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

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

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.

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.

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".

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

Paul

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.

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

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

-dan z-

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

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

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.

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.

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

On Thu, 16 May 2019 01:54:41 GMT, Mark Blain snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote as underneath :

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).

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.

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.

You're welcome.

Any chance of a URL? Sounds potentially useful. (Though I'd probably forget I had it after a while!)

I don't know what "DOS" dir actually does if you don't give it the /o: parameter at all. []

(Not relevant, but it does amaze me how electronics has progressed. I already had something to play MP3s [my SatNav/GPS], which I played through a cassette adapter; when I had to change car, and got one that didn't have a cassette slot, I was amazed to be able to get a fully synthesized stereo FM transmitter gizmo for 3 pounds 20 [probably $3 in US] - even with a rechargeable battery and charging circuitry built in. [Though my faith was somewhat restored when I found it has the channels transposed {which doesn't really bother me}.])

Oops - I had been deleting that for non-UK 'groups. The petition only got 330 signatures in the six months anyway )-: [first threshold is

Alphabetical by file name.

I left something out. When watching the screen with RadioMaximus, you can see that the caption, the song title, changes a little before the song is over, and at least with the music stations I listen to (100FM and 181FM), the songs are stored individually, but the first 2 or 3 seconds of each song is at the end of one file, and the next file starts

Well, with the $16 gizmo, I can't hear the transition at all, even when I try, and I tried several times (and I didn't try 100's of times, but would have noticed anyhow). It goes straight from one file to the next. (If the songs didn't span files you'd expect a moment of silence between them, but here there is no silence. It sounds perfect.)

But with every car radio, Mazda, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, there was a moment, a full second, of silence or maybe not even silence, but a tiny thud or click, 2 or 3 seconds into every song.

Cheap is sometimes better.

I can't try it with my 2005 Toyota becaus it has no USB input (other than one or another gizmo.)

You're right.

Wow.

Thanks for those. (I wondered why you gave two until I looked at the first one: in my browser at least, the first one - that tells me about it - almost uniquely, has no link to the download one!) []

When I play mp3s on my SatNav, it plays a little blip at the start of any file, that comes from a few seconds into the file.

I've often found that! []

It's not a bad system: tends to get misused as a measure of public opinion (which it isn't - it only counts supporters for any petition, not those against [that's what my petition was about]), but at least it gives _some_ input for the populace. (The "debate" at 100k is _not_ necessarily - usually isn't - in the main chamber as seen on TV; it's usually in a committee room somewhere. [And usually a better debate for that.])

yes it does.

there are two download links, a green button and an orange button, for

there is also a separate download link at the top right of the page, which goes to the second link listed above for all of their products. that link is also a drop-down menu to directly download the specific product.