Sansa E280v1 Rockbox Syncing, Media Monkey and Spanning Onboard and Card Memory

[androo235]

My motivation for "Rockboxing" my Sansa is to be able to use the 8gb mini-disk I have and so make the player, I hope, effectively a 16gb player. My player was almost full and I have had some problems following an initial install of Rockbox,

• I noticed that the database had missed about 800 tracks of the 2400 or so on the player..
• I tried to work out why this was - I think it may be to do with some of the jpg files, at any rate while still trying to figure it out the player locked up at the Rockbox welcome screen and would not respond. All I could do was turn it on, or off. I could still choose the original firmware though and all tracks were still there.
• It then became apparent that the player would not stay connected to my machine (Win 7 64 bit) in MSC mode.
• I then found out how to put it into recovery mode, formatted and have now reinstalled Rockbox.

So, now I have a nice clean slate. My questions are.

• The Rockbox manual says nothing about syncing although I know that I can't now sync in the original firmware as that does not recognise the additional 8gb capacity of my card. So, can I sync using playlists created in Media Monkey and will the sync adjust playlists for the location on the Sansa of tracks transferred that may end up in the Sansa's original memory or on the new card.
• Should I drag and drop now rather than sync and then edit playlists manually (although that doesn't sound like much of an advance over the standard firmware....)

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Thanks in advance for any help.

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[saratoga]

I have no idea how mediamonkey works, but assuming it can sync files to an MSC device and uses standard m3u playlists it should work. 

[androo235]

Thanks.

I've since fired up MediaMonkey (MM) with the Rockboxed Sansa with the 8gb card in it connected in MSC mode. The native drive and the card appear as separate drives in MM (and in Explorer) which ask for a separate sync command, I tried selecting both at once (using ctrl, alt and shift in various combinations) but that didn't seem to be possible. So it looks to me like the drives will only sync independently and so auto spanning is unlikely to work. I'll try it though - and perhaps MTP mode too.

If neither works I have another idea based on Rockbox (RB) which I think can create Playlists itself based on tags. If that's the case then I can drag and drop my stuff to the two drives and then let RB build its database (I am presuming that process does span both drives - does it?). Finally I recreate my MM playlists in RB based on the tagging done in MM. Sounds like a pfaff but it might work.

Actually dragging and dropping will be a significant pfaff (mild UK slang meaning bother, irritation, long way around to do something) because syncing direct from MM I can get 64bit conversion on the fly and auto-levelling. If I take the drag and drop route I will have to first export everything to a temp folder, level adjusted and converted to 64 bit, and then drag and drop that to the player.

Any advice is gratefully received.

Thanks.