USB playing order

[unknown.man]

Hi all,

does anyone has got an idea what defines the order of the folders and the MP3 files in the folders?
I organized my music on an USB stick calling the folders: "Artist - Album" and the MP3 files in the folder are called: "Nr - Title".mp3.

Still the folders as well as the files appear completely disordered. I tried to reshuffle the folders and the files on the stick (their storage position) with an dis-fragmentation tool, but that didn't help.

I found it very annoying not being able to listen to an album in its proper order.

I hope anyone can help me or give me a hint.

Thanks in advance.

 

[nizzy1115]

For the songs in the folder it uses the mp3 metadata for track numbers. Not sure how you ripped your music, but mine works. Should also work fine for downloaded music.

 

[ta240]

for mine it looks like it arranges the folders in the order they were added to the USB drive.

 

[mikeregister]

I am also having this same issue. I didn't really pay attention to the order of the folders because I only have a few but when I open up a folder with an album it will play out of order. All of my meta data is filled out and is 100% correct. I have tried multiple different things to try to get it work but, nothing gives. If I put the USB drive into another device it will play in the correct order. I did notice in the manual that it says this on page 5-22 bullet 4: "The order of the music data stored in the device may differ from the playback order." Not sure if this means it doesn't work sometimes or what. I think I need a firmware update.

 

[stromdriver]

it would be nice if they updated to give us usb users more usability, but they only cared about the white corded mafia as far as functionality
things we need
playlist support (standard .m3u)
a more robust player (so that it handles mp3 files better, mine wont track back because i ran mp3gain on the files, and it sometimes starts a few seconds into a track rather than the beginning, plus it wont scroll id3 tag data )
ability to play/sort by id3 tag info, artist, album, genre, etc...

 

[unknown.man]

It seems, I have figured out, what decides the order of the songs in the folders: it is the order the files were stored on the stick. It's not the date of the files (created/modified/accessed dates). It is the structure of the FAT that defines the order.
I used MediaMonkey to convert my flac files to mp3 and store them directly on the stick. As MediaMonkey makes use of the multi core processors there were 4 tracks of conversion running in parallel and not being synchronized. So the order was gone.
What you can do now is to copy the folder to your hard disk. Delete the files on your stick and copy them one by one back to the stick, as you can not rely on the order Windows would do it if you select severall files at once.
I myself can make MediaMonkey using just one core for the conversion, that slows it down, but guarantees the order of the songs.
Another consequence is that it is not needed to call the song files "xx - Title" (where xx stands for the track number) as it does not make any difference on the order they are played. As the available amount of characters displayed is rather limited in the CX-5 I removed the numbering.

 

[stromdriver]

It seems, I have figured out, what decides the order of the songs in the folders: it is the order the files were stored on the stick. It's not the date of the files (created/modified/accessed dates). It is the structure of the FAT that defines the order.
I used MediaMonkey to convert my flac files to mp3 and store them directly on the stick. As MediaMonkey makes use of the multi core processors there were 4 tracks of conversion running in parallel and not being synchronized. So the order was gone.
What you can do now is to copy the folder to your hard disk. Delete the files on your stick and copy them one by one back to the stick, as you can not rely on the order Windows would do it if you select severall files at once.
I myself can make MediaMonkey using just one core for the conversion, that slows it down, but guarantees the order of the songs.
Another consequence is that it is not needed to call the song files "xx - Title" (where xx stands for the track number) as it does not make any difference on the order they are played. As the available amount of characters displayed is rather limited in the CX-5 I removed the numbering.

does media monkey do track volume normalizing? and/or tag cleanup or correction?
can you still track back to previous songs?

 

[DJ41]

I have a solution for you. It's a free program called Mp3DirsorterE. It's a Windows tool (sorry Mac users!) that will put all folders in alfabetical order. One downside though. You have to make 1 folder in the root ("music" for example) and put all the folders in this folder. If you have a CD with 2 folders (CD1 and CD2), then you have to rename them to: "Adele 21 CD1" and Adele 21 CD2" and put them both in the folder you created in the root. Because Mazda has hired a twat to design the interface, your folder name will most likely be shortened in most cases. If that happens, remember that the above one is CD1 and the lower one CD2.

I'll make a topic with this solution, so other people may find this excellent piece of free software.

Here's the program: Click

 

[aperture_shot]

I also use a USB with a mac and I found that by renaming my files with a 01song, 02song i can control the order. Also if I want to add more songs or more folders I have to copy all of the folders to my desktop, delete, all folders on usb stick, add the new songs, then copy all those back to the usb stick. Kind of a pain but that is the only way I know to do it. Also if you use a mac and have a problem with having ._file copies being added there is a way to remove all of them.

 

[mikeregister]

This seems like a lot of work just for my music to play in the correct order!

 

[unknown.man]

The tool proposed by DJ41 (post #8) works perfectly! (Thanks DJ41!!!)
So now I can make use of all the processor power when converting in MediaMonkey. But now in order to make the tool work, the files need to have the track number in front, otherwise they don't end up in the correct order.

does media monkey do track volume normalizing? and/or tag cleanup or correction?
can you still track back to previous songs?

Yes MediaMonkey can do all this, but so far I didn't make use of it. I don't have problems to track back to the previous song.