How to get mp3 files to play in correct order on car stereo player

Having converted a tape from analog to digital and spent some time fiddling with the ID3 tags, I was able to get it to play tracks in the correct order on my MP3 player, but not on my car stereo when reading from my USB drive. What I think I've found is that the problem could be something specific to car stereo mp3 functionality.

Specifically, the conclusions that a lot of people on forums seem to be coming to is that these players are playing tracks in the order that they were copied to the USB drive (I think that this is Create Date, based on prior experience with Create Date and Modified Date being nonintuitive for copied files). Here is my favorite link that goes over this ground:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=79667

There's a few people who think that the problem is in the File Allocation Table. This link explains it more clearly than anybody else:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/sort-files-alphabetically-usb-stick-or-mp3-player.htm

Some of the solutions involve using programs which reorder files and directories. Among these programs are something called "robocopy", something called "fatsort" (apparently this doesn't work on Vista and therefore probably not on W7), something called "Drivesort", something called "plgen" (this is apparently a playlist generator). This page provides links to all of these answers:

http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0010.html

Other people have suggested just carefully recopying (robocopy is about this). Apparently, if you select a bunch of files, then drag and drop by the *first* file, they are copied in file name order which is usually how they are named with the track number preceeding.

Here are some links that were nice and referenced the player issue, but which didn't convey the problem well, even if they had a favorite solution:

http://www.techtangerine.com/2009/03/29/how-to-make-your-mp3-cd-play-in-the-order-you-want/

http://mp3.about.com/od/tutorials/ht/MP3-sorting-Tutorial.htm

Edit ID3 tags

More on ID3 tags, just helpful general information about editing the tags. Find my other post about all the different version types and which do and don't work on my phone.

Here's a lovely list of ID3 tag editors, along with several pages of interesting comments below the original article. The article mentions the editor that I tried out before, mp3tag.de:

http://lifehacker.com/5266613/six-best-mp3-tagging-tools

The following page maintains that it is possible to edit tags in Windows Media Player 12, but it probably only edits the tags that are windows compatible or something like that. Plus the lack of a discrete save step is a disturbing sign:

http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8029/~/editing-id3-tags-in-windows-media-player-12

That having been said, I recalled that the last time I was stuck on a problem with ID3 tags, I downloaded Mp3tag and it worked well. It looks sort of like the older, easier to use iTunes tag editor with the added bonus of being able to select and save in old tag formats. Being able to see all the tags at once, poke those that need changing or do a batch change, is nice. Once I changed all the tag names to include track number, and fixed the track number tags, the files began to play in the correct order for the album I had imported from analog.

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

Samsung F210 mp3 player can't read ID3 tags

Love the F210, but the MP3 player didn't recognize album or artist for most of the songs that I brought over from Lisa's iTunes.

After some research, mp3tag seemed the best option and least likely to contain malware. This forum thread seems to go over lots of different types of mp3 tag problems and their solutions: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpromedia/thread/0b284232-aaf4-4cd8-8fee-91b46e9acbd9

And here's where mp3tag comes from: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

The most likely culprit seemed to be which ID3 tag format was being used (particularly since some files worked and some didn't. There is apparently an ID3v1 and an ID3v2, files can have either or both, and they're different enough from each other to be incompatible for some players.

Here's a different product that had changing the tag version built into its front panel: http://www.maniactools.com/soft/mp3tag/copy-id3v1-to-id3v2-or-id3v2-to-id3v1.shtml

Here's how to do it in mp3tag. The key is to set the tag save type in Options, then save the tags. In practice, it is often necessary to fiddle with the tags before they will be saved. Also, the default settings for the files on my little micro-SD card seems to have been "Read Only", so saving may not have been having an effect at first (although I didn't get any feedback saying that there was a problem). http://forums.mp3tag.de/lofiversion/index.php/t6727.html

So, it turns out that the version that I needed was version 2.3! There's also a version 2.4 and maybe other later ones. The plain version 2 or maybe it's version 2.2 could not be read by the F210. Most of the tags in Lisa's iTunes were 2.2, and many were noted by mp3tag as "Bad 2.2". There are also apparently three different flavors of 2.3, UTF-8, UTF-16, and ISO something. The player didn't seem to care between UTF-16 and ISO.

This forum thread had the 2.3 answer, but it was buried under a bunch of distracting stuff about FLAC version tags: http://androidforums.com/samsung-captivate/139592-samsung-player-doesnt-recognize-my-music-tags.html

This is just an interesting forum thread by a guy who tried a bunch of stuff to fix a problem only slightly related to mine: http://forums.mp3tag.de/lofiversion/index.php/t12455.html