Murdering Pink Floyd
 

Finally broke down and bought a smart-phone. HTC Desire, Android OS. Trying to transfer my music collection onto it's MP3 player using Windows Media Player. All well and good, except that the sequence of songs on any given album gets scrambled between the computer and the phone. The computer will rip everything off the CD, and the sequence will be correct in the Media Player library, but something goes wrong in the final step. Everything copies over, but in the wrong order. This is extremely annoying for music such as Pink Floyd, where the entire album is a continuous performance. What am I doing wrong?

Sounds like (!) you might have it set to shuffle. I don't know much about the phone version of windows, but on the pc wmp, there is an icon on the play controls that looks like to interlinked curved arrows - that's the turn shuffle on/off control - may be worth checking out whether that control is carried over to the mobile version.

When you say the wrong order, do you mean they are now alphabetically arranged or some random order.

I've found this occasionally to happen in other programs, it's maybe something to do with the tags, i.e. how the software that rips the cd numbers them, if at all.

Now that you mention it, it does appear to be alphabetical. Must be a setting somewhere in WMP I can change?

Do the track names start with a number to ensure correct sorting?

01 In the flesh
02 The thin ice
03 another brick in the wall part 1

That sorts correctly. Without the number you get track 3 first.

Does your ripping software have an option to 'rip as single track'?
I use a Linux programme, K3b, which has this option and it proves invaluable for the likes of Pink Floyd, which MP3 players usually mix up.

Gibbo.

Not really into PC to phone stuff, but it sounds to me as if WMP has a large hand in this. It does sort into alpha order and will play that way unless Shuffle is selected.

Can you take WMP out of the process and use a file transfer program?

Apart from listening to Pink Floyd, you're not naming the files in such a way that they come properly sorted in your MP3 device.

As others have said, rename the tracks so that their alphabetical sorting is the same as their order in the CD, e.g., by prefixing them with their track number.

When I rip into WMA format my phone sorts the songs alphabetically, even when there are track numbers included. When I rip into MP3, the phone leaves the track order alone. Go figure. Thanks for the tips.