Rockbox - files read in alphabetical or FAT32 order?

[darkmenace]

Hi all

I use my Ipod with my USB capable pioneer car stereo and I want to try Rockbox on it, because I am sick to death of itunes, alternatives to itunes and syncing generally.

One issue I noticed when trying to read albums/songs off a USB stick, was that the car stereo would read files not in alphabetical order, but in the order they were listed in the file allocation table (fat32), so for example if I copied song with filename zzzz.mp3 to the usb stick and then after that copied song aaaa.mp3 to the stick, the cd player would play zzzz.mp3 first (because it appeared first in the FAT table on the usb stick).

When using Itunes, I can obviously sort into playlists with correct track orders and the cd player reads in the correct order. If I use rockbox, can you setup playlists? or are playlists in rockbox, just individual folders/directories on the ipod hard disk? What I want to know is will the stereo likely read by alphabetical order using Rockbox (like it basically does with an Ipod using standard Apple firmware), or will it read it in FAT32 order based on what songs were copied to the disk/folder first through last?

Hope this makes sense.

Cheers
DM

[soap]

If you attach your Rockbox's iPod to your stereo via USB it is very likely to do one of three things:

1 - If your stereo thinks it is an iPod it may attempt to read the Apple database.

2 - If your stereo thinks it is an iPod it may attempt to talk to the Apple OS, quite possibly find the Rockbox support for the Apple Accessory Protocol lacking, and barf when it doesn't get the response it expects.

3 - If your stereo doesn't think it is an iPod it very likely will mount the Rockboxed iPod as a UMS device and give you the same sorting that you would get from a thumbdrive.

[darkmenace]

Thanks for your reply Soap, that is food for thought.

Ultimately, I would like to find a non-ipod or non-apple OS ipod solution, where I can control my head unit from the mp3 player. Does anybody know if there's a way using an Iriver Mp3 player (in this case an S100 model), so that I can control what tunes are played in the car from the Iriver, rather than the headunit?

Thanks
DM

[saratoga]

Ultimately, I would like to find a non-ipod or non-apple OS ipod solution, where I can control my head unit from the mp3 player.

Connect the headphone jack on the player to an analog input on the stereo (line in, cassette adapter, fm modulator, etc). 

[Julian67]

....in the order they were listed in the file allocation table (fat32), so for example if I copied song with filename zzzz.mp3 to the usb stick and then after that copied song aaaa.mp3 to the stick......

There is a useful utility called fatsort:  http://fatsort.sourceforge.net/

It's for OS X, BSD, Linux etc. but I know I've seen similar for Windows.  The utility's page is not very informative but if you have a look at a man page you can see how flexible it is: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man8/fatsort.8.html

[AlexP]

Yep, fatsort is great.  It is annoying though that car stereos are so stupid, I have the same problem of having to run fatsort everytime I add something.