Rearrange songs on the SanDisk

Creating Playlists on the Sansa M240

The Sansa M240 is a decent device, but if you are like many, you have not been able to create playlists. The instructions with the player and the maker’s website offer little help. Here a solution that I found on-line with some additional detail. The step by step instructions for even those with little computer savvy.

1. power up your M240 player without connecting to your computer. Scroll thru the menu to the “settings” menu. Select “USB”, deselect “auto detect” then select “MSC”. (I don’t know if this step is critical, but I picked up this suggestion from another site)

2. Power down the MP240 and using the cable supplied with your player, connect to the USB port of your computer. The display will show “MSC” when connected.

3. If you have not already done so, download the songs you want to include on your playlist from your computer to the M240. Any number of media player software packages will allow you to copy or burn your songs to a “portable media device” for this step.

4. After your songs are downloaded, on your computer, go to “My Computer” and open the "Sansa M240" icon. On the explorer task bar, select “view”> “details”. You should see several standard folders and all your songs. (Note I have used this for both .wma and .mp3 formats and have intermixed them in the playlist)

5. On your computer, open a new Notepad document and save it to your desktop.
Name it whatever you like, but it has to have “.m3u” as a file extension when you save it.
For example I named mine…. playlist1.m3u, playlist2.m3u, playlist3.m3u.

6. Next, in this newly saved notepad document, type this exactly on the very first line < #EXTM3U > without the brackets.

7. Now, find your first song in the open M240 folder, place your cursor on it, right click and select "rename". When the song title is highlighted hit control + C or "Copy" the entire title, being careful not to change anything. Now place your cursor immediately after the #EXTM3U text, hit return and paste the title of your first song directly below it with NO line space in between.

8. Repeat the steps to copy the title of your next song from the M240 folder. When copied, place your cursor immediately after the previous song title copied in the step above. Hit return Twice to create a single line space after the song title and paste in the next song title at the beginning of the line. Repeat this process til you have built your playlist.

8. After you’ve entered your last song title, it should look something like this. (Either .mp3 or .wma extensions can be used)
-----------------------------
#EXTM3U
First song.mp3

Second song.mp3

Third song.mp3

And so on.mp3
------------------------------
Now, within your notepad playlist document, click File/Save (noting where it was saved) and close the file. Now, find that same original playlist on your computer. Highlight it and copy / paste it onto your M240. I copied mine into a folder called “playlist” on the M240. Then I repeated the process for other playlists, giving each a unique name.

After allowing sufficient time for the file to copy, use the icon in the lower taskbar of your computer to “safely disconnect hardware” to unplug your player. Disconnect the USB cord, power up and your ready to enjoy your playlists.

Thanks to dmil, I found a nice workaround for this problem, but you need to have Winamp (mine is 5.52).

Basically you plug in your Sansa (mine is a m240) and on XP it will prompt you asking what program you would like to manage this new device with. Choose Winamp. I had Winamp "play all". Now from the list of all your songs on the player, you can "delete" (which simply takes them off the list) or rearrange them however you like.

Then click "List Options>Save List". On my m240, you need to save it in the same folder as all the songs folders (Music). If you just save it in the root directory, if will say "no files" when you try to use it, though it WILL show up.

Power the beast back on, give it a second, go to Menu>Play Music> Playlists and you should see your playlist(s) there.

I am using Windows Media Player. The itunes will not recognize the scan disk.