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So, your tracks are in numerical order? (assuming artist/album is the same for the whole album). If they're not playing in order, I assume the DMPx20 is only reading the first ?? characters of the file name to decide the order, the way some of the early CD MP3 players worked? (I had some cheap thing that only read the first 20 characters of the file name)

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yes my files are all tagged correctly, which since they are all in "Artist - Album - Track# - Title" Puts the FILENAME in alphanumerical order.

The player does not use the Filename string for any indexing.

It uses an *ID3 TAG DATABASE*

It reads the Artist, Album, Title, and Genre from the ID3 tag in each file and creates an index. The problem is that it doesn't read the "Track #" into any index, so it can't determine the play order that an album should play in.

Oh, that's insanely stupid of them.
Surely they will have to revise the software to fix something that stupid?!? But I'd return it and wait for the fix before re-buying, instead of taking the chance that they will or won't fix it.

Stupid of Gateway, but even Creative Labs isn't free of blame. Their Jukeboxes can't differentiate tracks by track number. If you've got two (usually classical) tracks with exactly the same information except for the track number, one of them won't get copied over. Sometimes pop CD's with the oh-so-hip secret track at the end will pad it with many empty tracks; this will fail Creative's definition of a unique track as well. When you transfer such a disc, the secret track pops up immediately after the official "last" track!

If I find this behavior annoying, I am willing to guess I would have returned the DMP-X20 immediately! But who knows, maybe a firmware upgrade may fix it. Good luck!

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Is that a bad thing? Do you want to sit through 60 tracks of silence to get to that secret tidbit?

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Ah well, call me anal. I want my MP3 rips to sound just like the original albums, which presumably have been worked over with love and care to sound just like the artist desired. Of course, it's not like I have a gapless player in the first place ....

In any event, I only noticed the secret track thing on a purely technical basis. Missing entire classical tracks is butt-screwingly annoying and what originally put me on the scent of Creative's stupid-ass design choices. Pardon my frustration. I will be buying an iPod soon, which doesn't (yet) have title scrolling but does (thankfully) take into account the track number.

Review at PCMAG

Battery life is about 9 hours 10 minutes, comparable with the 9 hours an equivalent iPod lasts

9 Hours for the IPOD? What world are they living in? I wish I got that and that's with a 2nd Gen version.