

Also, coming from Linux, you'd need to make sure the file was a typical DOS ANSI style text file. Meaning ANSI characters and lines are terminated with CRLF, as opposed to Unicode characters and just CR (or is it just LF?) typical of Linux/Unix. I think most any reasonable text editor should be able to do this.

Originally Posted by sweet spot

As for putting the year in the beginning of the name, perhaps I can live with that if I can use only two digits ? Where is the option to create an extra field for that ?Doug

You can't create a separate field, you actually have to change the name of the album from, for example, "Rio Grande Blood" to "2006 Rio Grande Blood". In other words the value of the Album tag would be "2006 Rio Grande Blood". You would have to use all four digits or else 06 would come before 96.

Originally Posted by sweet spot

The number two option sounds like way too much of a PITA and time consuming for what I think should be a much more simple task. Plus the fact that I'm not sure if you're correct about playlist creation being as easy as you make it sound for Linux/Ubuntu using MSC mode.

There's probably some Linux media player program or utility that could do it automatically. In Windows, for example, MediaMonkey can do it. If your album folders are already organized by year, you could probably do it pretty easilly with a shell script. I could do it with a DOS batch file, but unfortunately I don't know any Linux/Unix scripting.

Creating a playlist should be very simple. Depending on available tools and scripting knowledge, automatically creating playlists for all the artists/albums could be a challenge.

Originally Posted by sweet spot

To clarify my last statement, sorry... What I meant was that it would be nice to have a feature (it shouldn't be a feature ... it should be standard) like ROCKbox has, where once the last song in a particular artist's folder is done playing, you can have it skip right to the next artist's folder and continue playing through.

Ah, I get it now. I believe this has already been requested in the official Sansa forums, so it's possible it could happen. I would suggest going there and posting your own request. I've also seen several posts about Linux there, so you might be able to hook up with someone who could offer more specific help.

[Skinjob]

Originally Posted by sweet spot

This is what has happened:

But why ? I just don't get it. All I did was add a number and a space before the album names and then hit the save icon, that's it. And now for each of the 7 Radiohead albums I have (as well as the 3 Interpol albums) all the songs are listed much like this, but instead, they're the actual songs, but playing in random order again. Ridiculous.

Edit: Because curiosity got the best of me (and I don't like to quit) I tried something a tad different, but am not sure if it's why things seem to be working again, and the way I want, too. What I've been doing is creating folders in the music folder, corresponding with the artist's names, and then putting the albums in those folders. This time, I neglected to create a folder (Norah Jones) and simply ripped two of her CD's, tagged them with mp3tag, then put the number in front of the album again, and then copied over. And now, it worked perfectly ?!

Quirky bugger of a system this is, but if it's all sorted now, with its idiosyncratic ways, perhaps I can keep it after all.... Let's see.

Doug

Hmm... Not sure what's going on exactly, but it sounds like the tags are messed up. The Fuze doesn't care where the files are located or what folder structure (if any) is used. It scans the entire memory looking for recognizable file type, extracts the metadata from the tags and builds it's own database from the extracted metadata. So unless something went terribly wrong during the database refresh, what you see on the screen is what's stored in your tags.

[sweet spot]

Thanks for all that, skinjob. In fact, I've got the whole tagging thing sorted, and returned the 4 gig today....

and replaced it with... a.... 8 gig. Now the only bad thing is that tonight, my computer blew up ! Seriously. There must have been a power surge which got through or something, and my mobo fried during an electrical storm. So now I have to build a new pc.. argh ! I'll probably also purchase a Mac while I"m at it.

Doug