Album tracks alphabeticised

[Ian Jackson]

I just upgraded the software on my B2 and installed the app (which works great, much better than the web UI). However, the tracks in each album, unless they were numbered, are now alphabeticised within the album, rather than their album order, the order they were loaded in. I can't seem to put it back to the loading (actual) order. Removing alphabeticise doesn't work; it works for the albums but not the tracks within. I hope this doesn't mean I have to edit each of 00s of albums to get he right order?

[Daniel Taylor]

The way some of us work around that is to prepend something like [1], [2], etc, for the release number of the album.  Track names are supposed to start with the number of the track.

[Mark Fishman]

Apparently, since some software update a year or two ago, tracks are ALWAYS shown (and played) in alphanumeric order. Since numbers have a computer-code value lower than letters, if the tracknames start with a number, they sort that way. The behavior you are seeing is "as designed".

If you rip on the B2 itself, the tracknames always start with the tracknumber. If your tracknames don't start with a number, you must have ripped the music somewhere else. If so, and the software you used put tags in the files, you could use tagging software to rename the tracks with the track numbers at the beginning. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please ignore me.

[Ian Jackson]

Most of the albums were ripped on the JB7. Looking at albums on the JB7 I see they have a track number displayed, but apparently this isn't part of the track name? The most recent albums ripped on the B2 do have numbers as part of the track name, although I don't think all do. Is there no fix for this? Otherwise means I have to check put track order on every album and edit every track name.

[Mark Fishman]

As I don't have a JB7, I can't see what it does about tracks. I'm sure that someone can explain how the JB7 keeps the tracks in the right sequence if it doesn't put the track numbers on the filenames.

Tagging software can help in putting track numbers on your files, if you are able to view your B2 on a computer over the network, using the Network Attached Storage [NAS] function of the B2's software. mp3tag, for example, can look up albums on MusicBrainz. Unfortunately, you'd have to do this for each album, one at a time, since there's no database out there that has your whole collection.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Ian,

I was facing a similar problem with my collection of 1,400 albums/ 20,000 tracks, where the tagging over the years ranged from good to appalling.  My solution was to download a tagging product called 'mp3Tag' from the web.  This is available free, with a voluntary donation option.

mp3Tag is superb, once you get to understand how its functionality works.  It took me a couple of days to get into the swing of it, and to figure out how to make its 'functions' work, but once I got there, mp3Tag was absolutely fantastic!

How it works:

Load up an album into mp3Tag.

- mp3Tag shows the existing tag data which you can edit/ update at will.

OR

- mp3Tag gives you other options such as

   Tag lookup and download the album tag data from the internet from MusicBrainz / FreeDb.

- Then mp3Tag gives you further options such as:

     Convert existing track name from the existing tag data to your desired track name format.

        The track name conversion is generated from mp3Tag functions which you can change or create to suit your requirements.

         mp3Tag enables you to move/copy data from one tag field to another automatically.

So as an example, for normal single performer albums, I wanted to create my track names in the format of:

In the Artist folder 'The Eagles'; Album folder 'Hotel California' ;track name '01 - Hotel California';  and so on so I modified an existing mp3Tag function to give me this format.

For compilation albums with multiple artists, I wanted to have the track name in the format of:

In the Artist folder 'Various Compiation Albums'; Album folder  '60 Number Ones of the Sixties - Disc 1'; Track name  '03 - Roy Orbison - Pretty Woman'; and so on, so I modified the track naming function to do this.

mp3Tag enables you to do bulk updates of fields in an album, so this makes the re-tagging much quicker than I expected.  When I began looking at re-tagging my collection, I thought that it would take me between 6 months and 1 year, doing say 5 albums per evening.  With mp3Tag, I have just completed the job in about 3 weeks!

So that was my solution to the nightmare of re-tagging.  I should say that I have no affiliation with mp3Tag other than sending a donation after the first day of using it, as I was so impressed with it.  The developer sent me a thank-you for the donation.

Regards and good luck!

Peter.

[Daniel Taylor]

Also, there is now a "New track labeling feature" - see thread of the same name at the top of the forum.

[Ian Jackson]

Thanks Daniel,

I had tried the Amazon track list previously to no effect, but it does work well if it connects. It seems the connection to Amazon is a bit flaky. Works fine for most non-classical albums. I did a couple of dozen in half an hour. Probably the way forward is this plus a bit of manual numbering.