Cars play songs on flash drive in alphabetical order by file name.

[micky]

Windows relevance at the end.

Last year I posted about the 3 cars I ended up having in one 2 month rental period, and about the flash drive I had made that had about 800 songs on it from the 50's and early 60's, that I recorded off of

181.FM-oldies, one of several internet radio station from the same company, with a little advertising. Easy to play and record using RadioMaximus, a free program. (the paid version will do scheduled recording, but I just let it run for 2 days.)

And it will record each song separately but the first two seconds of each song are attached to the previous song, and the only way to hear it correctly is to play the songs in the order they were recorded.**

And I said how the Nissan Micra and the Hyudai i10 insisted on playing them in order alphabetically by file name. So all the Brenda Lee songs played in a row, etc. But then I got a Honda something or other and it worked fine. (At home I use a cigarrette lighter player FM-transmitter and that works fine too.)

So this year I started with a Mazda 2 and iirc it worked fine, but the key was stolen and the next car is a 2019 Honda Jazz (Fit) and it has 4 options for play order. BUT NONE are the order in which the songs reside on the flashdrive. It's either random, or in order by file name, or repeating the same song over and over, or one other choice, so last year the Honda worked fine but this year it doesn't work right anymore.

It's sort of like the fact that Windows file managers will sort on any field hat has a column header, but they will not display files in the order in which they appear on the HDD or the flash drive. For that you need DOS and the option iirc dir /u for unsorted.

**In fact, since in File Managers I display most files with the newest at the top, it would copy them that way to the flash drive. I had to reorder them with the oldest at the top to copy them in the order recorded so they might play in the order recorded.

[Cindy Hamilton]

I'm not surprised. I've got a bunch of movies on a USB drive, which my Sony DVD player recognizes. They're listed in filename order and when one ends the next one in alphabetical order starts automatically. Given our penchant for movies with guns and explosions and animated kids' films, it can make for a strange marathon if we start a movie while puttering around the house.

Cindy Hamilton

[Big Al]

Can you use some bulk rename utility to number then so the filenames have a 3 digit # in front of the real file name? Bulk Rename Utility is one that comes to mind.

I do that a lot, as I like my mp3's I lull myself to bed with to be in a certain order too.

Al

[Rod Speed]

I normally listen to these podcasts when puttering around or when long distance driving etc.

Works very well on the iphone, they are downloaded automatically and they play in date sequence when you get it to play from one place in the series and keeps track of what you have heard before.

But have just got a google home mini for the much louder speaker and a decent base around the house. Sounds great but useless to tell it which particular podcast to play apart from the latest and it doesn’t keep track of what you have played before.

[micky]

That would work. Is there any problem renaming every file on a flash drive? Something about not being able to write to the drive too many times?

Bigger question: Is it going to read the files in the order they are on the drive? I think the answer must be yes.

Not like the car does and use alphabetical or some other order.

( BTW, the car displays the song number, and it will say first #651 for example, then 652 next, then 653, even though they're by the same artist and I know they were not recorded one after the other. )

I installed program, dl'd the manual but the flash drive is in the car so I'll actually do this later. Thanks. Great idea.

In the car I don't want the songs to lull me to sleep, but whatever works for you.

[pjp]

Thank God new to me car I just bought has fancy lcd screen type interface. I finally have a car stereo plays mp3 directly from a cd and includes usb and aux inputs as well. Only issue is you have to copy mp3 and picture files off the usb onto it's internal 30Gb hard drive and it doesn't seem able to just play them directly off the usb device. Other than takes times to copy not any real issue. Play does Random ... yea haw!!! but looking at them they are in alphabetical order.

It;s a Chrylser 300 RB"x" style stereo btw.

[Paul]

You might want to do Properties on the files and see if they have metadata recorded in them. Or look at the filenames for hints as to what additional information might be present they could use for ordering purposes.

If this was my collection, I'd probably edit it in Audacity and break it into proper sections. But that would be a lot of work. So each section can play independently (shuffled).

A recording coming over the air shouldn't have metadata (i.e. if you were recording audio as samples). But the recording program could be using some method to stamp them after reception (look them up on an InternetDB somehow and stamp them).

This is a random MP3 I found on my disk drive, selected because the way it was acquired made it likely to have metadata. This didn't come in "hot" via streaming or anything. The file was downloaded from the station site that would normally be streaming it from their web page. You can see there is "stuff" inside this file, that a digital player might latch onto for genre or something. In this case the genre is "podcast".

And I'm only recommending looking for that, if it isn't apparent what field it is sorting on.

Since the metadata in that file is inside the file, it will survive transfer to a USB stick and FAT32 and so on.

Paul

[Shadow]

Easiest playlist maker (apart from Winamp) is Mp3Tag. Which is much faster if you are editing tags on multiple files or exporting IDs to filenames (or vice-versa).

Quite small (3.5Mb) freeware. []'s

[Mark Blain]

At one point I was using a cheap mp3 player that did NO sorting: the folder playback choices were "random" or "unsorted". As a quick workaround, I used a program to sort the FAT32 file table itself and place the files in my preferred order. It sounds like you have the opposite problem this time around, but given your past history that program might be a good tool to add to your arsenal.

[slate_leeper]

My KIA Sorento only took 8-1/2 HOURS to load my 8100 songs from the USB.

I add a character (~) to the end of song titles of songs I really like, and add it twice (~~) to indicate my "top 60" favorites. Since it is the last character in the field, it does not affect sorting. After a recent KIA recall software upgrade (apparently unrelated to the radio at all), the "random" order setting insisted on playing only those from the Top 60, although those were played in random order. I had to rename the files on the USB stick to change ~~ to just ~ on those files, and then reload them all again to get it to work properly. It reloads all instead of just changed or new files(another

8.5 hours).

Are they using Windows-10 as a software base <grin>?

-dan z-

[Shadow]

I'm a command-line guy myself. But some things are better done with GUI apps (I hate the word "apps", why do I use it?). Mp3tag is malware-free. It opens a html page at startup the first time it's run, but it's on localhost (in the program's folder). Just switch off your net if it worries you. ImgBurn, Winamp, MP3Tag, etc functions can all be done from the command line with DOS | DOS programs, but why bother?

I wrote a GUI to youtube-dl and wget. I was tired of typing in "youtube-dl -f18 blahblahblah" Or wget -c --referer= https://blabla https://e.e.e/something.zip A cut and paste is so much faster. And my fingers hurt. Doctors have terrible handwriting because they all have RSI. Well, my generation does. Younger guys probably dictate all their patient's secrets into Alexa and feel good about it. []'s

[Meanie]

Just don't play them while in reverse or you'll miss 15 to 20 seconds of important lyrics.

[gfretwell]

The MP3 player in my wife's car stops the playback while the computer is taken over by the backup beeper function and it starts up where you left off when you go forward again. Same when the phone hijacks it.

[pjp]

Well this Chrylser only took approx 2 hours for 2,200 songs so seems about same. Therefore I suspect more like I assume both are using USB

1.x and not even USB 2.x.

Just a bit of a drag can't simply play them directly from a flashdrive. If I want to do that I'd need to use some external player and feed that into the stereo's aux input. I notice it will also copy cds to the hard disk. I suspect they'd be stored similar to a wav file and that would chew up space fast on the small hard disk. I assume it would not do any automatic compression of any sort so instead of a 5Mb mp3 file you'd end up with a 50Mb wav file (or similar format). I can live with any slight quality loss mp4's exibit, at almost 70 and one ear noticably different in freguency range than the other it's a moot issue.

And just to add, stereo also will display pics but not videos, go figure.

[micky]

Just checked and /u gives sUmmary information.

In TCC/Le and Take Command (command enhancers. First one free, both more powerful than DOS):

Display order is controlled by /o and unsorted is /o:u

It might be the same in DOS, but I find little reason to use straight DOS anymore, unless I'm using someone else's computer.

[J. P. Gilliver (John]

I've just tried - the "DOS" in my system ("ver" returns "Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]") doesn't mention u in the help returned by dir /?, and if I enter dir /o:u, says

Parameter format not correct - "u".

JPG

[Charlie+]

On Thu, 16 May 2019 01:54:41 GMT, Mark Blain [e-mail] wrote as underneath :

+1 on DriveSort - I remember having a little experimentation to find which type of sort worked best. Very much needed in Audio book MP3s where the right order is essential.. C+

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I seem to have had a lot of encounters with the helpful idiot, some device that insists on messing up directories that are already in order (by alphabetizing).

[micky]

Thanks for checking that out. That's why I like TCC/Le so much.

I think I bought Norton Utilities about 25 years ago and it came with Norton DOS, which was their name for 4DOS which was the predecessor for Take Command and TCC/Le. The second one is free and once installed requires no maintenance (Well, maybe I had to fiddle to get the window to fill the screen, but that would have been true of regular DOS also.)

Take Command has even more features, I guess, but I can't imagine what else I could use. TCC/le already has more than I can remember.

I think it's interesting that unsorted gets so little attention. I would think that would be the standard format and you'd have to do something to get things sorted.

In this case with the flashdrive, since the songs were written to the flashdrive in the order they were recorded to the HDD blank drive, unsorted and sorted by ascending date/time are the same thing, but the car radios didn't have a way to sort by date or time. And when there were over 600 songs, it seems like a bit of work for the radio to sort things alphabetically, but that's what all but one of the radios did.

OTOH, my $16 gizmo that plugs into the cigarette lighter and lets me plug in a flashdrive and transmits on FM to the car radio has no trouble playing the songs in the order they are stored on the flashdrive.

[micky]

BRU worked great, Big Al. It's impressive. Only took 4 or 5 seconds to rename 600 files on the flashdrive, and the flashdrive played perfectly afterwards.

I also had an earlier section I didn't like anymore and Bulk Rename Utility has a way to change extensions, so I changed all the .mp3's to .zp3.

He seems to have thought of everything.