[Signal2Noise]

Anyone here listen to personal music from a USB thumb drive inside their vehicle? My particular vehicle's system reads MP3 files by the file creation date, not alphanumerically. So track order by album is not in the correct sequence, most often playback is reverse order due to how the track files were copied to USB. This is fine if I just play shuffle/random but there's certain albums I'd prefer listening to in original track order, especially live recordings.

So now I am on the hunt for a software utility that can either copy the files to the thumb drive in correct order and time stamp accordingly or something that can change the time stamps in situ. The alternative is to copy each track individually starting with last album track (I.e #10 first and up to #1) which would require a lot of time to do.

Googling has yielded some possibilities which I haven't tried yet, e.g. DataSort, while seemingly cumbersome. Curious if anybody here has experienced this issue with their vehicle's audio system operation and found a solution.

I could use a dap and play USB connected or Bluetooth but USB provides convenience in using the vehicle stereo head unit touch control screen instead of looking at a secondary and smaller dap display.

Vehicle: 2014 Pathfinder/Bose Nav/Audio

TIA

 

[jnorris]

Early on I realized that I would have to number both the the file name and the title tag if I wanted songs to play in order. Additionally, you need to use leading zeros for albums with 10 or more tracks. I use mp3tag to do this.

 

[squishware]

I use an Alpine single DIN. I have about 140 folders on a flash drive. Each folder is an album. Been doing it this way for 10 years. It allows you to switch a track or an entire album.