Music Player: masking directories and sorting track order?

[ianr]

Wotcher all, I'm trying to use the in-built Media app but am finding it rather poor for two main reasons.

One is that it scans my entire SD card for music to play, which I really don't want it to do as it finds my podcasts downloaded by acast and the tags in those MP3 files are all over the place so make a mess of the Music Player lists. I've tried adding a .nomedia file to the podcast directory as suggested on another site but HTC's app doesn't pay any attention to that.

The second issue is that despite my files having MP3 track number tags, the Music Player app usually ignores those and sorts the tracks into alphabetical order which just doesn't work for a lot of my albums. It's not consistent with sorting, e.g. if I pick an album off the Albums list the tracks are in order and play in order in the track list for that album so I can hit the first track and it plays in order, but if I go back up to the albums screen and add the whole album to a playlist, sometimes it puts the tracks in order, other times it re-orders them in alphabetical order of track name. If I go to a particular artist or composer and select an album, it normally sorts the tracks by alphabetical order this time instead of tagged track order.. This is all with the same album too so it's not that some albums have track number ID3 tags and others don't.

I copy the MP3s across the USB link, I'm not using HTC Sync as it won't run on my desktop computer (a linux box), so I don't know if HTC Sync can help out here or not.

 

[hooy]

I think I figured out why this is happening. (Found this thread via Google searching for the same problem). Android is looking at ID3v2 tags. If you only have v1 tags it won't recognize the track order right. There are plenty of free desktop based apps for Windows/Mac/Linux that you can use to relatively quickly sync the different tags or completely re-tag your music to get it to work right.

This is what I discovered on HTC Incredible (Android 2.1) and seems to be consistent across various music apps.

 

[lekky]

Heard on the grapevine if you put your music on the media/Music folder the default music app will only grab mp3's from there, not sure if this is true tho.

Anyway can I suggest using mixzing instead. It lets you choose your top level music folder so you only get mp3's from there.

 

[m1.carson]

Hi,

Had the same problem putting an opera on, came out in alphabetical order , installed MIXZING LIGHT music player and it put it all back in the correct sequence by itself, have now purchased the upgrade off the market, worth every penny... er... cent of $6-99 USD .

Max.

 

[j-money]

To do this for free what would i have to do? save the relevant tags while the music is on my pc. then recopy it to the device ? i downloaded mp3tag but not quite sure what to check and uncheck for different tags

 

[hooy]

First of all, if all your music is in SD:/media/Music the default media player will look there for music files. Put other sound files in SD:/media/sounds/alarms (or notifications or ringtones).

As far as tagging goes, just do whatever your program has for an option to copy the ID3v1 tags to ID3v2. Album art is also saved as a part of the ID3v2 tag, so there's probably an option for including the album art there. I don't know exactly how every tagging program works, so just mess with your tagging program until you find how to do that. Then re-copy the music to your device.

 

[peterc10]

The alphabetic order problem was the reason why I ditched the standard Music Player app ages ago and went over to MixZing