micky wrote:
> In rec.autos.tech, on Wed, 15 May 2019 15:50:27 -0400, Big Al
> > wrote:
>
>> On 5/15/19 3:28 PM, micky wrote:
>>> Windows relevance at the end.
>>>
>>> Last year I posted about the 3 cars I ended up having in one 2 month
>>> rental period, and about the flash drive I had made that had about 800
>>> songs on it from the 50's and early 60's, that I recorded off of
>>> 181.FM-oldies, one of several internet radio station from the same
>>> company, with a little advertising. Easy to play and record using
>>> RadioMaximus, a free program. (the paid version will do scheduled
>>> recording, but I just let it run for 2 days.)
>>>
>>> And it will record each song separately but the first two seconds of
>>> each song are attached to the previous song, and the only way to hear it
>>> correctly is to play the songs in the order they were recorded.**
>>>
>>> And I said how the Nissan Micra and the Hyudai i10 insisted on playing
>>> them in order alphabetically by file name. So all the Brenda Lee songs
>>> played in a row, etc. But then I got a Honda something or other and it
>>> worked fine. (At home I use a cigarrette lighter player FM-transmitter
>>> and that works fine too.)
>>>
>>> So this year I started with a Mazda 2 and iirc it worked fine, but the
>>> key was stolen and the next car is a 2019 Honda Jazz (Fit) and it has 4
>>> options for play order. BUT NONE are the order in which the songs
>>> reside on the flashdrive. It's either random, or in order by file name,
>>> or repeating the same song over and over, or one other choice, so last
>>> year the Honda worked fine but this year it doesn't work right anymore.
>>>
>>> It's sort of like the fact that Windows file managers will sort on any
>>> field hat has a column header, but they will not display files in the
>>> order in which they appear on the HDD or the flash drive. For that you
>>> need DOS and the option iirc dir /u for unsorted.
>>>
>>>
>>> **In fact, since in File Managers I display most files with the newest
>>> at the top, it would copy them that way to the flash drive. I had to
>>> reorder them with the oldest at the top to copy them in the order
>>> recorded so they might play in the order recorded.
>>>
>> Can you use some bulk rename utility to number then so the filenames
>> have a 3 digit # in front of the real file name? Bulk Rename Utility
>> is one that comes to mind.
>
> That would work. Is there any problem renaming every file on a flash
> drive? Something about not being able to write to the drive too many
> times?
>
> Bigger question: Is it going to read the files in the order they are on
> the drive? I think the answer must be yes.
>
> Not like the car does and use alphabetical or some other order.
>
> ( BTW, the car displays the song number, and it will say first #651 for
> example, then 652 next, then 653, even though they're by the same artist
> and I know they were not recorded one after the other. )
>
> I installed program, dl'd the manual but the flash drive is in the car
> so I'll actually do this later. Thanks. Great idea.
>
>> I do that a lot, as I like my mp3's I lull myself to bed with to be in a
>> certain order too.
>
> In the car I don't want the songs to lull me to sleep, but whatever
> works for you.

You might want to do Properties on the files and see if they have
metadata recorded in them. Or look at the filenames for hints
as to what additional information might be present they could
use for ordering purposes.

If this was my collection, I'd probably edit it in Audacity and
break it into proper sections. But that would be a lot of work.
So each section can play independently (shuffled).

A recording coming over the air shouldn't have metadata (i.e. if
you were recording audio as samples). But the recording program
could be using some method to stamp them after reception (look
them up on an InternetDB somehow and stamp them).

This is a random MP3 I found on my disk drive, selected because
the way it was acquired made it likely to have metadata. This
didn't come in "hot" via streaming or anything. The file was
downloaded from the station site that would normally be
streaming it from their web page. You can see there is "stuff"
inside this file, that a digital player might latch onto for
genre or something. In this case the genre is "podcast".

https://i.postimg.cc/fW9mk69n/mp3-visible-metadata.gif

And I'm only recommending looking for that, if it isn't
apparent what field it is sorting on.

Since the metadata in that file is inside the file, it
will survive transfer to a USB stick and FAT32 and so on.

Paul