Easy way to create Playlist on Sansa Clip

[tomomx]

Hi!

Unfortunately, I can't get this nifty little program to work with my clip. I followed the instruction, but I keep getting the same error message as mentioned above...

'sansa player not found and a sdk file must be present in the root directory and the directory should contain "sansa"in its name.'

I am using the newest version of the firmware. Could that be an issue?

[CrowdAds]

[dfkt]

You have to use MSC mode for it to work, as stated above, in posts #11-#14.

[Vladimir]

At first I had the error message also, but after deleting all music and putting it back with MSC mode selected, the play-list generator worked quite well. Thanks!

[miss MIA]

...anyone besides me have trouble saying "Sansastic" instead of "Sansa-tastic??" ;-) I guess "Sansatastic" has that familiar infomercial ring to it or something. (On that note, R.I.P., Billy Mays!)

[smithsr]

S3T,
Your invention is simple, fast and works perfectly as advertised.
Thank You !

[LoWw]

Since I transferred all my music to my clip in MTP mode and u need to transfer in MSC mode; is there anyway to get this prog to recognize my files w/o re-transferring all my music which I have about 800+ mp3s on the clip????

[yem184]

I have Sansa clip and connect it to my XP computer in MSC mode.

All of my music is in the MUSIC folder (no sub-folders).

I have tried to load manually created m3u playlists in both the clip root and MUSIC folder to no avail.

Please inform me why the following one song playlist loads on to the clip but shows up as empty. The (one song/one line) playlist contents are:

MUSIC\Bob Seger - OLD TIME ROCK AND ROLL.mp3

The track "Bob Seger - OLD TIME ROCK AND ROLL.mp3" exists in the MUSIC folder and plays on the clip.

[yem184]

UPDATE: Using Windows Media Player 10, I was able to create a playlist by dragging mp3s directly from the clip folder (in MSC mode) and then save it directly to the root clip folder.

[Dalmane98]

Making a playlist for the Clip+ with Mp3tag is easy!!!

Clip+ in MSC Mode...

Connect Clip to computer > Open Mp3tag > Navigate to the Clip Music Folder (check to include sub directories) > Select the songs you want > File > Playlist (Selected Files) > Name it and save to the Music Folder.

It is so easy it hurts...

EDIT: You can have multiple lists...

[dave61430]

That works. I've previously posted that I tested with winamp. One small disadvantage of using mp3tag is you will have to wait while mp3tag collects all the music on the clip and displays in one window. It's ok, you get to see album etc and can sort on any column. Using music software will remember the scan in a library.
One thing I haven't tried to determine is what happens if music isn't tagged. All mine have album/folder name same and song title/filename same so I don't know if clip is using tagged data or folder/filename and I'm not sufficiently interested to set up a test for same. I really don't use playlists, just made some to educate myself on topic.

[Ashen]

you can also just create playlists using MTP mode as shown
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum...ad.php?t=47610

very easy, works with pretty much any MTP device.

[honndo]

thx a lot @S3T .. you made my day!

to download your useful little programm, i registered myself in this forum today

[HankB]

Hey Skinjob (and I do not mean that in a derogatory way ) thanks for posting these tips (and thanks mods for making it a sticky.)

Just got my Clip from the recent Woot-off
It's a V2 - No Rockbox for me.
No folder navigation.

So, it's back to the good old ways of managing playlists to organize my listening pleasure. The other wrinkle in this is that I'm a penguinista so the manual that describes how to do this using WMP is about as useless as ... well you can guess.

The one bit of information I wanted to add is that the Clip does not seem to grok forward slashes in path names. Fortunately the playlist generator I use (fapg) can substitute backslashes and otherwise produces output (relative path names) that the clip is happy with.

Now I just need to dust off those scripts I used to use to generate playlists and git-er-done!

-hank

[dave61430]

One more note, the clip seems to be fussy about pathnames. Something like foldername\filename within the playlist saved in music directory seems to work ok (I only use one level of folder under music). However, it doesn't like something using pathnames like ..\foldername..., and I'm pretty sure it doesn't like \music\foldername..., in other words it only seems to interpret a limited subset of DOS commands.

[HankB]

And yet another note...

I put a directory for podcasts under /PODCASTS and created an M3U playlist there. The Clip shows the playlist in its menu but indicated it was empty. I moved both directory and playlist to the /MUSIC directory and they worked fine. Apparently playlists in the PODCAST directory do not work.

I also had a go 'round with gpodder on my Linux host. It seems to be OK aggregating (so far) but integration with the Clip was poor. It created playlists that included the full path and that does not work on the Clip as previously noted. Even if it did, it adds new podcasts to the front of the podcast playlist which is just plain backwards.

IMO directory traversal is the way to go with podcast organization on an MP3 player. Each new batch of podcasts goes into a directory dated using ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) so they sort properly. The player just marches through the directories and never loses its place as new directories are added (as long as the previous one is not finished) or when old directories are removed.

Too bad the Clip does not support folder access. /whinge

[SlickWilly]

Okay, I tried the program out in MSC mode (Clip+), and the playlists are created fine. However, when I play them with the clip, not all the songs on the folder are recognized by the playlist(Even though in non-playlist playback all the songs are recognized by the clip). I checked the playlist in a text editor and all the names looked fine for that folder of the songs. I then created the .pla playlist in MTP mode by right-clicking a folder -> create playlist and that method worked fine.

A little off topic, but I even tried the playlist program that a user linked on this thread and had the same problem.

Edit: It seems that the songs with Korean characters are not being recognized in PlayList Mode, even though if the list is viewed in a text editor, the characters show up fine.

[Leif]

Unfortunately the playlist I created from the folder with Gunder Hägg and Blå Tåget ended up totally empty. Because of the umlauts probably. Any chance of a fix?

[dfkt]

Did you look at the created playlists if that's the issue? You can open them in any text editor, to make sure.

[Leif]

The playlist actually looks OK. But the Clip shows it as empty. I instead created a playlist using Sansa Playlist Creator; and this playlist works OK.
Sansastic:
#EXTM3U

music\Progg\Blå Tåget - Alienation.mp3


Sansa Playlist Creator:
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:295,Blå tåget - Alienation
MUSIC\Progg\Blå Tåget - Alienation.mp3

[Leif]

Resaving the Sansatic playlist as UTF-8 fixed the problem. Bit of a hassle, though.