MFT plays albums out of order?

[jinx8402]

I posted this in the sync forum, but not sure how much traction it gets. Anyways, I am having issues playing albums off a SD card. It seems as if MFT isn't indexing my songs in the right track order. When I go to browse > music > albums, it shows the tracks in the right order, yet of I tell it to play the first track, on the top it will show it as a random number in the order (15/20 rather than 1/20). When it's done playing it will go to another random track. Yes, shuffle is turned off . If I go to browse > browse folders and then go into a particular album it shows the tracks in random order (4-songname, 2-songname, 10-songname etc). I believe this is what the problem is. I ripped the CDs myself, and put the SD card into my computer to check that the tags are correct for track # and they are.

Is anyone else having a similar issue? I hope I explained this clearly, lol. It is extremely annoying because I like to play albums in order, from beginning to end, and it is impossible to do so at the moment.

Thanks!

[twintornados]

I noticed my SYNC will play my tracks in alphabetical order, not track order.

[jinx8402]

Well that's the thing, when I ripped all the tracks, I had it put the track number first to combat that problem. Seems that didn't work. I'm uploading a video now to youtube with an example.

[Morcelu]

I have yet to figure out how to get MFT to play albums in track order, and I'm not going to take the time to update the tags on the 3,000 or so songs i have on my USB drive. Hopefully Ford will address this in a future update. Until then I guess I'll be listening to the songs on an album in alphabetical order!

[jinx8402]

OK, so at least it seems I'm not the only one LOL. It just sucks because I enjoy listening to albums from start to finish, especially when there are albums that are made to be listened like that.

 

After looking at my video, I noticed that it does indeed order by name of the song title in the MP3 tag. It doesn't order by the name of the file or by track # in the MP3 tag. What engineer when coding the music player thought that was the way to go?

Edited February 22, 2013 by jinx8402

[captinkirk]

I have had nothing but issues with MFT in my explorer. The system is very buggy and often doesnt work right. It should work via track number. I dont know what kind of programmers ford hired, but they are not a very bright bunch of group. I really wish ford would get the software right.

[JSKershaw]

I found this thread that may work. It looks like the way these people numbered the tracks using metadata.

http://fordsyncforum.com/topic/1381-setting-up-the-usb-flash-drive/

 

Anyways worth a shot!

[akirby]

I dont know what kind of programmers ford hired, but they are not a very bright bunch of group.

 

Former Microsoft employees who started a company called BSQuare.

[jinx8402]

I think it's kind of sad that this has been an issue since 2011. Who in their right mind would have coded the system so that tracks played from an album be playing in alphabetical order? Other than this, I have nothing but good things to say about MFT. I will try with saving the tracks as 001, 002 etc to see if that works.

[jinx8402]

Well, I can confirm that updating the track information to use 3 digits (001, 002...010) works! I have no idea why the MFT system would recognize this and not 1,2...10, etc. I used this: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ app. You can import a folder and all it's sub directories. Once you have the files loaded, you select all, go to convert > tag - tag. This let's you select a tag you want to use as the source and destination. Then you just use this expression: $num(%track%,3). It will take the current track number and ensure that it is 3 digits, adding 0's to the beginning of the track number if needed. It will also change any track info that is setup like 1/15, 2/15 to 001 and 002.

[akirby]

I have no idea why the MFT system would recognize this and not 1,2...10, etc.

 

Because it's ASCII text, not integers.

Edited February 24, 2013 by akirby

[jinx8402]

That still doesn't make sense. Every other media player out there reads the same MP3 tags, and none of them have issues with playing tracks in the right order without using 3 digit track numbers.

[Morcelu]

What I find odd is that when I browse to an album, it displays the list of track in track order. However, when I go to play the album, it moves them to alphabetical order. I may try the 001, 002, etc. workaround if I have time.

[jinx8402]

I was seeing that as well. So it knew the order it should be in, but didn't play them in that order. Give it a shot, it worked for me. There are a ton of tools that support using expressions to update the tags, the one I posted made it extremely easy. Updated 3000 tracks in just a few minutes.

Edited February 24, 2013 by jinx8402

[jinx8402]

Ugh...still not fixed after all. It seems like when it first starts to index it will play the album in the right order, but once it's done indexing and building the voice commands it goes back to playing albums alphabetically. If i manually have it re-index it does the same thing.

[bluspikez]

That's interesting - I have about 7gb of music on a thumb drive, and I don't remember having any issues with the tracks on an album getting played out of order in my Fusion. I'll have a look when I get home today to see how I have the metadata set up on my files and will let you know what I find.

[jinx8402]

I wonder if it's the difference of using and SD card vs USB? In the meantime, I have updated the track title to be track number + title. Kinda looks ugly when viewing the name of the songs, and eliminates me being able to speak the name of track I want to listen to, but I'd rather be able to play albums in order. I sent a message to Rebecca @ Ford on facebook, who is sync support and she said she will forward it to the proper people. Not sure how much good that will do, since this has been an issue since at least 2011. LOL.

[akirby]

I can't help with this one. I don't think I've ever listened to an entire album at one time, much less in order.

[bluspikez]

So I checked in my car, and it does play the songs in track order when pulling from my USB stick. This is both if I let the song finish and MFT pulls up the next song, or if I skip to the next track myself. Metadata/organization details:

• Each artist has their own folder. In that folder, there's a separate folder for each album. Inside that folder is all the tracks and album art for the album (pretty standard).
• All of my tracks have their track name metadata set to the name of the song only. Artist, album title, track number, etc are all filled in accordingly.
• All tracks are named with some variation of "[tracknumber][separator][tracktitle].[mp3/wma/etc]".
• Some have dashes for separators, some are spaces. tracknumber in the above is not consistent between albums; some are 1, others 01, others 001, but within the same album it's consistent.

I didn't have a chance to try any music off of an SD card, but if you're interested I can throw some of the same albums I use off of USB onto an SD card and see if I get the behavior that you do.

[jinx8402]

Cool thanks. I'm going to go test it a usb of mine to see if it works for me that way.

[Camride]

Mine does not play in order either. I am also a "listens to entire albums" guy and it frustrates me. I basically rarely use the 32GB USB drive and mostly stream music from my phone as I can play it properly that way.

 

I'm still amazed at how Ford could release MFT with as many issues as it has (mostly the slowness). And hearing that it has gotten significantly better than a few years ago really baffles my mind.

[bluspikez]

What version of MFT are you guys on? I'm on v3.5.1.

 

I read elsewhere that some people have had success toggling shuffle from OFF -> ON -> OFF. I've also read that some people had success with disabling Gracenote. Both are easy enough to be worth a shot if you're still having issues.

Edited March 1, 2013 by bluspikez

[akirby]

I'm still amazed at how Ford could release MFT with as many issues as it has (mostly the slowness). And hearing that it has gotten significantly better than a few years ago really baffles my mind.

 

They didn't really have a choice. They had no backup plan when the original developers totally screwed it up. It was a lose/lose worse situation.

[Mike Reese]

I'm late to this discussion, but I came up with my own solution - I had a lot of 'recorded' (actually downloaded) music files through the Radio Sure and Screamer Radio applications; they will allow you to tune into Internet stations and 'record' programs - the only fault being that the files don't cut cleanly at the end of the music play, but fade into the next file played. So if you move the files around, it sounds even weirder, so I wanted to keep the files in date/time order. I tried the 'number the file' prefix, that didn't work. SO, I checked with an MP3 editor to make sure that I had the tag info correct, and then I renumbered the files in order, taking the filename away and replacing it with the number. Now the files play in date/time order. However, if you do this, you HAVE to make sure the MP3 tag info is correct - 'cause if you don't know the music piece, it may be difficult to find out what it is later. One of the stations I listen to, SomaFm.com, has a program named Secret Agent, where they play a variety of pieces, interspersed with movie/tv clips and such. Move those files out of sequence, and you have a mess...