I have a SanDisk ClipSport GO MP3 player. Today I tried to add some new fiels to it, audiobooks in mp3 format where each book is in a folder of its own and each chapter is a separate mp3 file with id3 tags set for track order and "album" (book title), and names set to ensure good ordering. And this is where my trouble began:
1.I could see from my PC (linux mint) that I'd copied the files to the player just fine, and on the player I could see and play those fiels in "foldr view" mode, but the player's audiobook mode (which naturally respects track order and has useful time markers shown on the display only browses some of the first few files to be copied over, as if despite the player's huge memory capacity (32Gb is quite a lot for this sort of thing) it can only handle listing the folders and album titles of a limited number of books in audiobook mode.
2.In folder view mode I could find and play each book but the chapters were out of order. The id3 tags should ensure they are in ordr, as should the file names, but instead each folder has what seems a random ordering of chapters. I tried using linuxs touch command to set the same tiestamp, exactly, on to all fiels on the player, hoping that it was working on file timestamp to order them and would revert to name if all timestamps were the same. It didn't help. I don't think timestamps are being used by te player's ordering. I can't work out what is driving this crazy ordering in "folder view" mode.
3.The device's manual is ofcourse useless for these kind of details, for many years no consumr electronics have come with useful manuals of the kind of technical details you need.
4.I'm in progress of removing some files from the device to see if the later books will then list properly, but even if this works I'll want to copy all the older book files back on to it eventually and be able to play both the old and new ones.
Any idea how I might get the audiobook mode to properly cope with the number of different audiobook folders, and files within each one, so as to display ALL the books properly to let me listen to them in the proper mode? Failing that what about re-ordering. somehow, the files in the folders so tat folder-view mode will atleast let me play the fiels in the right order within each book, I've been wondering about a tool caled fatsort
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/fatsort.1.html
but details seem a bit lacking, nothing on the manpage says what "natural" or "ASCIIbetical" order corresponds to, and I'm unsure if unmounting the mp3 player so as to run this tool on it might cause the tool to run while the player thinks it is playing and mess something up.
Thank you
Edited by hamluis, 23 November 2020 - 04:47 PM.
Fixed typo - Hamluis.
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