Using USB thumbdrive for playlists without playing in alphabetical order

[Calson]

My music is in a folder on the root of the NAS and inside are folders by artist and album and #song. So the first character is a number but this is ignored by Sync with a USB plugged in.

I prefer to have playlists on multiple USB drives as I did with my Chevy vehicles but now need to use the iphone with its more than 1200 songs.

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[Rineland]

I had kind of figured playlists were out when I put my USB drive in the truck but this thread got me thinking I would like to have them again. It’s a chore sometimes getting the right song (to be expected with 10,849 songs). Most of the time I just play all and put it on shuffle. I wonder if you could copy the songs you want in a playlist and drop them into a folder with the name of the playlist. Or have an “Artist” folder named playlist and have sub-folders with the names of the different playlists. Maybe the voice command “play playlist …” would treat it like an artist named playlist and album with the playlist name. Question, if it works, becomes would it play it in alphabetical order or would it pull the track number from the meta data and get confused and play in a quasi-alphabetical-numerical order (thinking of there’s multiple tracks that are #3, it would probably play them in alphabetical order). It might be a somewhat easy thing to test.

 

[Calson]

Sync at this point in time will play songs in alphabetical order regardless of how the files are placed on the thumbdrive. The only option is to use a mp3 player or smartphone and use Sync only as a way to use the truck's amplifier and speakers.

Very glad I held onto my Sony mp3 player as now with my Ford F-150 it is going to be my primary way to manage music in the truck.

 

[Los150]

I too have a NAS and roughly over 17k tracks/files. I have a 128G thumb drive with about 5,300 tracks in the truck and still have lots to organize and sort through in my free time. I listen to pretty much anything from A-Z if it has a good beat or fun lyrics.

I pay attn to the filenames and I know it'll play them in alphabetical order. No files on my root folder. In there is "Assorted" then specific genres of music. Under those genre folders, is both album folders and individual files for when I just want certain songs. Again, everything plays in order so for the albums, I make sure they're prefixed w/numbers
01 - Blah Blah
02 - Blah Blah
03 - Blah Blah

No issues. I use MP3Tag to manage the data in the FLAC & MP3 files. Voice commands work about 95% of the time but I typically just play full albums or the bunch of assorted tracks in each genre.

 

[fog53]

I gave up trying to figure out how ro play my music in the order I would like and have surrendered to the random playlist. But one problem still haunts me, I can't us e the full sorting list because use I get an errotr that some functions aren't available while it is "Indexing" What dahell is indexin=xing and why /how do I get it completed. I drove a four hour leg yesterday and it never completed "indexing".

 

[Calson]

My guess is that the program has encountered a problem accessing the files and the default error message used by the programmer is "indexing". It will never finish as the program has hit a dead end in its routine.

Ford punted with its audio player to Apple and Apple wants to force people to use its Siri application. A separate MP3 player connected via a USB cable is the only reliable solution I have found with my Ford. It has the newest car stereo but also the least capable of any vehicle I have owned in the past 20 years. There are trade-offs with any truck and the audio player is a relatively minor PITA for me.

 

[Chooosieee]

Thanks for the suggestions. I already have hundreds of tracks on my NAS and am not about to re-rip my CD's. It also would not allow for adding new tracks.

Evidently I will need to create new USB drives with the individual artist's folders copied over and then deleting one by one the songs I do not want on the drive. Microsoft bites yet again but when you have a monopoly (thanks to your parents connections and wealth) there is no need to be user oriented. Small wonder that the ipod, smartphone, and music streaming originated with Steve Jobs.
He was unique in having both the vision and the expertise to create products providing a high end user experience.

Totally get where you’re coming from — managing music on a NAS and dealing with USB transfers can be a real chore, especially when there’s no smart way to filter what you want. If you’re ever looking to streamline that process or sync specific playlists across devices without all the manual work, Tracklistpro could help save you a lot of time.

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