Last year I purchased a flash based 2 GB DAP SanDisk Sansa e250 to join my good ole 20 GB HDD player Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Firewire. Sadly the Sansa is quite picky when it comes to ID3 tags.
By experimenting and reading up I found out how to retag my MP3s using Linux (and probably also Windows using Cygwin) so that they all will be fully recognized. I also found a procedure to nicely resize cover scans which can be displayed when playing a corresponding track.
Prerequisites
For ID3 tagging I’m using the command line application eyeD3, as it handles ID3v2.4 and – yes – it’s commandline driven. I made an RPM for Fedora Core 5. The original spec file didn’t work because of using the wrong python version. I’ve put my edited spec file and the RPM into my box.net share.
To handle the cover scans I use ImageMagick.
Preparation
For better performance one should copy the files to be uploaded to your player somewhere on your harddrive.
Copy your MP3s to some working directory and finally cd into it
mkdir -p ~/wrk/mp3new cd /windows/g/mp3 cp -r _electronic/Aphex\ Twin/Aphex_Twin-...I_Care_Because_You_Do-1995/ /windows/g/mp3 cp -r _metal/Colonel\ Claypool\'s\ Bucket\ of\ Bernie\ Brains\ -\ Big\ Eyeball\ in\ the\ Sky/ /windows/g/mp3 cp -r _metal/Primus/primus-pork_soda-1993/ /windows/g/mp3 cd ~/wrk/mp3new
Retagging
The Sansa preferres ID3v2 tags over ID3v1 and can read up to ID3v2.3 tags. But it doesn’t seem to like some of the special fields possible with ID3v2.3 and therefore these will have to be removed. The following steps may seem a bit complicated, but it’s the only way to do the cleanup with eyeD3 currently.
1.) Convert to v1.x
find -type f -and \( -name "*.mp3" -or -name "*.MP3" \) -print0 | xargs -0 eyeD3 --to-v1
2.) Remove v2
find -type f -and \( -name "*.mp3" -or -name "*.MP3" \) -print0 | xargs -0 eyeD3 --remove-v2
3.) Convert to v2.3
find -type f -and \( -name "*.mp3" -or -name "*.MP3" \) -print0 | xargs -0 eyeD3 --to-v2.3
4.) Remove v1
find -type f -and \( -name "*.mp3" -or -name "*.MP3" \) -print0 | xargs -0 eyeD3 --remove-v1
To make things easier, I’ll try to condense all this to one single command next time. So stay tuned..
Cover Art
My procedure will only keep the front cover scans, where available. If you’d like to keep other images too, you’d have to follow the alternative procedure 1b/2b instead of 1a/2a.
Please note: even png images will be renamed to folder.jpg ImageMagick will correctly recognize them as pngs when converting.
If you’d prefer not to use folder.jpg for the resized cover images you may instead use Album Art.jpg as filename.
1a.) List all jpegs and png files. Then manually delete all unneeded files!
find -type f -and \( -name "*.jpg" -or -name "*.JPG" -or -name "*.png" \)
2a.) Rename cover images to folder.jpg
OLDIFS=$IFS ; IFS=$'\n' ; \
for fn in `find -type f -and \( -name "*.jpg" -or -name "*.JPG" -or -name "*.png" \) -not -name "folder.jpg"` ; \
do mv -v "$fn" "${fn/`basename "$fn"`/folder.jpg}" ; \
done ; IFS=$OLDIFS
1b/2b.) Alternative: To keep other images as well, you’d have to manually rename (or copy to keep the original) the front cover images to folder.jpg
3.) Proportionally resize cover images to max 200 x 200 px
OLDIFS=$IFS ; IFS=$'\n' ; \ for fn in `find -type f -name folder.jpg` ; \ do mogrify -verbose -resize '200x200>' "$fn" ; \ done ; IFS=$OLDIFS
I must admit this isn’t the most elegant way. Maybe I’ll manage to make some little GUI and trying to automatically chose the front cover image files. We’ll see..
Uploading to the Player
Nothing special here. Just plug in your Sansa in MSC mode. Then move the files to the player.
mv -v * /media/Sansa\ e250/MUSIC
If you’re replacing files on your player, you’ll have to purge the tag database in order to let the player recognize the changes.
rm /media/Sansa\ e250/SYSTEM/DATA/PP5000.DAT
ChangeLog
[070923 Fix backslashes (“\\” markup was meanwhile rendered as “\\” and not “\” as before.]
[080120 Add “Sansa e200” category and link to it.]
Bembel-B Blog 