I’m hoping there’s an easy fix for this, and if anyone will know then it’s STW!

Hard drive in the new car is an absolute dick. I’ve imported some tunes into it, and rather than playing albums in the album order, it plays them alphabetically. I can’t find a setting to play them properly, and apparently it’s a known problem where the solution is to rename every track on every album, preceding the song name with 01, 02, and so on.

Is there an easy way to do this, or do I have to sit for hours right clicking on filenames?

is it a BMW by any chance? I had the same issue. you need to select the album by name, not via the artist

e.e. select artists -> green day -> dookie, tracks play in alphabetical order.

select albums -> dookie, tracks play in album order.

crap, innit? TBH though I just have mine on random so almost anything can come up next

Or, you can use a tool like MP3Tag

https://www.mp3tag.de/en/

For batch file renaming of any file type I use PowerRename which is in the Windows PowerToys App available for free.

For music files db poweramp may have something useful

If you are using a mac select a bunch and right click, you get a few options. Still have to do it once for each album though.

Spotify sub?

ask gpt to write a script for you

+1 MP3tag for music files

I use a programme called renamer for other files where I need to batch rename.

https://www.den4b.com/products/renamer

I’ve used A.F. tools to rename millions of files over the years….. Really powerful and free

http://www.fauland.com/download.htm

Excellent suggestions all, thank you. I’ll have a play. Although it might be a bust as well, given I’ve just done that with one album and it’s just ignored the numbers.

Spotify can GTF. I’ve got all my music on CDs, laptops, sticks, and cards. The idea of paying a monthly subscription to then burn through my phone data to listen to stuff I already own? Not happening. 

I’ve used Bulk Rename Utility for loads of files – worked very wellI’d suggest making copies of the originals first though, in case you ask it to do something daft (though you can get it to do a dummy run and show the results)

If you’ve renamed the files but it’s ignoring the change then it might be that it’s using the song titles stored within the MP3 files rather than the filenames themselves. If so, I imagine that MP3tag could edit those, but it’s been many years since I’ve used it.

The idea of paying a monthly subscription to then burn through my phone data to listen to stuff I already own? Not happening.

I mean… You can do it that way if you wish or you just hit the download button…

Spotify is waaaaaaaaaay better than a fixed media when you get your head round it being alot cheaper.

Musicbrainz Picard will re-tag and re-name files for you, available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Depends on the folder structure but shouldn’t be too difficult to write a loop that starts with naming ABBA “ABBA” as 0001, increments to 0002 and then names ABBA “Visitors” 0002 etc etc. Deal easy as a unix shell script…

Haven’t done this for years but MP3Tag was always my go to

Been a while but I used MediaMonkey which can rename mp3 files (and folders) from meta data:

https://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/WebHelp:Changing_Filenames/5.0

burn through my phone data

Is that still a thing?

I get something like 60GB of data allowance for ten quid. I don’t think I could listen to 60GB worth of streamed music outside of my own home in a month if I tried. I can’t imagine going back to messing about with moving mp3s about now, let alone physical media.