Hey,

Is it just me, or do all the songs I place on the USB stick come up randomly?

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how they list when I browse through them on the unit's screen.

They are not alphabetical by any stretch of the imagination, I used to think they were just listed by when I added the song, but no. There's gotta be some pattern to it.

I have done the latest firmware update, but that didnt change this.

It seems the only way they list properly is if they are numbered, like if I load a full album onto the drive.

But I have a folder, let's say "R&B singles" and I throw whatever in there, that's when it lists randomly.

It's a pain to find a track especially when there's many in that folder. Anyone else seen this and have a solution??

So I'm the only one that has this problem?

I also felt, it is coming in Random, but I have not looked into it. Let me check some time this week and see if it is different from your unit(which I doubt).

It could be the trick for Pioneer to push the people buy expensive units, like can not Play music from SD card etc.

Actually, I have the oposite problem.. always starts on the same song and songs are listed alphabetically and I set it for random and going to the next song is not random. I want random playing... what is the diference in our units?

The 310bt reads files according to the order they are placed in any given folder originally. For example if you select files 01.mp3 through 05.mp3 then drag and drop all 5 files by grabbing file 03.mp3 the order of the files in the new folder will be 3,4,5,1,2. To have files show in the order they appear in an album you must first make tacks an option to sort by in explorer, sort by tracks,then copy files to new directory by selecting all files in album and then dragging files over using the first file in the list. If you copy a folder containing incorrectly placed files their placement will persist regardless of windows sorting preferences. In short the 310bt reads the file location from the allocation table on your drive and has no indexing system. If you have a large drive or number of files and don't wish to cut and paste files for hours on end this is a solution I have found. First make sure all my music files are not read only with command prompt (google to find out how) right clicking and changing from file properties will not work believe me. Next use Windows Media Player to write all file names to this format (## title.mp3\wma\whatever) do this by opening "tools>options" in wmp and choosing the "rip music" tab. In rip music click "file name" and make sure only "track number" and "song title" are selected.next click on the library tab and mark the "rename music file using rip settings" box. It is probably best if "retrieve additional info from the internet" is not selected. Close options and mouse over library tab at top of wmp and click on the arrow underneath it from the drop down menu choose "apply media information changes" this will rename all files in your music library so be sure your files are organized so you can find them with this naming scheme first. Then use a freeware program called FolderSort to do a batch arrangement of entire music directory. This program will change order assignment of all files in your allocation table, putting them in a suitable order for your 310bt. "I used this method on a 250 gig external drive that i copied my entire music directory to." It is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you do this to a copy of your files and not the originals. Right now I am running said 250gig drive (samsung s1 mini with 1.8 inch hd platter) with over 10,000 files and over 400 folders(500 is the limit) with files formatted this way right off my 310bt. So far all Files are seen by device and are in correct order. Hope this helps with every ones file placement.

Wow that is more work than just finding the damn song even though its in the wrong order. But thanks for the suggestion.

That all depends upon how extensive a library you want to have and whether you have albums that need to be played in a specific order, like Pink Floyd's "The Wall", an audio book, or a Broadway musical soundtrack. I have dozens of albums that fall into this category. I will admit it is a lot of work if you only plan on putting a small number of files on a flash drive but if you want a browsable copy of a large library to keep in your car it is worth the effort, but to each his own.

If you want to create a playlist folder with a few files an easier way is to just drag and drop individual music files to a folder on your jump drive in the order you want them to appear.

The previous method was only devised to avoid doing exactly that with all of the thousands of files in my library. I actually spent a few hours doing just. I didn't even make it through artists beginning with the letter A.

The problem I have is not with full albums, those seem to order themselves properly.

It's when I have a folder of just random mp3 singles is where the issues happen. They arent named 01- 02- 03- etc, they are just 'Artist - Track Name.mp3.' Logic would dictate they would order A-Z regardless of when I add them to the folder, but that just isnt happening. I add a new song, it either appends to the end of the list, or it goes somewhere in between, the systems got a mind of its own.

From what you said in the previous post, froghawk79, they are ordered based on the original folder they came from.

My files are from all types of folders and I add and remove songs all the time from my PC. I love that ability on a usb drive, rather than making a whole new CD each time.

Are you suggesting I have to put all the songs I want in a folder on my computer, called 'R&B singles' for instance, THEN copy the folder itself onto the drive?? Seems redundant every time I want to switch up the songs.

Thanks for the info on how the device lists the files. That will be helpful since I'm trying to figure out the best way to organize my files.

I hooked up a 2.5" 160GB portable drive. I had an issue powering it since the u310bt didn't put out enough miliamps to spin up the disk. I used a blackberry cellphone charger and spliced it into the miniUSB cable since it outputs about 750ma.

I have about 18,000 MP3's for ~900 artists that I'm dealing with organizing and trying to figure out the most efficient way to arrange them in the 500 folder limit.

Here's what I've done so far:

1. Used a tool called Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) to normalize file names to

2. Created ~25 top level folders by alphabet #-Z

3. Created sub folders to bunch artists into manageable chunks 50-80 files per sub folder

Issues I'm running in to

~1 minute to do a format read on the hard drive when I start the car

~the file listing issue this thread is talking about

~navigation to a particular artist/album is still a PITA

Anyone have any suggestions or experiences to improve this.

I really didn't want to buy a 120gig iPod, but that may be the best solution.

thanks

pt

Hi again, sorry Its taken me so long to respond.

Skip to end if you just want a solution and don't care about the why of the problem.

The problems with file placement are caused by a combination of the way the fat32 file system stores files, the way our stereo reads the file system and the way drag and drop works in windows. the simplest way to took at it is to say that when a file is copied to a drive the file system assigns it a number. So lets say we copy a mp3 file over called metalica-unforgiven.mp3 to an empty drive what the drive writes is actually something like this:

1-metalica-unforgiven

mp3

tag info

data

Its actually a little more complex than that but it works for this example. Next add 2 more files one at a time in this order. zzz-yyy.mp3 and aaa-bbb.mp3 what is now on the drive is

1-metalica-unforgiven

mp3

tag info

data

2-zzz-yyy

mp3

tag info

data

3-aaa-bbb

mp3

tag info

data

Our stereo uses the file system assigned number to order files so what we see on our deck will be

metalica-unforgiven.mp3

zzz-yyy.mp3

aaa.bbb.mp3

And yes that is a pita. That said if you delete metalica from your drive and then put it back you will have this

2-zzz-yyy

mp3

tag info

data

3-aaa-bbb

mp3

tag info

data

4-metalica-unforgiven

mp3

tag info

data

and will display this

zzz-yyy.mp3

aaa.bbb.mp3

metalica-unforgiven.mp3

To make this more complicated when you mass select a group of files in windows then drag them as a group to copy to your drive they do not copy from the top file in your selection to the bottom file if they did your files would be in the order they appeared in window you copied them from. Instead the first file copied is the file your pointer was over when you grabbed the group of files. It then copies like this

1 -----------------> 3 grabbed file

2------------------> 4

3 grabbed file---> 5

4------------------> 1

5 -----------------> 2

That is more than likely what is causing the most messes.

The best way to fix the weird file order issue is to copy all files in a directory to a new one but in the correct order.

the fastest most fool proof way is this.

Rename the folder your files are in to (your folder name old) create a new folder and give it the name of the original folder. Navigate into your original folder right mouse click and choose arrangement preference, next press (ctrl-a), press (ctrl-x) navigate into new folder and press (ctrl-v) the old folder should now be empty, delete it and every thing should be in the right place. since you are working only on one drive the copy paste should be almost immediate.

Last I'll address the format read wait time. I don't know if this will help or not but platter hard drives are much slower than flash memory and solid state drives you could try a large 32gb flash drive (around $60) and shrink your library a bit or look into a ssd that's bigger but they are very expensive per gig. and since i don't have one of either to test i don't know if it is drive speed that is slowing read time or if our deck just takes a long time add so many files to its library. Mine also takes about a minute but I am also running a platter hard drive.