I need some help please.
I can rip a CD to my music collection on my laptop and everything is in the correct running order - thus.................



However, when I then copy this onto a memory stick I use in the car, all the tracks appear in alphabetical order and I just don't know how this can be altered - thus............



It's entirely unsatisfactory as I have many albums where the tracks blend into the next, and it's maybe me being anal but if the tracks don't follow in the order they should it always catches me out. Anyone know of a way round this please?

Easy. Trash the lot of it! 

Notice that when you're viewing the tracks on your laptop from a "music" subfolder Windows sorts by the track number tag (metadata added to the file) and shows different information to what it shows when you copy the tracks to a standard folder on your memory stick.

When I rip a CD I make sure the track names are named with the track number at the start.You can usually set your preferences for the file name as part of the ripping process.   I also prefix the album folder name with the year.




If necessary you can use separate software to rename the files and/or re-set the tags on music tracks.  I use TagScanner for that. WMA and MP3 both support metadata tags.

When my (BMW) imports the CD tracks (or off a data stick) it sorts them by artist, genre, album, etc.
I guess that data must be on the data stick by the time it gets to the car..., but off the CD it just "knows".

Probably best not to worry about these things

Bob 

I'm just looking at his playlist. 

@Bob G   All that information is stored as tags within each mp3 file.  It relies on the CD rip process successfully finding and using detailed information about the CD from a music database out there on the internet (eg. GraceNote), which in turn relies on someone having uploaded accurate info to that database in the first place.  CDs don't store this information, I believe the CD is identified based on a hash calculation of the track lengths etc. so sometimes it finds more than one possible match from which you select the correct one.

You can view and edit the tags in the file properties

A quick and dirty measure is just to rename the tracks, adding "01 -", "02 - ", etc. to the beginning of each filename.

Whoops, I see ntpntpntp has already made the same suggestion.

Too be honest, looking at the play list I reckon he's got bigger problems!

The correct answer is "buy a car with an audio system that can read & recognise the file metadata, and arrange them in the right order" (the Phillips unit in my Vauxhall does)

The simpler, cheaper answer if your car doesn't, as like ntp says, to prefix the title with the track number...

(P.S. who else was surprised to hear Mick has advanced from an 8-track... )

Rip the tracks again. FreeRIP will number them for you if you ask it nicely!