iPod track order

[Bilge Rat]

A while back I bought an iPod Touch that I use to play audio books, and for all you know I obtain them legally.

However I found that the metadata on the files tended to be messed up or unreliable. For instance, if track numbers were missed off a few of the files then everything would end up playing in the wrong order. Since there could be over a hundred files to an audiobook it seemed to me that the simplest solution was to nuke all the metadata and just get the tracks to play in alphabetical order. By naming them 001,002,003 etc. I could be sure that they would play in the correct sequence.

Except that for some books they don't because the iPod is retarded. It seems that with some books it wants to play them in order of shortest to longest file. I can rearrange them in iTunes but once they are on the iPod they don't care and play in the order that they feel like (shuffle is off obviously - they ought to be playing from start to end).

Does anyone know how to trick the iPod into playing the tracks in the order that I want? I could manually assign track numbers but that would take ages since there are so many files. I can't use a batch meta data editor because I am too stupid to work one. Is there a simple way to con my iPod into doing the right thing?

[Nigel Tufnell]

A while back I bought an iPod Touch that I use to play audio books, and for all you know I obtain them legally.

However I found that the metadata on the files tended to be messed up or unreliable. For instance, if track numbers were missed off a few of the files then everything would end up playing in the wrong order. Since there could be over a hundred files to an audiobook it seemed to me that the simplest solution was to nuke all the metadata and just get the tracks to play in alphabetical order. By naming them 001,002,003 etc. I could be sure that they would play in the correct sequence.

Except that for some books they don't because the iPod is retarded. It seems that with some books it wants to play them in order of shortest to longest file. I can rearrange them in iTunes but once they are on the iPod they don't care and play in the order that they feel like (shuffle is off obviously - they ought to be playing from start to end).

Does anyone know how to trick the iPod into playing the tracks in the order that I want? I could manually assign track numbers but that would take ages since there are so many files. I can't use a batch meta data editor because I am too stupid to work one. Is there a simple way to con my iPod into doing the right thing?

I'm not familair with audio book files, are they basically mp3s?

For mp3s i use a simple program called mp3tag for editing track numbers, album details, coverart etc.

[Bilge Rat]

Yeah, they are just Mp3s, but obviously in an audio book the track order is more important than it is for normal music.

I have tried using tagging programs before but I have found they come with no instructions and I can never figure out how to work them.

[DifferentClass]

Wow, that sounds a pain. I never have that trouble... I wonder why that is?

[Bilge Rat]

I eventually found that in one of the mostly non-functional MP3 tagging applications I had download I could select the first track, type '1' then press return to immediately start editing the number for the second track. using the number pad I was therefore able to individually type the track numbers for all 343 tracks of one book. It took ages but it seems to have least tricked the iPod into playing them in the right order.

[Nigel Tufnell]

That mp3tag program does the business, i have tagged over 4000 mp3s for my ipod classic, keeps everything in great order.