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"Does Not Play Tracks In Order" on by ryandv
Pros: The price is great, lots of storage space, voice recording, fm radio, subscription capability
Cons: Does not play tracks in the order they appear on albums, no usb cover, cheep feel to it.
Summary: The largest dissapointment I have with the unit is that it does not play tracks from albums in the proper order. Instead it plays them in alphabetical order. I prefer to listen to albums in the way artists created them.
I called Sandisk and was told to put the track number at the start song title to have them played in the correct order. Obviously that would be ALOT of work to do that for the over 1000 songs in my library.
Sandisk told me they were aware of the issue and that they were working on a firmware update.
- 5 replies to this review
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There are a lot of MP3 tag editing tools that can enable this easily. One is Musicmatch's smart tagging feature. The only requirement is the track be part of the MP3 info (which is usually pulled in from GraceNote anyway). Then you have the files renamed via the smart tagging feature and specify the format for the filenaming to include the track number. My personal preference is to name the files with the artist, then track number, then song name. I don't need the album name in there since I arrange them in folders by album name under folders by artist name.<br><br>Musicmatch will do this in mass, so set it up and if need be run it overnight and ALL your music collection will be good to go!
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I've found that my Sansa m260 will play tracks in proper order if you use MP3 format, but not if you use WMA format. The problem I'm having is that the player ignores the ID3 tag on about 1 out of every 100 tracks altogether. It places these tracks in an "unknown" catagory and skips that track when you try to play the album in proper order. Sandisk needs to fix this in a firmware upgrade!
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I purchased a Sandisk Sansa m240 in November 2005, to use primarily with audio books. They can contain hundreds of tracks, so the 1 Gigabyte capacity of the Sansa gives me enough room to store several books on it at once.<br><br>Now imagine buying a paperback book, ripping out the pages, throwing them up in the air and reading them in the order they land in. Now you know what listening to an audio book on the Sandisk Sansa is like.<br><br>I've spent hours and hours editing the ID3 tags in the files I'm loading into the Sansa, to no avail. I've renumbered the tracks, edited the title and album and artist tags, changed the filenames, etc, but nothing has helped. I've also tried storing files in different folders on the Sansa. I've contacted their support people three times for this problem, and I've flashed the Sansa with two different firmware updates, which were not advertised as a fix for this problem, but which I figured couldn't hurt either. They didn't make a difference. It still shuffles the play order of some of the tracks, even though the shuffle function IS turned off.<br><br>I suspect, but can't say for certain that the tracks only get shuffled by the Sansa when you start storing large numbers of files on the player. Sandisk has NOT acknowledged any problems with the firmware. Instead they suggest that you create playlists in Windows Media Player, edit the .M3U playlist files with a text editor (tedious), and copy the playlist to the Sansa. While this does appear to solve the problem, it is an unacceptable solution. Would you but a book that has it's pages printed out-of-order, but which comes with a pair of scissors and a bottle of glue so you can correct the manufacturing mistake ? I don't think so.<br><br>Sandisk needs to correct the firmware so that albums (or audiobooks) play in track # order reliably, without having to resort to these time-consuming contortions. I've never seen another .MP3 player or CD player that refused to play an album in the correct track order !<br><br>Hey Sandisk.... I'm waiting for your firmware update that will fix the problem !<br>Until the problem is corrected, I would strongly recommend AGAINST buying a Sandisk Sansa.
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Wow. So it doesn't play them in order? Big deal. Turn your albums into playlists, or use the "Favorites" option.
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The M260 does play tracks in order if you have entered track information in the ID3 tag. Putting in ID3 tag info allows you to sort by title, artist, album (and track number within the album), year, and genre in any program that supports ID3 tags (like windows media player, winamp, and, of course, the m260).<br><br>The m260 also supports playlists, but you have to make sure the USB setting is "MSC," which is the normal USB mode for storage devices. I wouldn't use Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) unless you have a subscription service.<br><br>Using MSC, create a playlist (it recognizes m3u playlists from Winamp; don't know about MS's wpl format) and then drag that list (and the songs) to the m260.
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