I'm hoping (desperately) that I'm wrong here. In the PCM manual it says for both the USB & Jukebox that the tracks within a folder (album in my case) are displayed (and played) in alphabetical order.

Here's a link to the online manual showing this information:

http://www.porscheownersmanuals.com/...forwardreverse

So my question to those who have used the USB and Jukebox features: how do you get around this?

It's just not ok to start Van Halen I and lead off with "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" rather than "Running with the Devil."

 

I name tracks starting with track number.
There are a lot of renaming programs that can do this for you, as well as adding metadata etc.

 

I agree with lunarx in that the way around this is to rip your tracks with the track number as the beginning of the track title (e.g., 01-Walk This Way). I started doing this for all my music when I first encountered players that wouldn't read meta data or read it correctly.

Two issues: 1) (and I know most people don't listen to music this way) If you play your tracks across all albums in alpha sequence, all the 01's are played first, then all the 02's and so on. Probably shouldn't care too much since you were playing in a very different jukebox manner anyway (does prevent you from hearing originals and back to back covers which can be pretty interesting sometimes) and 2) If for some reason you need to strip this info out of your track titles it is a real pain.

 

My tracks have track numbers in the names. See attached picture. When I play that album the Piano Concerto plays before the Symphony.

So now I'm thinking of appending a T (for track) in front of the file name which should prevent the PCM from stripping them as it builds its database (at least I hope.)

Any other ideas from the forumsphere?

 

Yes, this is strange. I would suggest three things...First, if you select the first track instead of the album, which in this case is "Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67- I. Allegro con brio", does it play and then II. Andante, III. Allegro, and IV. Allegro play in that order and then Piano Concerto No. 4 in the correct order? That is play the tracks simply sequentially? Second, is the track metadata in conflict with the track name? and Third, try 01, 02, 03, etc. This last shouldn't make a difference since you have less than 10 tracks in this album but I have found going to 01, etc. seems to make a difference for some systems...it is what I use and I don't have the problem you are seeing. by the way, is this happening with both USB and the jukebox or just one or the other?

 

I am at the dealer getting winter tires fitted. My sales guy suggested removing the hyphen. I will try that next. I can't imagine how the metadata would be off but I will check that next. More later.

Also, it happens the same with jukebox and USB.

 

The testing continues.

Removing the hyphens did nada.

The symphony album is in FLAC format on my laptop, downloaded from HDTracks. I used XLD to reconvert it to AAC 320kbps this afternoon. I reformatted my USB thumb drive. I loaded the album (enclosing folders of SF Symphony and then Beethoven's 5th) on the thumb drive.

As I plugged in the thumb drive, PCM recognized it and told me it had a USB device connected. I switched the source to USB and got the first track, with the 1- in front of the track number playing. This is shown in the first attached picture. Brilliant, I'm thinking, I just have to reconvert all my music (easy) and I'm golden. At the bottom of the PCM screen it tells me it is "building music database" (or some such.)

I decide to go search for music. I search for the album, select it, start playback, and what comes up but the Piano Concerto. No 4- in front of it. See the second attached picture.

So now I know that it's the searchable database that is the problem. And from a data indexing perspective, I get that. (For those who weren't database administrators in a prior life, indexes are small searchable lists which can be parsed quickly to find key values, then have pointers to the actual data you need. If the software didn't strip the numbers in front of the tracks, the index would be "bunchy" with lots of values starting with 1, 2, 3, etc and not much dispersion in the key values.) I just don't know why playback can't use the original file name rather than the stripped track name. So at this point, I know what happens, I don't know if I can change it (I suspect not.)

I'm going to try a couple of other things, but I am not hopeful. More later this evening.

I wouldn't go as far as to say I'm upset, rather just confounded that the Porsche engineers think it's ok to serve an album's tracks up in alpha order rather than in recorded order.

 

Alright, my next step Monday will be to call PCNA and see if anyone can really help. Meanwhile, could someone lay out the steps they took to get albums to play in the correct order (from file on disc or laptop through to USB or jukebox) I would really appreciate it. I'd like to see if I can figure out if I'm doing something different/wrong.

TIA

jnscolo

 

Given that you got step one to work correctly I ask you the following but with more specificity than before-- is the ID tag track name in the metadata preceded by a numeric, is the ID tag track number in the metadata the same as the numeric of the ID tag for the same track, and finally, is the track name of the file itself (for example what windows file manager "explorer" sees and shows you on your PC) preceded by a numeric and is the same as the Id tag metadata track numeric and the ID tag track number? I can use dbpoweramp, windows media player, or itunes to rip my music with the above and music plays correctly on a USB drive of any kind, my phone in drive access mode, and a USB hard drive.

 

I hadn't checked this until this morning, but you are right. The metadata track titles did not have preceding numerics. I had doubted that would be the case, but I was wrong. I've found Mac software to edit the tags. I have converted a small set, tested it, and it works great. Thanks for the follow-on question, it turned out to be the right place to look. I'll post a detailed write-up of my process sometime soon so nobody else will have to bang their head against this particular wall.

 

I haven't had any issues with order with my iTunes-managed library (CDs ripped to iTunes, purchased iTunes songs, or downloaded from HDTracks and imported - as long as they're all AAC) other than album art being wrong at times. (Covers showing from albums that I played days ago, typically.)

I had no luck though with ALAC (whether lossless CDs or 96/24 or 192/24), which is irritating because I have enough albums encoded lossless that I later discovered wouldn't work in the PCM - forcing some re-exports to AAC, deletes, then re-imports into the jukebox. I had hoped that at least ALAC would be supported since it's been open-sourced by Apple years ago. Have you happened to find any higher quality formats that happen to work?

[FWIW, XLD will convert very nicely to ALAC (in addition to those downloads being available that way directly if you choose it), so I've imported high res into iTunes that way and it's all great, just the PCM that doesn't want to cooperate.]

 

Unless something has recently changed, the PCM will only play lossless (USB stick or hard drive) in wav and MLP format. I believe these are the only lossless decoders built in, (no flac, apple lossless, WMA lossless, etc.) ID tags are not supported well if at all for wav. Apple lossless thru the ipod is as close as I can get and have full tag and playlist support. Wav plays well but I can't get a straight answer from Porsche as to whether tags aren't supported or there is some secret to getting them to fully work correctly.