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How to get music tracks in the right order - PCM 4

Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:24 pm
by Pete
So, I have an older Macan (pre-car play) with PCM 4.75.

I've spent ages loading the jukebox from a USB stick and came to listen to some music, only to find most of the tracks on the albums are in alphabetical order.

I checked the tags in MediaMonkey and they look fine in there's a Track Number tag and the file name starts with the track number:-

PSB.PNG

So what the Dickens am I doing wrong?

Does the track title also need to start with a number?

Re: How to get musc tracks in the right order - PCM

Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:47 pm
by goron59
Older PCM (3.x vs 4.x) orders tracks by track name alphabetic order unless you browse the file system, in which case it's in filename alphabetic order.

What we used to have to do was name the files with the track number (two digits) as the leading part of the name.

Putting that in the track name meta didn't help (although some claimed it did - I tried various tag schemas and container formats, but never got it to work).

Edit to emphasise the browse by filesystem.

Re: How to get musc tracks in the right order - PCM

Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:58 pm
by Pete
Yeah, you see in my screen cap that the file name has a number in front of it.

This is how it is on the USB that got copied to the Jukebox.

I'm not sure what you mean by "browse the file system".

The GTK app just says that it shows tracks in alphabetical order.

Re: How to get musc tracks in the right order - PCM

Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 5:53 pm
by Col Lamb
I had similar problems with my SD which was the older PCM.

I had to go through each track in each album to check every one of the data fields to ensure that within a specific Album folder att the tracks had the correct info.

Like you the file names were prefixed with two numbers corresponding to the track numbers but the Title field just had the name of the track sans numbers.

It was only after I did this with each of the 12,000 tracks I wanted to put on the Jukebox that I got it to work.

Bearing in mind that my MP3 files were of varying age, all ripped off CDs with many of them simply not having any data of significant quality embedded.

Conversely I have just finished downloading some MP3 tracks off the internet via a streaming site and I am finding that say a music track by Artist A has the data showing in MP3 Tag but the Album art displayed relates to a track by Artist B, this I find very strange.

Re: How to get musc tracks in the right order - PCM

Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 6:44 pm
by Pete
Yes, I could be suffering from the same thing. I'll go and experiment the next time it decides to stop raining.

Re: How to get musc tracks in the right order - PCM

Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 9:13 pm
by goron59
Pete wrote: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:58 pm Yeah, you see in my screen cap that the file name has a number in front of it.

This is how it is on the USB that got copied to the Jukebox.

I'm not sure what you mean by "browse the file system".

The GTK app just says that it shows tracks in alphabetical order.
You can either browse by meta data (album/artist/genre/etc) or just browse the SD card/Jukebox/USB stick file system directly. I can't remember the details - it's been well over a year since I used that version PCM.

Doing the former, the filename is irrelevant. Doing the latter, it's paramount.

Re: How to get musc tracks in the right order - PCM

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 8:14 am
by Pete
Ok, so I have this understood now.

Using the "Find Music" option in the jukebox will give you the options to find by artist/album, but tracks played from this will be in alphabetical order.

The only way to get them into track order is to modify the ID3 track name tag to put the track number at the start.

OR

Use the 'Track List' button and navigate the folder structure from there (you'll see the 'up folder' icon at the top of the screen)

Playing using this method will play the tracks in file name order. This also works though the binnacle control.

Re: How to get music tracks in the right order - PCM 4

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 10:06 am
by goron59
More or less, although setting the trackname in a tag doesn't always help.

Depends on a lot of factors, not least of which is the container format, tag set present, tag version used, consistency, use of character codings that some readers will misread for comparison purposes, but not for display purposes, etc etc.

If you find something that works for you and your circumstances, then yay!

Re: How to get music tracks in the right order - PCM 4

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 10:30 am
by Pete
My digital music store is pretty well tagged - I've used it over many years and many devices and I've not had anything like the confusion I've had with the Porsche Jukebox which seems to read Album/Artist tags, but completely ignores the track # tag. You'd kind of assume that a 2014 system would act with a modicum of sense, but I guess the PCM system was designed 10 years ago.

I'll just have to train myself to use browse instead of find.

It's all my fault for being a cheapskate and not spending another £10K on a car with CarPlay.

I did mention this to my SE and he basically rolled his eyes in agreement and suggested I used Bluetooth instead (although that seems a good way of draining my phone battery in double-quick time...).