Stupid MP3 Player
2008-02-08
I've been meaning to get a portable media player for ages.
The delay is mainly because of the poor reporting of crucial abilities: from specifications and descriptions I couldn't normally work out whether the device could read and use ID3 tags, which makes a lot of difference.
Planning to buy something cheap as I was, I got ready for a non-tag-aware player by moving my music into artist/album folders (which was a good idea anyway) and prepending track numbers to file names (which is far from ideal, but then it's essential for something that tries to play in file name order and a tag-aware agent doesn't show you file names anyway).
The other day I bought a SanDisk M240. A tenner, 1GB nothing special, but by the sounds of the customer reviews on Amazon it was tag-aware and capable of building playlists by artist/album etc.
And it is, but it doesn't respect track numbers. Various people online claim to have found solutions by using different software to sync the device (although I plan to use it in USB-MSD mode anyway) and by hard-resetting while it's playing, so it does sound like it's a bug rather than a design decision, but none of that worked for me. The stupid device insists on playing things alphabetically by track name.
What I'll do is throw together a Python script to copy the track number into the start of the track name field; it was Python that sorted them into folders based on their tags when I decided to do that. My sympathy is with the people on various forums who are trying to play audio books on them and face changing all their files by hand in a tag editor, or giving up and getting another device.
Yes, I could have spent more, but while I accept that cheaper goods may be made with cheaper parts, I don't expect them to be so obviously buggy. Maybe that's just me: maybe bad QA is par for the course as well.
The delay is mainly because of the poor reporting of crucial abilities: from specifications and descriptions I couldn't normally work out whether the device could read and use ID3 tags, which makes a lot of difference.
Planning to buy something cheap as I was, I got ready for a non-tag-aware player by moving my music into artist/album folders (which was a good idea anyway) and prepending track numbers to file names (which is far from ideal, but then it's essential for something that tries to play in file name order and a tag-aware agent doesn't show you file names anyway).
The other day I bought a SanDisk M240. A tenner, 1GB nothing special, but by the sounds of the customer reviews on Amazon it was tag-aware and capable of building playlists by artist/album etc.
And it is, but it doesn't respect track numbers. Various people online claim to have found solutions by using different software to sync the device (although I plan to use it in USB-MSD mode anyway) and by hard-resetting while it's playing, so it does sound like it's a bug rather than a design decision, but none of that worked for me. The stupid device insists on playing things alphabetically by track name.
What I'll do is throw together a Python script to copy the track number into the start of the track name field; it was Python that sorted them into folders based on their tags when I decided to do that. My sympathy is with the people on various forums who are trying to play audio books on them and face changing all their files by hand in a tag editor, or giving up and getting another device.
Yes, I could have spent more, but while I accept that cheaper goods may be made with cheaper parts, I don't expect them to be so obviously buggy. Maybe that's just me: maybe bad QA is par for the course as well.
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