Hello once again guys,
So after updating my new Red N3 to FW 2.1, and playing a few albums on it, I have noticed that track orders for albums with 2 disc are completely messed up (when I browse by album after scanning my media library).
I use foobar to name my music files and if an album has two disc I will name it like so:
1.01 AAAAA
1.02 BBBBB
.......
2.01 CCCCC
2.02 DDDDD
.......
Where 1 is the disc number and .01 is the track number from that disc.
Besides that, how does the N3 sort its music? Alphabetically? When I am trying to browse my music folders in TF Card mode,
the order would be alphabetical, but then sometimes between artist with english names, my chinese or japanese artist would pop-out even though I use Chinese and Japanese Characters
Is anyone else having this issue?
Thank-you
EDIT: Added "(when I browse by album after scanning my media library)"
The reason of track orders out of sequence when browsing through albums with multiple discs is because N3 does not support discnumber as a sorting/indexing metadata item..
This is a compromise we make after lengthy discussion. The objective is to maintain a smooth operation across all routine operation, folder operation is normally straight forward, but the Music Library operation is a lot more demanding, that’s why we need to be very careful in handling read/write frequency, Library size (in terms of number of entries) and index complexity of Music Library.
For this reason, we have to set a reasonable upper limit to every feature. For example, N3 can only handle playlist up to 1000 titles, and we have also encountered the Library size issue earlier on. To response to user request in this forum, Cayin has increased file limit of Music Library from 12,000 titles to 20,000 titles (firmware v2.0), but we have explained that:
this will increase the processing loading and will take up more internal memory, the system resource is indeed a bit tight with N3, we have to be very calculative in order to offer this level of digital audio capability and sound quality at the entry level budget.
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/cay...oax-out-for-150.833932/page-146#post-13519872
On the other hand, adding new index field will definitely allow more flexibility to user control, but the sorting and scanning task will drain more processing power and eat up more internal memory. The situation is actually very similar to the file limit issue. If supporting discnumber in Music Library is an absolutely necessary feature, we can do it, just like what we did to the Music Library limit. Right now we have deployed most of our processing power to digital audio processing, that’s why N3 offers amazing digital audio capability (32/384, DSD256, SACD-ISO etc) at an entry level price, so if we trim down the digital audio processing slightly, maybe we can squeeze out more processing power to handle the extra index field like discnumber. We make the compromise decision during product development, but we’ll consider suggestions form user community seriously.
Before we plunge into the hot debate of to be or not to be, let me offer some quick solution.
When you extract your CD into FLAC (or whatever format that support metadata), you can renumber the tracks by embedding the disc number into the track number. For example, when you handle a single disc album, the track number should be 01, 02, 03, …. 10, 11, 12 etc. When you are dealing with a two-disc album, Disc 1 tracks should be numbered as 101, 102, 103, …110, 111, 112 etc, and disc 2 tracks should be numbered as 201, 202, 203, …210, 211, 212 etc. This will be a bit tedious if we need to renumber our complete music library again, but if you were to do this while you extract your FLAC, this should be straight forward.
@fourrobert13 has proposed similar solution earlier on, and I have been doing this since I use my first DAP (yes, wrong track sorting in album view), works very well so far.
If you have a big Music Library and don’t want to fiddler with the track number, I can understand that. N3 can handle Album name and track number correct in the ID3 metadata, so the quickest way to get out of the sorting error is to edit the album name directly to include Disc01 and Disc02. The system will treat the disc1 and disc2 as two separate albums in one folder, the track numbers will not meze up again.
I hope these two solutions will resolve the problem “temporary”. As
@fourrobert13 has stated that he has yet to find a DAP that does it correctly. I assume other DAP manufacturers have faced similar processing bottleneck like Cayin.
