Sansa MP3 players

[RASwift]

It seems Music Bee doesn't "see" my Sansa mp3 player. Would it be possible to include other players for sync purposes at some time in the future? Thanks for your help.

[Steven]

i think if you tick 'enable MTP devices' in the main preferences panel it should work

[Crosmanrond]

(long time Sansa player user)
Steven is right, enabling the "Detect MTP devices" option will enable the use of nearly any Sansa mp3 player to date(though you may have to set the connection type to "MTP" on the player itself).

Cheers,
Cros

[dowens59]

Hi,

I have a Sansa Fuse player with  the MTP option set and the "Detect MTP devices" option set in MusicBee, but the palyer is not detected. Nor is Windows 7 carrying out the Autoplay when I connect. What am I doing wrong? Can anyone shed light on this please.

[Steven]

Do you see the device in windows explorer and does it show as a drive letter or as a name?
hopefully Crosmanrond can help with this but my guess is the Sansa itself needs to be configured as a MTP device. However I have no idea how you would do that. Perhaps the sansa forums can also help.

[Crosmanrond]

1. Check your connections (check whether the player says it's charging when you plug it in)
2. Double check you have the device set to MTP(a lot of sansa's menus like to pretend to have set something when all it really did was open a different part of the menu)
3. Double check MB is set to "Detect MTP devices"
4. See if Windows Media Player can find the device. If so, check if you can see it under "My Computer". If you can see it under "My Computer" and MB still does not "see" the device (on the left under computer most devices) then it may actually be a bug in MB(in which case I'm sure Steven will want more information

[Steven]

one more thing to add - also check the date of the file:
Interop.PortableDeviceApiLib.dll
located in the MusicBee application folder. If the file modification date is from last year (it should be dated feb 2010) then you should download the latest 1.2 beta which includes the updated file

[manwithcake]

Hmmm....just checked my Sansa player and it's not showing up either.  Ran through all the double-checks in preferences in MB and on the Sansa player and it shows up in Explorer, though not as a drive letter, just as "Sansa Clip 2gb."

[Crosmanrond]

manwithcake, you made me curious so I decided to test my sansa and sure enough, no connection under MTP. under MSC(the one that is not MTP) it worked just fine though. Also of note if you want more from your mp3/mp4 player check out rockbox.org (I run rockbox on my device normally, but I went back to the normal firmware to test this  )

Steven,
as manwithcake mentioned the device shows up in Explorer, but it's not assigned a drive letter...

[Steven]

if you are using XP there is a dependency on DLL's that come with windows media player 11 in order for MTP mode in MusicBee to work. Do you think this could be the reason?

[dowens59]

Steven and Crosmanrond,

I checked everything you suggested and found 'Interop.PortableDeviceApiLib.dll' to be out of date. I have just installed the latest MB Beta 1.2.3705 and I can now see my device and everything seems to work OK.

Thanks for all your help.

[manwithcake]

manwithcake, you made me curious so I decided to test my sansa and sure enough, no connection under MTP. under MSC(the one that is not MTP) it worked just fine though. Also of note if you want more from your mp3/mp4 player check out rockbox.org (I run rockbox on my device normally, but I went back to the normal firmware to test this  )

Thanks, this did the trick.  BTW, my Sansa is the clip v.2 so rockbox supposedly won't work on it.

[wildgrace]

In the future can an option be added to save m3u playlists with a relative path?  This seems to be the magic required for m3u playlists to work on my Sansa Clip +.  I tried to save the playlist with a relative path by adding ".." to the "path prefix for tracks" under device settings, playlist storage, however this did not work.

[Steven]

the playlist path prefix replaces the path to the root music folder in the playlist eg.
when the device is plugged in it might have:
music files root folder = G:\Storage1\Music
playlist root path = G:\Storage1\Playlists

of course the G: only has meaning when plugged into your computer
so in this case i think you could use for the path prefix:
\Storage1\
or
..\

when you tried '..' did you also include the extra \ ie. '..\'  ?

[wildgrace]

I tried:
..
..\
../

I then used notepad to open the newly created m3u playlists and as far as I can tell it ignored the ".." request.  I did not see any ".." in the playlists.  Perhaps I entered the request incorrectly?