Need A Music Player That Maintains The Album Track Order

[ahclem]

I've tried three highly-rated Music Player Apps on my Acer A500. Now I'm using "Doubletwist". The problem I'm finding is the track order is wrong, which is especially bad with an album where the tracks are designed to be played in a certain sequence (plenty of them). They aren't numerical, and not alphabetical. The sorting makes no sense. Yet some albums are listed correctly. It's not just happening in one App. All of my albums work great on my other dedicated (Non-Android) MP3 players -- they always play in the correct sequence.

I'm ready for a suggested App that definitely holds the track order, no funny stuff.

 

[Icebike]

This probably has to do with the naming conventions used on your music files.
Did you rip these yourself from CD?

Android relies on proper folder structure and rational naming.

It also might be doubtwist. That app is never necessary on android, and just confuses the issue. Time to shed your Apple ways ;-)

Sign up for Google Music and install the Google Music uploader on your computer and point it to your music directory. All your music on your tablet an in the proper order with the proper album art and poor quality rips replaced with perfect 320k rips.

Sent from my HOX

 

[ahclem]

This probably has to do with the naming conventions used on your music files.
Did you rip these yourself from CD?

Android relies on proper folder structure and rational naming.

It also might be doubtwist. That app is never necessary on android, and just confuses the issue. Time to shed your Apple ways ;-)

Sign up for Google Music and install the Google Music uploader on your computer and point it to your music directory. All your music on your tablet an in the proper order with the proper album art and poor quality rips replaced with perfect 320k rips.

Yes these are ripped from CD. I didn't use sync or itunes, just placed them into a directory as I would with any ordinary MP3 player, and those players work fine, due to me painstakingly ripping my entire collection to work anywhere. ...Except ANDROID?!! What you talkin bout Willis?!

I'm in no way sold on Doubletwist, it's just one of the players I've tried (and it's a little too 'Apple' for my taste anyway). But another thing I will NOT do is to rip my CDs into a format that's not transportable. It plays today, it won't play tomorrow because "the license expired".

and poor quality rips replaced with perfect 320k rips

Well there goes my remaining file space. So I do need to re-rip everything again just to get the correct track order?

 

[FlutteringBy]

You might want to give Music Folder Player Free a try.....from the market:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/...RlLnpvcmlsbGFzb2Z0Lm11c2ljZm9sZGVycGxheWVyIl0.

I use this player & have some .mp3's in special folders.....when I want tracks played in a particular order I just add a 001, 002 etc at the beginning of the file name then Music Folder Player will play only that folder.....if you want, it also has an option to advance to the next folder after it has played the last track....

FlutteringBy

 

[Icebike]

Actually, almost all players rely on something in the file folder structure to clue them to the order.

Usually the rip tool names these in a way that indicates the order:
01 - song-1
02 - song 2
etc...

If your rip tool didn't do this then they might be sorted by just date and time, and its a toss up
whether any player will do its own sort on that or not.

(I found this out the hard way, when I started a rip using this high powered rip tool that would
rip 4 songs in parallel on a quad core machine. Trouble is, the rips would finish asynchronously
and have dates and time that caused them to sort out of order).

Without something in the file title, some players may just sorts them in date order, or the order
that they are listed in the directory

Most modern rip tools embed the sequence number in the meta-data of the songs.
Some modern players rely on that instead of the song title.

On windows you can see this meta data in the directory listing:
You don't mention what your computer is running, so I have no clue if you can check this.
On Windows, you can change the internal meta data sequence number by right clicking
and selecting properties.

If that track number number is not embedded, its probably going to sort by name.


You might have to re-name if the rip-tool didn't put the track numbers into the name. (or the metadata).
Maybe you can find a tool that lets you fix the metadata?

Sort your directory by Date and time, and see if the songs go into the wrong order.
If so, then this might be carried over into the tablet when you copy the files.

(if they sort to the wrong order, maybe you can just "touch" them to change their date/time
so that you can trick the player into using the right order).

 

[ahclem]

All of my MP3s are ripped with track numbers at the start of the file name (exactly like your example). Yes, that was a ton of work for a bunch of albums. The A500 for some reason doesn't sort in that order, and it's not sorting alphabetically, either. Well, some seem to be in the correct track order. While researching this, I see people mention that the songs are in the correct order in the list, but don't play in the correct order. I haven't begun to get that far in my testing, since if a lot of them are scrambled, that's kind of the bigger issue.

I started to do the Google Music Manager, and that seems to be not for me. I've also pretty much destroyed my music collection in the process (but I kind of expected that), so now I'm battling Win Media Player to give me back my album art, etc. I have to reset Win Media Player somehow and start over (I also of course wiped out all the tunes on the Android, to make way for Google Music Manager's magic). I have all my ripped albums saved on other drives, so it's not a big deal to eventually restore the music files where I like.

Anyway, my albums work out to almost 6000 tracks, and Google Music Manager needs me to upload them if I'm to access them on the A500. That's completely unacceptable. It took 15 minutes to upload just 5 tracks. At 3 minutes a song, that's 300 hours just to upload them. I can't play them til I download them onto the Android -- at least another 300 hours? No way I'm doing that, just to find out if the track order is correct (what if it isn't!). I'm working pretty hard right now getting Google Music Manager to stop doing what it's doing. If I get a wild hair, I'll do just an album or two, but the upload/download thing is for the birds. I'm pretty sure Google Music Manager is getting deleted soon.

But I will check out your suggestions for making the track order correct. Thanks! I just now looked at the sequence number in Windows, and "Kitaro: Silk Road" (one of the scrambled albums) is shown in the correct sequence in Windows. It's probably just a silly thing I've overlooked. I've also discovered that scrambled track orders are a current bug in Doubletwist, so that App is also getting removed pronto (it complicates things).

Actually, almost all players rely on something in the file folder structure to clue them to the order.

Usually the rip tool names these in a way that indicates the order:
01 - song-1
02 - song 2
etc...

If your rip tool didn't do this then they might be sorted by just date and time, and its a toss up
whether any player will do its own sort on that or not.

(I found this out the hard way, when I started a rip using this high powered rip tool that would
rip 4 songs in parallel on a quad core machine. Trouble is, the rips would finish asynchronously
and have dates and time that caused them to sort out of order).

Without something in the file title, some players may just sorts them in date order, or the order
that they are listed in the directory

Most modern rip tools embed the sequence number in the meta-data of the songs.
Some modern players rely on that instead of the song title.

On windows you can see this meta data in the directory listing:View attachment 7772
You don't mention what your computer is running, so I have no clue if you can check this.
On Windows, you can change the internal meta data sequence number by right clicking
and selecting properties.

If that track number number is not embedded, its probably going to sort by name.


You might have to re-name if the rip-tool didn't put the track numbers into the name. (or the metadata).
Maybe you can find a tool that lets you fix the metadata?

Sort your directory by Date and time, and see if the songs go into the wrong order.
If so, then this might be carried over into the tablet when you copy the files.

(if they sort to the wrong order, maybe you can just "touch" them to change their date/time
so that you can trick the player into using the right order).

 

[ahclem]

That seems good to me. I'm installing it. My dedicated MP3 player works exactly like that: each folder is an album, each track in the folder has a sequentially numbered file name so they play in the correct order. I was thinking all Android music Apps would default to that, but here we are. Actually, I'm guessing there's some setting that just isn't set up right yet. Icebike is explaining some Android file sorting schemes which I'll also try. Thanks!

[EDIT]: That player works perfectly fine! It actually shows the file name, so I can see the track number (other players hide the track number, which makes me think I'm losing my mind when the album order doesn't seem right). I also think there's a way (as suggested) to force any player to get it right, so if I can somehow use the built-in Google "Play Music" App for free, I'd prefer that. But I probably won't put much more work into convincing Android to unscramble the albums.

Also, I've been reminded that download speeds may be 10x upload speeds. 30 hours instead of 300. I doubt I'd do that, but it's an improvement.

You might want to give Music Folder Player Free a try.....from the market:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/...RlLnpvcmlsbGFzb2Z0Lm11c2ljZm9sZGVycGxheWVyIl0.

I use this player & have some .mp3's in special folders.....when I want tracks played in a particular order I just add a 001, 002 etc at the beginning of the file name then Music Folder Player will play only that folder.....if you want, it also has an option to advance to the next folder after it has played the last track....

FlutteringBy

 

[FlutteringBy]

Good to hear that Music Folder Player does what you want..........

 

[alexhaltonhills]

VLC for Android.
Music Folder Player Free is pretty good, too.