mp3 playback order in car stereo (USB stick) Options

[maggior]

I have a new car (Volvo XC70) which has the ability to play mp3 files stored on a USB memory stick. I copied a bunch of mp3 files to a USB stick and put it into the player. It worked well except for the fact that it played the tracks in a seemingly random order. The files and albums are organized like this:
artist\album\## TrackName.mp3

The files are LAME mp3 and are tagged with artist, genre, track number, track name, and year.

The album/artist/track name information all appeared correctly in the display, but the track order was totally wrong. Even listing the tracks in an album show them in the incorrect order. I did verify that "shuffle" is turned off. The tracks do maintain their grouping as an album, but are a random order within the album. Of course, the owner's manual is of no use.

Older posts here have talked about the play order being determined by when the file was created on the medium (CD-R at the time) rather than by the file name.

Does anybody know if this is the case? Any simple methods to resolve issues like this?

Thanks.

This post has been edited by maggior: Mar 22 2010, 20:17

[washu]

Older posts here have talked about the play order being determined by when the file was created on the medium (CD-R at the time) rather than by the file name.

Thanks.

My previous car (2007 Kia Specra) was like this with both USB and CD-R. Files would play in the physical order they were in the directory. It would not sort the files either by file name or by tags. "Albums" were by directories, not tags. It also could only read version 2.3 tags.

What I did was collect all the files in a directory on my PC first. Then I would format my USB stick and use robocopy to copy them all over, which would write them in alphabetical order. Whenever I changed what was on the USB stick I would format and re-copy everything.

The robocopy command I used was "robocopy /mir C:\pathtomusic U:\" Be careful with the destination drive/folder, it will erase anything there that isn't present in the source folder.

I would highly suggest you make only one level of folders such as "Artist - Album\## trackname.mp3". That way if your player is like my old one it won't try playing the "empty" artist folders.

My new car (2010 Hyundai Elantra) does sort the folders and files so order on disk is not important.

[jp_over]

Older posts here have talked about the play order being determined by when the file was created on the medium (CD-R at the time) rather than by the file name.

My previous car (2007 Kia Specra) was like this with both USB and CD-R. [. . .] What I did was collect all the files in a directory on my PC first. Then I would format my USB stick and use robocopy to copy them all over, which would write them in alphabetical order. [. . .]

Robocopy is an excellent tool - thanks for posting this! I'll be testing out my newly robocopy'd USB this afternoon (Alpine CDA-117).

This post has been edited by db1989: Feb 5 2012, 14:57

Reason for edit: truncating full quote and moving from bottom to top

[jp_over]

Sadly, robocopy didn't do the trick (neither the/mir command or just robocopy) - the FAT application also would not recognize the drive. Not sure of other solutions here or perhaps something I missed in using robocopy (it did copy the files, just didn't put them in order). Perhaps a smaller file naming convention might help? I used album, artist, track, track title... player is an Alpine CDA 117.

This post has been edited by db1989: Feb 8 2012, 19:07

Reason for edit: removing botched attempt at an unnecessary bottom-quote

[jp_over]

OK, tried moving 1 file at a time to the USB drive - Alpine CDA 117 still did not play the files in the order I specified. Just about to give up on using the USB and expecting the files to play back in any specified (or even logical) order.

Of note, am using DB Poweramp to try to burn some CDs - will post back with the results from moving 1 file at a time to the "burn q"...

[jp_over]

OK, tried moving 1 file at a time to the USB drive - Alpine CDA 117 still did not play the files in the order I specified. Just about to give up on using the USB and expecting the files to play back in any specified (or even logical) order.

Of note, am using DB Poweramp to try to burn some CDs - will post back with the results from moving 1 file at a time to the "burn q"...

DB Poweramp will burn CDs in correct order. Will attempt to use Drivesort and will post back. Perhaps this is an impossible problem set with the Alpine CDA 117.