[DerAlte]

Originally Posted by saket77

... Or may be I am acting too smart!

Not really. You are trying to do the logical thing.

There is a difference between 'view' and physical sorting. In any OS (with GUI), one can change the view in the (equivalent of) File Explorer to any sort order - only the display is changed. You are not wrong in expecting a tool to actually physically sort the files.

Be sure to change the file names to start with track number (as per your choice). Do this *before* you use the tool, so that the tool will set the physical order based on the filename - which starts with track number.

A quick and dirty method is to drag and drop the files into an empty directory on the drive one at a time, in the order that you want to listen to them. Open the source and destination in 2 separate windows when doing this. DON'T mark a group of files while dragging and dropping - you never know the order in which Windows will transfer.

[saket77]

Originally Posted by DerAlte

A quick and dirty method is to drag and drop the files into an empty directory on the drive one at a time, in the order that you want to listen to them. Open the source and destination in 2 separate windows when doing this. DON'T mark a group of files while dragging and dropping - you never know the order in which Windows will transfer.

Thanks Aniruddha.

^ as of now, I am resorting to the above method only. I re-transferred all the files in the order I wanted the player to play. Its working that way only but its a long & time consuming method.

To cut it little shorter, I first copied the songs that I wanted to come first in every directory. After 10-15 songs in each directory, I copied all the remaining tracks as they would mostly come after reaching my destination, so who cares!
So, the bottom line is to arrange the first few songs of the directory, so that they play first. If we have to add new songs, make a new directory & put the new songs there first. Then cut-paste the songs in the other directory to the new one & as we know, cut-paste in the same drive hardly takes time. This is how I am living with it!

Regards,
Saket

[RaguHolla]

Originally Posted by saket77

Thanks Aniruddha.

^ as of now, I am resorting to the above method only. I re-transferred all the files in the order I wanted the player to play. Its working that way only but its a long & time consuming method.
Regards,
Saket

My HU in does by file name. Hence I wrote small perl script. This might solve your issue also.

What this script does is, it take winamp playlist and destination directory as input. It then copies all songs in the order it appears in playlist. While it copies them one by one, it also appends sequence numbers in the beginning of files. This will ensure creation date of file is date copied. If you need this script I will upload it here. You need Perl v2.5 (search active Perl) and above is installed in you machine.


I basically create playlist in certain order, it is easy as I don't have to wait till file copied. And its easy to search and create play list in winamp than in file system. Feed playlist to this script. You are done.

[saket77]

Hey thanks Ragu! I think it will do it. I think your script might be useful for many people, if you can upload that.

I have also downloaded some FATsorters which claim to be built for the purpose.
Thanks,
Saket

[swami.n]

Originally Posted by saket77

Hey thanks Ragu! I think it will do it. I think your script might be useful for many people, if you can upload that.

I have also downloaded some FATsorters which claim to be built for the purpose.
Thanks,
Saket

So Saket, Did you get to try out any of the sorters and what were your results?

[RaguHolla]

Originally Posted by saket77

Hey thanks Ragu! I think it will do it. I think your script might be useful for many people, if you can upload that.

Here is the file. playList.doc

You need to rename the file to playList.doc to playlist.pl.

You need to install perl before you can try this. For windows you get free perl at following link

Once perl is installed usually it associate itself with .pl extension. Open command prompt and run "playlist.pl playlistpath destination".

Its pretty simple code, see if it helps.

[parsh]

I have no idea why all this sorting is required. Generally the HU sorting should be independent of the date and time the file is written on the media and mostly based on alpha-numeric sorting of folder names and within folders the alpha-numeric sorting of the file names.

Most of the HUs resort to the sorting in the following manner, as is a case with a Pioneer HU, this should help:

[Ragul]

Arent there any HU's that allow easy folder navigation or read playlists files saved from a PC to the usb drive?


-R

[DerAlte]

Originally Posted by parsh

I have no idea why all this sorting is required. Generally the HU sorting should be independent of the date and time the file is written on the media and mostly based on alpha-numeric sorting of folder names and within folders the alpha-numeric sorting of the file names. ...

Perhaps you are not reading the text carefully, and missing something. Refer to the last 3 bullets in your attachment.
1. "User cannot assign folder numbers and specify playback sequence with this unit"
2. "Playback sequence of the audio file is the same as the recorded sequence in the USB device"
3. "To specify the playback sequence, the following method is recommended ..."

It is clear that whichever technical writer wrote the manual made a hash of the issue by writing contradictory statements. First they say User cannot specify playback sequence, and then they say To specify playback sequence ...

* The HU described in the manual is doing the same thing that @Saket77's Blau HU is doing - playing files in physical order
* The description also means there is no facility for using Playlists
* The technical writer made an innocent assumption that naming files, with sequential numbers at the start, changes the physical order of the files. Poor chap!
* (For the programmers here) All device systems, including USB systems, use the Unix-style Get First Entry - Get Next Entry to query device / directory contents - where the source returns in order of physical storage in the File System. Once the HU has created a map of the contents, it has the freedom to do all subsequent operations based on that *map*. In this case, the HU doesn't sort the tree branches in the map in alpha-numeric order, and just plays back in branch sequence. If one wants a different sort order, one has to physically reorganize files on the device - just like @saket77 is trying to do

Originally Posted by Ragul

Arent there any HU's that allow easy folder navigation or read playlists files saved from a PC to the usb drive? ...

1. Kenwood sorts the song map in the HU in Name order before playing. There may be other brands which do this, including newer Blau HUs (the limitation earlier was a software implementation limitation in the HU)

2. HUs cannot accept and execute a computer-based Playlist - simply because of difference in storage / file systems. In a computer-based Playlist, one can specify full-path-spec of the location of a particular song file. That would be meaningless on an HU, since the HU doesn't have it's own storage, and gets files dynamically from an external device (one at a time). Querying file system and file contents (READ) over USB is not the same as reading a file system directly through OS calls

3. Many HUs do allow Playlists to be created on the HU, but this is a different method. The Playlist will work *as long as* the device is not disconnected. As soon as one disconnects the device, the Playlist is unusable. I don't think the HU writes the Playlist on to the device for playing back the next time the same device connects - HUs don't write anything to external devices

4. Only with Apple iDevices (not sure, but some HUs may support M$ devices also in the same way), the protocol works in a way that Playlists on the iDevice is available for execution on the HU - only then can the HU claim to be "iPod compatible"

[JMaruru]

Some of the mp3 files does NOT play on my car HU. It comes out as - Track ' " (<single quote> <space> <double quote> - on the HU display.

What might be the reason here? Please advise.

[NPV]

Originally Posted by saket77

I would like to have it play following MY sequence. How do I go about it, please let me know.

Saket - thanks for your thread.
I was surprised when I faced this problem when using a USB pen drive in the Wagon R's HU.

I think I found a simple solution/workaround using the "touch" command, and there is no need to use any tool like Fat Sorter, etc

Posted details here in my ownership thread - Link

[JMaruru]

Originally Posted by NPV

Saket - thanks for your thread.
I was surprised when I faced this problem when using a USB pen drive in the Wagon R's HU.

I think I found a simple solution/workaround using the "touch" command, and there is no need to use any tool like Fat Sorter, etc

Posted details here in my ownership thread - Link

How did you get 'touch' command to work on MS-DOS?

When i tried, got the message 'Not recognized as internal or external command'.

Please explain.

[NPV]

Originally Posted by JMaruru

How did you get 'touch' command to work on MS-DOS?

I didn't use it on DOS/Windows but on a Mac which is Linux based. However, there are ways using custom scripting/code to build an equivalent of a "touch" command for Windows, like this