Order of Files on Thumbdrive

I assume the situation is that the radio reads the file on a (V?)FAT-formatted pendrive, but only in the order of the location in the FAT.

I have had simple/old devices that do that - specifically car Audio transceivers that accept an SD card and re-transmit the MP3 files on it on the FM Band.

I did used to have a utility that would re-sort the FAT order - so if you have files named

1. AnotherTrack.mp3
2. Track one.mp3
3. Second Trackname.mp3

etc. the device would play in 01, 02, 03 order. I will try to see if I can find mention of it again.

J^n

IIRC this was (& maybe still is) a common problem with audio files. The standard answer was to number them.

'Drivesort' rings a bell (although I would have been doing this under Linux)

FAT file systems have no intrinsic concept of order - they basically just allocate a position in the table using the next free slot.

So one option would be to copy the files to a folder on your computer, quick format the thumb drive, and then copy the files back one by one in the order you would like them.

One could of course create a batch file semi automatically to do this. If you start with:

dir /b d:\ | clip

(assuming d:\ is the mount point of the drive) that will create a list of all the filenames (without the other decorating stuff like dates and filesizes etc), and save it in the clip board. You could then past that into an editor, sort as you fancy, and add the copy command required to put it back on the drive. Save it with a .bat extension and then run it.

fatsort will also do it under linux (you can run that on windows under wsl)

or there are things like DriveSort:

Yes, I think Fatsort what what I used for this purpose under Linux, as per my earlier posting.

Many thanks for the input :-)

I think if I format the thumbdrive and copy I Got Ubay over then the rest of the files I may get there.

My music files are spread over 137 sub-directories of the Mediashare/Music directory on my server.

I originally just did a search for mp3 files then copied them into an "Allmusic" directory but lost about 200 files because they had the same names, even though it was often a different version.

I put together a utility in C# that:

Searched for all mp3 files and stored them in a List<>. Went through the list and copied the files to Music0 in Allmusic if it wasn't already there but added it to a new List<> if it was. I then recursed thought the function creating MusicN until everything was copied. I ended up with Music0 to Music3 then had to decide what to keep so some manual work.

I had 5 or 6 versions of some songs but what surprised me was that some song titles are duplicated, but they are entirely different songs. I would have though the music industry would keep a register of song titles to avoid duplication.

clearly you don't know musicians ... some will delight in having duplicate titles.

eg. There is a band helpfully called "Sunn O)))" (with the parentheses), and plenty of artists with non-ASCII glyphs in their name.

J^n