27 June 2010

Sorting files in folders

So, just a quick one - not so long ago, I got a Pioneer DEH-P4200SD for my car. In brief, it's a decent head unit, but I'd like to compare it against something made by Alpine, because I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually sound as good as the CDR-500 that was installed in my car from the factory. I have noticed that using the graphic EQ mode seems to make a big difference to sound quality, though.

Anyway, I'm using it with a 16GB SD card, which is great from the point of view of getting a cubic buttload of music in the car, but the HU is a bit dumb, in that it does absolutely no sorting of its own, and relies entirely on the order the files are written into the FAT table.

Just last night I was heading to bed when I remembered the problem of jumbled up folder order, and found this page, which links to a conceptually deceptively simple batch file (which has been well written, all credit to Steffen). I ran it on my SD card this morning, and it's done the job perfectly, with everything coming up in order now. Luckily, I don't add music to the SD card often, so I can just run this batch whenever I do and it'll sort it out :)

Note that since all the batch does is move everything on the card, the process is actually reasonably quick...it can't have taken more than about 5 minutes to sort ~15GB on my class 4 SDHC card.

Thanks to Murray and Steffen!