mp3 player oddness

I think I mentioned a while back that someone left a blue SanDisk MP3 player in the LAN room at MAGFest. I posted on the site about it, and gave its owner a few months to claim it. No response. So, I claimed it. I removed the music from it (I still have it around, I guess I'm just paranoid) and have been using it for myself.

Recently I noticed a weird problem with it. I had put a few entire albums on it and had been listening to them on shuffle, so I hadn't noticed it until I tried to browse for a specific track to play at a party. It basically sorted my music in random order. It's not completely random, however. The files I have in the root of the player are sorted alphabetically by name as one might expect. The complete albums (in folders by artist), however, were completely randomized. My naming format is <artist> - <track number> - <title>, which coupled with the player's tiny screen means that I have to wait for the filename to slowly scroll across the screen to see which track it is.

So, I broke out Advanced Renamer, a batch-renaming utility I got off of SoftPedia a while back, and used it to rename one album to <track number> - <title> - <artist>, using its handy dandy feature that reads ID3 tags from music files. I figured if it didn't fix the problem, at the very least, I'd be able to find the track I wanted a lot more easily. I start the thing up, go into the folder, and wham, everything's sorted by track number as it should have been to begin with.

The only logical explanation that I can come up with to explain this is that it uses only the first few characters of the filename to sort the list, to save time over comparing each character until it finds a difference. Maybe that saves battery power or something.

So if you've got one of these and are experiencing this problem (or for that matter, are experiencing this problem with any audio player), try renaming your files to put the track number first. This will especially help if you're trying to listen to an audio book on any player affected by this problem.

I dunno if there's a firmware update that fixes this or not. When I look at the player's software version, it says "2.0.007A 2005/09/09" and the most recent firmware I can find is 1.24. The player is a refurb, maybe they have a special fimware version they install onto players when they refurbish them.

Now that I've explained the problem and its solution, I can drift away from the topic. Here's some of the features that I like.

• It appears as USB Mass Storage instead of requiring the use of special software.
• That means it can be used on any OS that supports USB. Cross-platform compatibility is always a huge plus.
• Simply open a file browser window and drag files onto (and even off of) the device, when they're done copying, you're ready to go.
• It has an FM radio that gets pretty good reception. I successfully used it to listen to WCNR 106.1 FM. Compare that to the clock radio I have on my desk which loses the signal if I get up from my computer (no joke).
• It also has a voice recorder. I haven't used it except to record short clips of me saying "testing, testing", but it works pretty well. Not sure how well it'd work for recording audio that's coming from farther away (say, your professor's lecture).
• It's fairly configurable. You can change equalizer settings, tell it to keep the backlight on longer (or shorter), turn on a sleep timer, and much more.
• It runs off of one AAA battery. I haven't evaluated the battery life, but I got a couple hours out of it at the party with no dent to its battery meter (which only shows three bars, terrible resolution).
• It gets its power from the USB connection when you plug it into a computer, instead of using your battery.
  

As with pretty much anything, there are some downsides:

• The UI is fairly horrible. You have to navigate it with this tiny stick that can be pushed in four directions as well as inwards.
• Pushing the button inwards and releasing it quickly lets you browse the folders, pushing it and holding it brings up the config.
• To go into a folder you don't push the button in, you push it towards the right. Luckily you can play a selected file by either pushing right again or hitting Play.
• The screen is tiny. The Gameboy Micro has a bigger screen.
• No ogg vorbis support. Just MP3, WMA, and WAV. I could get so many more songs into the 512MB of available space if it supported vorbis :(

I don't think it's worth looking for one of these, as I don't think they're manufactured anymore. To find anything related to it on SanDisk's website I have to use their search. Their Sansa players are featured much more prominently and look to be much more iPod-like in appearance, whereas the SDMX1 is a clear take-off of an iRiver IFP-700 or similar looking audio player.

As for Advanced Renamer, all I can say is I wish it supported regular expressions. If someone releases a batch renaming program for Windows that does, I'd use that in an instant. Yeah, I did link you to the portable version, but whatever. Just tell your unzipping utility to make a folder in Program Files and unzip it to that, then make a start menu shortcut pointing to ARen.exe. Bam, same effect as an installer.

The verdict: keep and use until someone makes one that supports regular expressions. Maybe someone already has, there are a few other batch renamers on SoftPedia.