rio karma-song order messed up

[karmypolitics]

I just got a rio karma, and everything's fine except for one minor inconvienience. I put the Beastie Boy's Paul's Boutique on it. Now, it's pretty good on it because of the gapless, but when I tell it to "play all files" it will start at the middle of the album instead of the beginning. All of the files will be in order, but it'll start at the wrong place. I'm using lame 3.90.3 APS for the mp3 files, and EAC for extraction. I think that the culprit might be the lack of a tracknumber value for the files, but then they're in the correct order for the most part. I couldn't find the setting in eac to write the tracknumber, and besides, it would be a huge hassle to put tracknumber values on 200+ albums. can anyone help?

 

[Dixie Flatline]

Well... without a tracknumber, how is the poor Karma supposed to figure out what order you want it to play the songs in?

It'll probably go by the order that they happened to get loaded onto the player, which might or might not match the actual album order. Haven't used EAC much for encoding, but I believe as long as you've pointed it at LAME properly and set the "parameter passing scheme" to LAME, it should add the tracknumbers automatically.

At any rate, one of the great benefits of the Karma is that it uses metadata to organize your music. If the tracks aren't properly tagged, you're wasting that. There are any number of good MP3 taggers which should be able to help you get them sorted out. (Can't recommend any myself, since I do all my music maintenance on the Linux side, but I've heard many good things here about the Godfather and "Tag & Rename", among others.)

 

[proximal]

Make sure that the track numbers are present. In the playlist mode on the Karma, press and hold the stick to get to the track information. (You can also go to menu -> about track)There's an item in that list called "Track #". If it's blank or just has a 0 for all tracks, then they weren't tagged properly, and are probably playing in alphabetical order. In that case, you'll need to use a masstagger, such as the one in Foobar2000 to add the track numbers. It's not hard, just put them in the correct order in the foobar playlist, then use the auto track number function. In the future, make sure your tags are set up correctly under Compression Options -> ID3 tag in EAC.

I have had occasional problems with track order on the Karma, even with correct tags. However, this occurs when I select play all albums rather than play all tracks in an album.

 

[whiteSanjuro]

as previous guy said, you have to make sure track numbers are right.

all the tracks i have ripped myself (vorbis -q6 from cdex) work fine, but many other things do not. i have found the best solution is to take the troublesome tracks onto your computer and edit them with the rio software to have the right track numbers, then copy to device. if even one song is missing track number/not right, the player messes up.

also, it seems that even if all of an artists albums have track numbers, play all randomizes the songs within albums. the only way around it is playlists, which are again, easier to do on pc.

 

[karmypolitics]

yup, eac never filled in the tracknumber field. they're all 0.

however, they are playing in the correct order, they're just starting at the wrong place. How to fix this? my entire collection without tracknumbers so editing them would take a long long time

 

[remilard]

Quote:

Originally Posted by karmypolitics yup, eac never filled in the tracknumber field. they're all 0. however, they are playing in the correct order, they're just starting at the wrong place. How to fix this? my entire collection without tracknumbers so editing them would take a long long time

I also use linux but apparently for windows the Godfather will do this all for you automatically using CDDB, so a second recommendation for the Godfather from someone who has never used it.

 

[vranswer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by karmypolitics yup, eac never filled in the tracknumber field. they're all 0. however, they are playing in the correct order, they're just starting at the wrong place. How to fix this? my entire collection without tracknumbers so editing them would take a long long time

Yeah, when I ripped to WAV files for storage and encoding flexibility, ran into the same side-effect - no id3 tags. In Windows of course that means tracks will simply be alphabetized, and I guess the Karma uses upload order. When converting the WAV files in Itunes to ALAC I simply go in and manually edit the tags so the track play order is correct (and other metadata is correct). Definitely a PIA, but necessary if you want the music played right and wish to see track name, etc. on the DAP screen.

With my new Karma I just use Rio Music Manager to rip to FLAC - it does a fine job and includes all id3 tags. BTW, the Karma with its equalizer and long battery life is pretty awesome!

 

[gratner]

Quote:

Originally Posted by karmypolitics yup, eac never filled in the tracknumber field. they're all 0. however, they are playing in the correct order, they're just starting at the wrong place. How to fix this? my entire collection without tracknumbers so editing them would take a long long time

You must have your EAC settings wrong since i rip with EAC all the time and it fills in the ID3 tag info properly.

If the file names have the track number in them you can use something like MP3 Tag Studio to populate the ID3 tags track numbers properly.