21 August 2015
How I finally got my car's radio to play mp3 files in the correct order.
When I bought a new Scion IQ, I was impressed with the full featured factory radio made by Pioneer that it came with. Except, I found that sometimes it wouldn’t sort the MP3’s in a folder correctly, and my files are both id3 tagged and prefixed with the track number with leading 0. I reported the bug to Toyota and had the dealer look at it. The dealer said that there was nothing wrong, that they even went so far as to play the stick on a computer (running Windows) and the files played in the same incorrect order. Their conclusion was that my files must be defective.
There is nothing wrong with my files. When you copy files to a Fat32 device on Windows, it will usually physically order the directory entries by alphanumeric sort. Even if it works with Windows Media Player, depending on the File System to write the files in the order the listener wants them played is the laziest possible solution.
I recently discovered a utility that fixes this, its in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories so its easy to install. fatsort. You’ll need root privileges. Insert your thumb drive, use mount (if it automounted) to find the device it is on, then unmount the device, or try fdisk -l. fatsort -c %device, in seconds everything on your thumb drive has been sorted alphanumerically and your car or other mp3 player will play them in that order. Although there is an option to sort while mounted I had better results with the device unmounted.
Meet Tyrion, my half-car.