Playing Usb Mp3's In Their Original Album Order.

[Acky]

I've done a search and cant find a related thread anywhere so i apologise if it has been raised before.

We have a 2011 Yaris T-spirit, with the large colour screen sat nav stereo. (unsure of exact model number).

The problem i am having, is the playing order when playing MP3's from a USB stick.

The stick itself works absolutely fine, (if a bit annoying at the lengthy start-up time, no good for a short trip to the shops), and i can see all the music stored on it, via the screen.

My problem is the sorting and in particular, the playback of the tracks.

When i go to album, every song seems to be sorted via the artists album, rather than the actual album it came from. Eg, compilation albums organise the tracks in the artists album, instead of an album entitled 'Now 84' etc.

The only way to search for an actual album is to use the playlist section. This works great, and all songs are in the right folders, but this kinda makes the 'Album' search irrelevant, unless you ONLY have artists individual albums, and no compilations.

Navigating to the Playlist icon is just as easy as the Album icon though so i can live with this, but it does still leave me with my main issue.

And that is, the systems sorts all tracks within folders/albums in alphabetical order and plays them back this way too.

Not too much of an issue, unless of course you are listening to a mix album.

Obviously the mix is ruined by cutting to a completely different song to the one currently being mixed in.

On the stick itself, the songs are sorted in a basic system, in the sense that the tracks are within a folder given the album name.

I leave all track names with the preceding track number, so i would've thought they would remain in the right order, as even alphabetical order would sort '01....' before a track titled '04....'.

I can only suspect the system sorts tracks and albums using the ID3 tags, instead of a much simpler folder structure. (As most people will copy over an album in a folder structure, instead of planting 800 tracks individually on the stick leaving the system to organise them).

Apart from manually editing hundreds of track ID3 tags, is there anyway i can get the system to organise them exactly as they are organised within the directory structure?

Thanks in advance for any help

[Aceshigh84]

If the system is sorting based on id3 tags, and you haven't set yours up, the easiest and quickest way is to use a program such as media monkey.

You can just drag and drop all of the mp3's into the program, and it well create/edit the id3 tag based on the file name and then go off to the net to get all the media information and album art. It might cost you an hour or so, but the majority of the work is automatic.

[jules8343]

I have had a similar problem on the Avensis (57 plate) which will play mp3s off CDs. I found that tracks would not play in order, because the tracks were originally numbered 1,2,3...10,11 etc and of course 11 comes before 2 alphabetically. I tweaked the export options to ensure that the track numbers on track titles and filenames have leading 0s.

I can add another vote for Media Monkey, which I have used for years and has very flexible tagging and export options to help you get your tracks just how you want them.

[Acky]

Thanks for the responses, i shall try media monkey and see what it can do for me, and re-post how i get on.

Thanks again guys :)

[Acky]

Ok, so i used Media Monkey and it does 'exactly what it says on the tin'.

All ID tags now contain the track number before the name of the track

eg: 01 Gangnam Style (dont laugh)

Trouble is, i still have the same issue.

In theory, it should all play in alphabetical order via either filename, or ID tag, both of which now have the track number before it.

But it doesn't.

In fact on screen, it doesn't even show the track number and still just the name of the track. Its as though the system is just programmed to completely ignore numbers in the titles and filenames.

I will keep trying and post back if i can solve the issue.