USB Audio Format Question

The other day I added a bunch more music (mp3 tracks) on my USB, but some of it is showing up in what I can only say is random order on my infotainment display. That is, when browsing by "Folder," the album folders are not listed alphabetically, and even within a folder some of the tracks aren't listed numerically either. For example, I have a few multi-disc box sets that I ripped, all nested in an album folder, but when I select that folder it lists the folders for the individual discs as "6,1,2,3,4,5." There seems to be some correlation in displaying the folders by the times I added them to the USB drive. For instance, the music I added a few weeks ago shows up earlier in the folder list than the ones I just added the other day (most but not all). Is they some better way of sorting the music on the USB drive either via the info unit or by structuring the files on the USB drive itself? Am I doing something wrong?

From what I understand it sorts the folders based on the date they were added to the USB drive (Oldest at the top). If it's showing disc 6 before disc 1 for an album, then I think it just added the 6th one to then USB drive before the others.

What I've always had to do when adding new music, is copy everything off of the drive and onto my desktop (copy, not cut), then copy it back on to the drive once I've added my new music folders. So long as your desktop folder is sorted alphabetically, it should copy them to the drive in that same order. Every so often i have random issues with ordering, but i just repeat this process and that'll normally fix it.

Maybe there's an easier way that I don't know about , but I could never figure out how to have it sort them alphabetically/numerically.

Thanks; I'll try that. I had to tweak some metadata in the files so that song titles displayed correctly, but it seems in doing so it changed the order of some stuff. Pity that it won't display/filter alphanumerically, but it's a relatively minor deal.

Yeah it's not a huge deal but certainly somewhat annoying. I had a few issues with the songs displaying correctly early on, so I slowly picked away with updating the metadata and that seemed to resolve any remaining problems (I'm also very particular and wanted things like album art to show).

I use a program called fatsort on linux to sort the files correctly. A quick search shows some Windows alternatives as well.

heywire said:

I use a program called fatsort on linux to sort the files correctly. A quick search shows some Windows alternatives as well.

Click to expand...

Yep, I use one called DriveSort. Works great for sorting!