Media Monkey and many other programs can sync an iPod. They all have had to reverse engineer how to do it and future firmware updates to an iPod can break that support. Support for the Touch and iPhone is different though. Media Monkey has managed to figure out how to sync a Touch or iPhone. They do it by automating iTunes. They send commands to iTunes and iTunes does the sync. It’s a fragile setup. A future change in iTunes could easily break that support.
Apple needs to make an open API so that 3rd party programs can sync music. But they’re never gonna do it. They want everyone to use iTunes even though iTunes sucks for managing large diverse music collections.
Zune is worse, and their software is immensly worse, but i like my zune far better than an ipod… i’ve seen too many broken/dead (battery) ipods because apple messed up
I got a Honda Fit a few weeks ago to replace my Saturn VUE that was totaled earlier this year, and it came with a nifty USB input. I’ve noticed that the tracks don’t seem to play in order for every album even though the filenames are numbered. I haven’t really messed around with it to figure out why, but it is quite annoying when I want to hear an album in order. I think it’s not gapless too. Dang engineers have no aesthetic sense.
Some of them play in the sequence that the files are written to the USB drive.
(kids who can only read a few words at a time can stop here)
Keep in mind that the USB drive is formatted like a hard drive – there is a file system on it (FAT16 or FAT32). Internally, in any file system, there are tables that store the directory information. There is one table entry for each file or directory within a directory. There are further entries that say where each chunk of the file is physically located.
The FAT file system is a simple file system, but even so, it was designed to be read by a computer running an operating system. But here we have car radios instead. How much computery sophistication did they build into the radio? I think not much. Just enough.
As such, some radios are documented to play the files in “the order that they are written.” This really means the order that the files appear in the directory tables. Say you delete the second file in a directory. That entry in the directory table is then marked as empty. If you copy another file into that directory, that second entry in the table is re-used. The player would probably play this new file as the second song even though alphabetically, the song should come last.
My player does sort everything alphabetically. It must have enough memory and processing power to do that. Others don’t. Some get even fancier and they read the metadata from each song file and build a database by genre, artist, and album. This is what any portable MP3 player would do. But I’ve read complaints that that process takes five minutes – every time you drive the car!
So, players vary in sophistication regarding how they access the file system. If you want to play everything alphabetically, you need to start with a freshly-formatted file system – then copy the files onto the USB drive alphabetically (which Windows does NOT do). If you format your USB drive, select FAT32. Make sure you do a quick-format so you don’t needlessly wear out the drive. There is also a question of compatibility – will a USB drive formatted by Windows work in a car radio? Does “anyone” know? I think formatting before copying is the right way to go, but don’t rush into it. It might end up not working at all.
I’ve never had an mp3 player that does that, although it did cross my mind. It would be pretty ridiculous that I can spend thousands on a car and they can’t even put a proper probably sub $10 mp3 player chip in it.
There are utilities that will sort a directory of files and write them to the directory in sorted order. Here’s a listing of a few: Sort MP3 Files On MP3 Player
I remember the old Norton program. PC Tools also had a way of sorting a directory like that.
I use only (legally, i.e. my own) copied CDs in my car, also because of the risk of theft. In the cassette tape era I lost some irreplaceable music to theft, and some to what was called “tape salad”. Everybody happy now, except the thieves maybe.
Clever. And funny. But not correct. Your head is not playing the MP3s. My car is. It’s a sit-inside MP3 player. Your head, while it is capable of many great feats, is not.
“Basically, a ‘zero’ means the brain cell is inactive, while a ‘one’ means the brain cell fired a pulse. So, for each cell, my recordings look like 00100000000000000000010000000100000000010000000000 00000001001000000000001000000000001000…etc. and I have hundreds of cells recorded at once.”
