September 27, 2010 12:22 PM

At last, a kindred spirit. I too use my mp3 player for only 'classical' music and drama/plays recorded from the radio (nowadays directly from iPlayer). And like the OP, the mp3 tags are pretty useless for these types of programme material. In fact, to make the earlier type of players work at all, I had to redefine in my own mind the meaning of the mp3 tags. So the Genre category was filled with things like Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Drama, Dvorak... etc; the Album became the title of the work (Symphony No 1 in C minor Op xx), the Artist the performer(s) (The English Classical Players conducted by Eugene Neverheardofhim). And like the OP, I had long ago solved the problem on my computer by using a sensible and consistent folder/subfolder/subfolder... structure. I wanted my mp3 player to allow me to use this same folder construct.

Which is why I bought the Sansa ClipPlus, since it does allow precisely this, which together with drag and drop from Explorer on the PC (no I don't bother with Media player either) makes life so much more simple. Folder view should be compulsory on all mp3 players!! The Sansa Clip+ however doesn't allow you to modify the folders on the player itself (apart from deleting files/folders), but I can live with that.

Again, like the OP, I find the fast forward/rewind controls cumbersome, although the latest software update for the Clip+ does improve this somewhat. The Clip+ has the concept of incrementally increasing fast-forwarding - keep your finger on the >> button (during play) and it scans forward very slowly at first, then jumps to faster, then faster still, then so fast that unless you've got nimble fingers, you're miles away from where you want to be.
Now I've faced this problem numerous times in my programming over the past 30 years, and there is a very simple solution. But it requires a paradigm shift in thinking. On the Sansa, a single press on the >> button skips to the next 'file', whereas a continuous press fast forwards (with the increasing speed). Turn this idea around - a held (say for 2 secs) press on the button skips to the next track, whereas a single press fast-forwards. The first single press fast forwards at say 2x, a second press increases the scan speed to say 6x, a third press to say 20x, a fourth press to say 120x (i.e. 2 min/sec, so you can scan a a 60 min programme in 30 secs). And at any given speed, a single press on the opposite button (<<) reduces the speed one notch, eventually, after enough presses, going into replay etc. The middle button (between the navigation buttons) would always put the system into normal play. So this control is now behaving a bit like the jog control on the old video-tape recorders. Pressing and holding to skip to the next (or previous) track then looks like the logical extension of the incremental-speed scanning.
Now who here is in a position to put this suggestion to the Sansa software guys?