Music Files Play in Different Order in Vehicle

[Amaury]

So, I have two USB flash drives–one for each vehicle–that I plug into our car and truck to listen to music that I copied over from my computer. For a lot of my music, I have them numbered as part of the file name in order to order them.

For example:
1. Track 1
2. Track 2
3. Track 3

And so on.

What I'm trying to figure out is why the order is different when I play these in the vehicles? It's not a thing with the flash drives, as the tracks play in the proper order if I play the music off my flash drives on the computer. (Likewise for the files directly from the computer, of course.)

Here's an example screenshot of the order they properly play in on my computer, whether I'm playing them off my computer directly or from the USB drive.



However, in the vehicles, they play in the following order.

1. Track 1
10. Track 10
11. Track 11

...

19. Track 19
2. Track 2
20. Track 20
21. Track 21

...

29. Track 29
3. Track 3
30. Track 30
31. Track 31

Does anyone know why this is? The only workaround I found would be to name my files as such for them to play in the proper sequential order, but there's no way to mass rename files and apply the numbers in that way.

001. Track 1
002. Track 2
003. Track 3

...

009. Track 9
010. Track 10
011. Track 11

[kalvado]

You have the player which plays files in the order they were written on a drive as opposed to any human-understandable order.
There are programs which do reorder files in the folder to what you need
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/95721/FAT-32-Sorter-Utility-that-Sorts-the-Files-Table-i
is one of such programs. Or
https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/File-Management/FAT-Sorter.shtml

[CtrlAltDel]

It looks like the files are playing in, shall we say, alphabetical order rather than numerical order. If that's the case, I'm pretty sure what you suggest will work. If you have Windows, the Bulk Rename Utility will prove helpful if you don't want to renumber them one by one.

[1995hoo]

Do you have any sort of tagging software like mp3tag (which is free) or similar? If not, that sort of thing might help. Your suggestion about adding the leading zeroes should work, but mp3tag might allow you to edit the track number, disc number, etc. so that the metadata ought to get them sorting in the right order. For me, it's essential for concert recordings, such as Springsteen concerts that would span three CDs. The Gracenote database most software uses for metadata has all sorts of errors and incorrect formatting–for example, it treats each disc of a multi-disc set as a separate album (e.g., "Live in New York City [Live] [Disc 2]") instead of as a single album as it should be–so editing the tags (in my example, both track number and disc number) gets things playing in the right order even without changing the filenames in the way you describe. (I also correct the capitalization in the song titles because I find the insistence on capitalizing every word–e.g., "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" when it should be "Darkness on the Edge of Town"–to be annoying and distracting.)

Software name notwithstanding, mp3tag works on real audio files as well, even DSD. It's not limited to .MP3 and I'm sure the filename is simply in recognition of the masses' misunderstanding of ".MP3" as synonymous with "computer audio."

The issue you raise, incidentally, is one reason why it's a good idea to use the YYYY-MM-DD date format if you include the date at the beginning of filenames. Today would be 2023-04-27, for example. If you don't do it that way, you get every January file from every year that's present, then every October, November, and December, again from every year, before you get any February files.

[Amaury]

Thanks, everyone, for the responses thus far. Admittedly, it's not a huge issue for me personally, unlike the concert example above. The bigger question I'm trying to figure out is why if they play in numerical order on my computer, as I have them, regardless of the source (computer directly or from the flash drive), they don't play in that same order on the vehicles, which seems to be alphabetical-numerical order, as was also mentioned above. For example, everything with "1" goes first (1, 10, 11, etc.), then everything with "2" (2, 20, 21, etc.), and so forth. Maybe the vehicles have their own default (hidden) order, but unlike computers, you can't choose how to order things. We have a 2020 Corolla and a 2022 Tacoma. Interestingly enough, when we had our 2015 Tacoma before we turned it in to Toyota to get the 2022 Tacoma because we needed a 4WD vehicle, the order there was in reverse of what our vehicles now do. If I recall correctly, it was something like 10, 11... 19, 1, 20, 21... 29, 2, and so forth. So, backward alphabetical-numerical order.

[ZLoth]

Sounds like the player is playing off the filename instead of the track number in the MP3 tag.

[Scott5114]

Thanks, everyone, for the responses thus far. Admittedly, it's not a huge issue for me personally, unlike the concert example above. The bigger question I'm trying to figure out is why if they play in numerical order on my computer, as I have them, regardless of the source (computer directly or from the flash drive), they don't play in that same order on the vehicles, which seems to be alphabetical-numerical order, as was also mentioned above.

Different programs have different ideas about how numbers should be alphabetized. Some will alphabetize in the order 1-9-10 because that's what the user probably actually wants, while others just do a naive ASCII sort that results in the order 1-10-9. The latter is easier, so it's more common; the former will only exist if someone incorporated code to explicitly check for such things and tweak them.

As has been discussed upthread, the only foolproof way to ensure proper sorting of numbers in file names is padding them to a consistent length with zeroes.

[hbelkins]

I'm noticing the same thing, although mine's a completely random scenario.

I'll get things like tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 17, 6, 7, 8, etc. And I don't know how to fix it.

[ErmineNotyours]

For my first multi-night road trip by myself, and the first with a car with a USB player, I could load up everything I wanted to hear in one file at home.  I dragged in the music in folders with audio book chapters in between, assuming it would all play in the order I placed everything on the stick.  Instead my Honda wanted to play the individual (root level) files first (the audio book chapters), then the files in folders.  I wound up having to manually jump between file types, which was fine because there were some albums I wanted to skip anyway.

Later I wanted to save streaming albums by recording them to my computer and cutting them back up into mp3s, manually numbered in correct order 01, 02, etc.  Not the best sound quality, but it's fine with road noise behind it anyway.  I used software by AVS4U, which has a de-facto batch processing mode so I don't have to save each file individually.  I simply attempt to close the program, and it asks if I want to save the files.  I click "yes to all," and it saves them.  In the past when I edited commercials out of podcasts for my smartphone it was no problem.  But when I saved a music album for my Honda this way, it played it in the order of last song, first song, next to last song, second song, etc.  I discovered that when I batch process files this way, it processes them in reverse order (last file first), and my Honda gets confused between playing them in ASCII order and "file created" order.  I did this with two albums before I realized my mistake, and I will have to save songs manually after all.