what to do if mp3s are not sorted right
 

Hi all !

I am pretty new here.
A while ago I have bought myself an Elson mp3 player and was very much satified with it. But after a while I was listening to an audio book and wondered why the track order suddenly got randomized. When I checked the folder with Windows Explorer, everything was alright. ID3 track numbers were alright, too. Other audio books played sequentially like normal.

So I found out that my mp3 player does not sort the files alphabetically but just shows and plays them in the order they were copied to the flash card ! To make a long story short, I have copied my audio books manually, one by one, ever since. This solved the problem for a while.

But then my girl-friend started using my player for her audio books, and finally I got fed up with manual copying ..

I have made a little freeware tool that sorts anything you throw at it on hardware level, so that they get played alphabetically on every player. Just drag and drop a drive icon, folder or any files on it and there you go. If you want it faster, use it on the mp3s on your HDD before you transfer them to your player.

download mp3sorter here.

For whom it may concern, I have also made a video converter for Meizu M6 and M3 which can be found here.

If this is not the right category, I would like to ask an admin to move this thread to the right location.

Have fun !

Thanks BobbyQ for sharing this with us.

Sounds like a great tool.
I know with my older MP4 players, I've always had the hassel of files not playing alphabetically as it only played them by date/time it was transferred onto the player.

I've tried your tool, but not entirely sure what else to do after I've dragged the file onto the mp3sorter.exe program? When it's done, it's done? Then I just copy the files onto my player and that's it?

Thanks for your contribution.

Re: what to do if mp3s are not sorted right
 

yes, you can drop anything you like onto mp3sorter's desktop icon : files, folders, drive icons or any combination.
Then it shows the % in the title row and after processing it says "finished".
Whatever you dragged onto it is now properly sorted on the drive.

Using it with files on your hard disk is (of course) much faster than on a flash drive. But using it directly on a flash drive is also possible.
I normally copy some files over to my player and then drag the whole flash drive icon to it, then go and make some coffe ;-)

Re: what to do if mp3s are not sorted right
 

Hello,

the issue with the randomised files is a known bug in Windows and stays there since windows 9x.

When you drag and drop files in explorer, the file whitch is under the mouse pointer, when you drag and drop, is allways copied first. For example when the mouse is over file six this file is copied first and file one is copied on the sixt position.

You can get around this, when you allways drag and drop the first of the selected files. Then they are every time in the right order.

that's interesting information, I will check that. Still it has nothing to do with some mp3 player's inability to sort by filename. And your theory implies that copying of whole folders wouldn't "randomize" the folder content - but you're wrong here. The content won't be copied alphabetically but in the order they got created on the hard disk. I think all you can do right now is use a tool like this.
EDIT : I checked the information you gave and can absolutely confirm it. It's like you say, even on Win2k.

Thanks for the tool, i have been looking for something like this for quite a while, and was too lazy to code one myself. :P

I'll try it now and report if it works! :D

Later edit: Yes, it works just fine. You're using windoze CMD scripts to sort them right? That should explain why it can't support files with the " & " character in their names. :P

Re: what to do if mp3s are not sorted right
 

damn .. my secret tech has been revealed ;-)

Don't worry Bobby, you're secret is still safe because some of us aren't fluent in tech speak. I have no idea what you two are doing to fix it. 8)

Re: what to do if mp3s are not sorted right
 

pure magic .. :D

Hehe. :P

Just a word of warning: The program does not like numbered tracks. If you have some numbered music files on your player (eg 01 - artist - title, 02 - artist2 - title2 etc) it will make a mess of them.

Personally i still use the good ol' "sort by name / start copying from the first file" method. :P

Re: what to do if mp3s are not sorted right
 

I have just sorted some tracks with numbers, and everything was fine. Can you provide an example with full path ? Like this :
"C:\mp3\David Bowie - Telling Stories (Vh1 Storytellers)\david bowie - telling stories (vh1 storytellers) - 21 - thursdays child.mp3"

I see no problem yet. And what do you mean exactly by "a mess" ?

Re: what to do if mp3s are not sorted right
 

hm, no response from Th3_uN1Qu3.
I believe he has encountered some other problem. Of course I have checked the program but could not find any evidence of the problem described.
All my tests even with crazy filenames with extra characters have not produced anything else than reliable program flow, so I would like to contradict Th3_uN1Qu3's warning and declare this application as working 8)

Didn't see your post till now. :P

I have all my music in one folder on my MP4 to be able to use random mode. After throwing the folder from my MP4 to the program the files were like 02 02 03 (different artists and titles) 06 04 11 07 and so on. Random. :lol:

I've neatly renamed and sorted all my music files now but i'll try to recreate the behavior.

Re: what to do if mp3s are not sorted right
 

02 artist1
02 artist2
03 artist1
would be absolutely correct .. they get sorted alphabetically and the above is an alphabetic ascending order. The numbers are part of the filename and count for the sorting strategy even before the names since they come first. Numbers are part of the "alphabet" (which is ASCII in this case), too.
If you want to have your files sorted by artist you should have renamed them :
artist1 01
artist1 02
artist1 03
artist2 01

and I just don't believe the "06 04 11 07" you said. I don't see a reason an alphabetic sorting would do that.
Please check again now that you know what alphabetic means.