I have been using WongDong's "PlayList Creator.exe" for a little while, and it was working great until recently. I don't know what changed, but suddenly the playlists got created in a somewhat unpredictable order. Since what I listen to primarily is audio books, the order of the tracks is extremely significant. I do
take care to name the folders with order-able names, like Disk 01, Disk 02, etc., (I don't assume a leading zero).

So I decided to try my hand at creating my own playlist program, which I have called PlayListEditor.exe. It is available for free at the following address: http://www.asherfamily.info/PlayListEditor/PlayListEditor.zip.

I believe it will reliably create playlists in the order of the folders. It will only create master-level folder playlists (ie there is no option to create playlists for each sub-folder). It will grab any sub folders in the \MUSIC folder of the main drive or the SD drive. It has logic to remember the drive letter of the SD drive. It looks for WMA or MP3 files, but if you have other file formats you want to include, you can specify them as well.

I have tested this only on my Sansa e250, version 01.02.24A. I don't know if it will work on other Sansas, other Sansa firmware versions, or other audio players. But if it does, please let me know! My email address is in the Help screen of the program.

The program is written with Delphi 5, so you will not need .NET on your system. Conversely, since it is a stand-alone executable it is much bigger than WongDong's program, which doesn't take much space at all. Mine is about 400 MB in size.

If you like the program (or not) please let me know. Obviously, back up your playlists and use the program at your own risk, but it's yet another way to skin the Sansa playlist cat that's been dogging all of us!

(Aside to WongDong: I did try to send you an email about this to an email address at the Technical University of a large European city, but it got rejected by the email server - maybe my attachment was too big. Please don't be offended by my "improvements"!).

Cheers,
wla2000

Hey wla.

Nah, why should i be offended? It's nice that someone finaly ported the stuff to delphi. I personally don't even have a Sansa Player anymore :) Even with playlists, i found the time this crap takes to even bring up the songs far to annoying (especiall when there are 20+ Songs in a dir).

Regarding your order-Problem. This is actually caused by the Sansa File management. It seems to order files that were added later after the ones already there. To re-order you can simply move the folder to your copmuter's drive and back on the player again. This will re-establish the correct file ordering. I think you'll not fare better with the Delphi version regarding this problem, but maybe i'm wrong there.

So keep it up and good someone did soemthing about the .NET requirement :)

Cheers, Christian a.k.a WongDong

Hey all this has helped. but I have a HUGE problem.
The part after downloading the firmware for the sansa e200 series, u are suppose to set ur mp3 to msc mode but the thing is...my sansa doesnt have the usb setting in the settings list. Tats seems really weird. so because of tat, the firmware setup wont detect my player.
Does anyone no wat to do??

Originally posted by jwskater:

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Hey all this has helped. but I have a HUGE problem.
The part after downloading the firmware for the sansa e200 series, u are suppose to set ur mp3 to msc mode but the thing is...my sansa doesnt have the usb setting in the settings list. Tats seems really weird. so because of tat, the firmware setup wont detect my player.
Does anyone no wat to do??

---

I had the same problem. You need to update your firmware to V03.0116A.

That version fixes the USB Settings problem.

Originally posted by jwskater:

---

Hey all this has helped. but I have a HUGE problem.
The part after downloading the firmware for the sansa e200 series, u are suppose to set ur mp3 to msc mode but the thing is...my sansa doesnt have the usb setting in the settings list. Tats seems really weird. so because of tat, the firmware setup wont detect my player.
Does anyone no wat to do??

---

I have not tried it but someone who was trying to use my scripts called the sansa support told them to do this and it worked for them:

restart the computer and the sansa holding the record and backward buttons.

Supposedly doing that puts the mp3 player in MSC mode. :)

Regards,

- Archit

THANK YOU!

thanks a lot

tat solved it
updating it

and thanks for helpin out

I have updated my PlayListEditor to deal with directories being out of order in the Sansa folder structure (by tabling up all folder entries and then sorting them, before creating each play list). The new zip file is available at http://www.asherfamily.info/PlayListEditor/PlayListEditor.zip.

This is a free program I created to help you create playlists on the Sansa e200 series. It is written with Delphi 5 and is stand-alone - just put it in the root folder of your Sansa (in MSC mode) and then execute it.

Note that if your folders have non-standard names, the sort will be a non-standard sort. Also, the sort will always be an alphabetic sort, so a folder named "Folder 10" will sort before "Folder 2". Always use leading zeroes when including numbers in the folder names.

Enjoy!

You should put your proggy on downloads.com

Cheers, Christian

Christian:
Thanks for the suggestion. I submitted PlayListEditor.exe to download.com a couple weeks ago, and as of today it is now available there.

I plan an improvement soon. The current version arranges playlists in alphabetical order, regardless of any quirky folder issues the Sansa firmware may have. My next version will perform a partial numeric sort, so that files that are duplicately named except for a trailing 1, 2, 3...10, 11, 12, etc. will be sorted in order, with no leading zeroes necessary. Rocket science!

William Asher

I have the sansa e250 4 GB.. My music will not show up in Rhapsody or windows media player, so im not able to delete any music.. I did the right click on the device in my computer and formated it thinking it would delete the music, and it did.. but it says only 600 MB of free space.. and said the rest (3GB) was filled up, but theres not music on it...How can i fix this?

Hello. I have updated my PlayListEditor.exe program, which is available for free at Download.com. The latest change is to make the handling of numbers in file names more flexible. They will now sort numerically, rather than alphabetically, so you can have a series of files with 1, 2, 3, ... 10, 11, 12 in the file names and have them sort in the expected way, rather than with the teens and hundreds sandwiched in between "1" and "2". In other words, there is no longer any need to put leading zeroes in before any numbers present in file or folder names.

You can find PlayListEditor v1.2 at download.com by searching for "sansa playlist". Thanks.