what to do if mp3s are not sorted right

[BobbyQ]

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 !

[admin]

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.

[BobbyQ]

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 ;-)

[rainer]

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.

[BobbyQ]

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.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

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!

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

[BobbyQ]

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

[booboo773]

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)

[BobbyQ]

pure magic ..

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

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