Getting properly named and titled MP3s to play in the correct order

I’ve been moving some multi-part radio documentaries and audiobooks onto my MP3 players (three different models and brands) and although I name AND title them beginning with numerical characters (as in “01_Woodstock,” “02_Woodstock,” etc) and also assign track numbers to them, they always seem to load up in the players in random order, and then of course they play in that same random order.

I’ve even tried dragging them into the players in order, one at a time, rather than in batches, figuring they might be stored in the order they were imported from my computer. Still no luck.

Any idea as to WHY this would happen, and any suggestions on how to fix it? It’s maddening.

 

You might check out this thread: MP3 files not playing in the right order, although they look fine to me...

 

Tagging.
Have you used Mp3Tag to see how the tagging is configured?

 

Yeah, I read that thread a few days ago. I have checked all the tagging, made sure the names and the titles (which are different) are in alphabetical order, and that they each begin with a 2-digit number; made sure the track numbers are in sequence; loaded them into the players in sequence, etc.

 

Dumb question. Is the player set to random?

I have JrRiver set to random when selecting multiple artists. When playing an album it is set to play in order. Curious if it is a setting in the player, and not a tagging issue.

 

One thought which you may have done, put an album name, then a track number. So in your example you might name the album Woodstock History/Performance/Interview, then Maybe label title Woodstock part 1 and so on, then put cd 1 total CDs 1. That should tell player this is 1 cd, also maybe put tags for track 1 of 3, 2 of 3 and so on. Mp3tag is fairly easy to use and free and a very good tagger. If you have done this and still not showing correct, copy album name from one track and paste to rest, sometimes an extra space or mismatched capitalization is easily missed but will create different albums.

 

Playlists always play for me in the order I arrange the songs in, maybe that’s an option.

 

One thing to consider is that it might have to do with the disc number. While you can put the disc number in a track's metadata, some players (like my Sony Walkman) don't recognize it or use it. I had an issue with audiobooks where it would play Disc 1, Track 1 then Disc 2, Track 1, and so on until it played all of the track 1s and then play all of the track 2s and so on. To deal with the issue I've done the following:

• Renumbered the entire audiobook so that all of the tracks are numbered in sequentally.
• Delete the disc number.
• Give the entire audiobook one name rather than separating the discs.

If separating the tracks by disc is necessary, an option I've employed for extremely long audio books (>1,000 tracks) is to put the disc/chapter number in the album title and then renumber the tracks for each disc/chapter. This allows me to jump around the audiobook by disc/chapter when needed.

I've also found that sometimes trying to load tracks by syncing sometimes are an issue. I've found that when I load files on a thumb drive for my car by syncing, often some of the tracks will lock up the player and/or the tracks don't appear. It seems by dragging and dropping the files on the thumb drive seems to solve the problem.

 

Excellent point. I just checked -- I had not done this before -- and "random" play is NOT selected. Hmmm.

 

Good thought, but these are largely self-created audio files, not rips from CDs.

 

I'll try that. Right now, none of my MP3s have anything at all in the album-name field. l leave that blank and then I just name and number all the tracks in the order I want them to play. And although they are in the correct sequence in Windows -- whether sorted alphabetically, by title, by name or by the assigned track number -- they never export that way.

 

As I mentioned, your issue is one of tagging.
You can lead a horse to water ....

The problems you're encountering are solely down to the tagging.
The order in which you drag things across from one place to another is of no consequence whatsoever.
You can drag complete libraries around willy nilly, and they'll always perform in a reliable and predictable fashion if the metadata tagging is up to snuff.

 

It’s all about the detail within the metadata, which is something that I took a while to understand.

It might be worth looking at the metadata on some albums that play in the right order and then compare this with the metadata that you’ve created.

 

The OP has already pinpointed the cause of at least one of their problems with this ...

Put something in that field and see what happens.

It appears to me that the OP has partially tagged the files.
There's no intelligence involved with playback - there's simple logic, but no intelligence.
If a field is missing there is no association made, so files that are associated are played in whatever logical form the tags point towards.

 

Ditto on the above. The program I use (TagScanner) has a "track" field that determines playing order. As I understand it, the Filenumber just helps the computer manage the files, not the player. I retag all the time when making custom albums and playlists. When I forget this, the tracks play in the order assigned in the "track" field, not the filename. And if I do not assign the same album title (another field) to all the tracks in the newly created custom album, my Sonos just indexes the tracks according to the albums they came from, so no custom album until I go back and fix it.

 

Makes sense. I added album titles for the tracks I wanted grouped together. That grouped them together in the player but still in no particular order despite numerically ordered file names and titles and track numbers.

One thing that seems to have fixed the problem: Naming the files with a three-digit prefix (003-Woodstock) instead of a two-digit prefix (03-Woodstock). Not sure why that worked since I don’t have more than 40 tracks in the player, but for now at least it seems to resolved the issue.

 

The filenames are of no relevance. Any numbers are read as part of the filename, and numerical value is ignored.
The metadata is the only thing that gets read properly. Number your tracks in metadata.

 

The tutorials I've seen indicate that you are editing the metadata when you right-click on the file and select "properties" and then go into the "details" tab and type in a title, year, album, album artist, contributing artist, track number, etc. You're saying that's not the case?

 

Use a tagging program like mp3tag, easytag etc.
Like SeeDeeFirth said there is no other cause here than incorrect tagging. Filenames are irrelevant.
At least populate the track number, track title, artist, album, year and genre tags. If the album has multiple artists populate the album artist tag with a relevant value like Various Artists.

 

Use a metadata editing program. Anything else is futzing about.
I use Mp3Tag

 

I do have Mp3 Tag installed but of course all of the metadata fields that you mention are already filled out because I previously filled them out myself using the right-click method -- so when I first open a file in the MP3 Tag program it displays the track numbers, track titles, artists, etc., that I want attached to each file.

But maybe the issue isn't the metadata itself. Perhaps my players will do a better job of recognizing the metadata once I open the files and then save them through MP3 Tag. I'll try that.

Thanks for all the tips!

 

Keep us posted

 

What others are telling you here about proper tagging is the key and should solve your problem.

I use xrecode II to assign the following information to each album that I rip:

E | Track: 01
E | Title: Brown Sugar
A | Artist: The Rolling Stones
A | Album: Sticky Fingers (Germany)
A | Album Artist: Rolling Stones, The
A | Year: 1971
A | Genre: Rock
A | Comment: Miscellaneous pressing information

E | Track: 02
E | Title: Sway
A | Artist: The Rolling Stones
A | Album: Sticky Fingers (Germany)
A | Album Artist: Rolling Stones, The
A | Year: 1971
A | Genre: Rock
A | Comment: Miscellaneous pressing information

The two fields labeled "E" are to show you this varies for each track, the fields labeled "A" are for every track associated with the album.

I have been tagging this way for years and have had NO issues playing any album in the correct order regardless of which device I am using (iPod, FiiO, JRiver, Cambridge CXN, Bluesound Node 2i).

 

Putting 'The" after "Rolling Stones", don't think I ever saw that on one of their album covers.

If you want Rolling Stones show under R many modern players have an option to ignore such articles like 'A' & 'The' when sorting, there's no need to futz with names.