I am trying to create playlist combining several folders containing subfolders and I want to maintain the sequence. If I sort according to path the list appears OK in mp3tag but not when I play the usb stick in the car.
If I could include the name of the folder in naming the song I think everything would be OK but how could I do that?
You first of all have to find out what kind of file/folder syntax your car player accepts.
E.g. Windows based paths have the backslash \ as separator between the path segments, Linux/Android based OS have the slash /.
I think it would be easiest to have a flat folder structure without path components.
I am not quite sure, it is mercedes mbux using usb fat32. However no problem flat formatting, if the name of the folder is included in the name of the song I would have no problem
From what I'm reading, you only want to copy a couple of files to the USB stick and play them in sequence, not an M3U playlist file that references the different tracks. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
You can try using Convert → Tag - Tag for TITLE using
%_directory% - %title%
Yes but it's quite complicated. There are maybe 50 folders each containing several subfolders and each subfolder containing the tracks!
The music is already in the usb stick and this stick I use in the car, so there should be a playlist probably.
The player in the mbux of mercedes will not play the tracks continuously, when I choose a (sub)folder and it reaches the last track it will start from the beginning.
Are you sure that the player interprets playlists?
So far it looks to me as though it plays the selected folder.
Maybe you have to look for a different setting for the selection that looks at the tag data and not at the folder.
In order to interpret tag data, the tags would have to be filled.
At the moment as I wrote the player recognizes the playlist and plays the tracks according to alphabetical order of the track name!
I'm still not sure if you're using a playlist in the sense that you've created a textual M3U file, either through Mp3tag or other means that is stored on your UBS stick.
Can you please double-check the contents of your USB drive and see if there is a file with the *.m3u extension? This file could for example be opened in your audio player on your PC and should play all the files in the desired playback order.
If there is no such file — no problem! Your car audio then simply tries to read everything from the file system and creates an internal list of files on its own. From what you're describing, it uses the track title for sorting the files across all different folders.
To include the full folder path in the track title, you can try using Convert → Tag - Tag for TITLE with
$replace($cutleft(%_folderpath%,3),\,_) %title%
This will strip the drive and replace all of the folder separators by an underscore. As always, try it on a copy of your files first.
Yes there is an m3u file in the usb stick! Created with mp3tag sorting by path! However the player sorts by track name.
By the way the player when it reads from the file system is can everything as it is: folder, then subfolder, then tracks. It will star playing the subfolder I choose but at the end track it starts again from the first track of the subfolder, this is the problem.
I would like to play continuously, folder after folder, I had this feature in my previous car.
The way I see it: playing by folder limits the available tracks to the files in a folder.
If that is not the desired way, it would be another approach to check if the player also interprets tag data (filenames are not really tags).
A good way would be to fill the tag fields ALBUMARTIST, ARTIST, ALBUM, TITLE and TRACK.
If you could check how files behave with this metadata, it would be easier to adapt the data to make it play you want it.
See also this thread about problems with a car stereo:
Or this one for different sorting options in a player (not necessarily features of your player)
All the tags are filled and the player can read them, although does not display all.
The way I see it every entry in the playlist should have a reference to the path in the usb stick, is this possible?
The playlist is a plain text file - so it should be possible to edit it with any text editor.
Please check the playlist file whether it has a
Thanks, I will check.
Thank you.
It looks like the (relative) path is included - so if the player uses that playlist and it knows how to deal with the windows style path information, then it should work.
Does it?
I would also assume that you would have to open the playlist in the player and not the folder.
Like I told you it plays the playlist but not in order.
However your last remark seems to the point, actually the player sees the playlist as a folder, it does not appear in the playlists category.
Maybe I should check this better.
You could try creating a minimal playlist with just a few songs from different folders and load this in your car audio. This should make it more obvious what's actually happening.
Yes, I will do this also
