Making creation time of converted files in order of track order

[Adrian Griffin]

My car stereo player (1916 Nissan Frontier) always plays tracks on a USB stick in order of their file creation time, not in track order or alphabetic order of track title. But when I use batch converter to convert an album of AIFFs to MP3s, it doesn't create the MP3s with any logical order of creation time, so they play out of order in my truck. I've tried restricting the converter to one thread, but this doesn't make any difference. Duplicating or copying the MP3s with the MacOS Finder, doesn't change the creation time of the MP3s. Is there any way of making Batch Converter create MP3s in track order or in order of the creation time of the original files?

[Spoon]

Re: Making creation time of converted files in order of track order

FAT32 does not work like this, we previously for TuneFUSION (on Windows) would write them in specific order, yet they would still get out of order because of the way FAT32 worked. We used a specific tool on Windows to rewrite the TOC (not files) based on the alphabetic order, this works.

[Adrian Griffin]

Re: Making creation time of converted files in order of track order

Thanks for your response. I guess the problem is with FAT32. I got it to work by dragging the mp3s one by one in the Finder to the window for my FAT32 USB stick. Very tiresome. I suppose I need a MacOS app that edits a FAT32 ToC, if such a thing exists. Maybe I'll look into doing something in the Terminal to copy files one by one from a MacOS directory to a FAT32 volume :-{

[Dat Ei]

Re: Making creation time of converted files in order of track order

I guess the problem is with FAT32.

The real problem is with the car stereo player. Have you looked for a tool already which can modify the creation date for a batch of files?


Dat Ei

[Adrian Griffin]

Re: Making creation time of converted files in order of track order

I don't think it's the creation date, its the order in which the filename are written to the ToC on the FAT32 volume. But since my last post, I have found that the rsync command writes files in alphabetical order. So, when creating the mp3s, make sure that the track number (with a leading zero for tracks 1 thru 9) is the first two characters of each track name. Copy the tracks to the FAT32 USB stick thusly:

Open a MacOS terminal window

Type rsync -rv (followed by a space)
Drag the source folder to the terminal window. You will now see the pathname after the rsync -rv command. Make sure there's a space between the -rv and the pathname

Type a space

Drag the target folder to the terminal window. Make sure there's a space between the source pathname and the target pathname. Hit enter to execute.

For more information on the rsync command, type rsync -h or rsync --help in the terminal window. BTW, the -rv options make rsync copy the contents of subdirectories in verbose mode.