Question on album track sorting - considering purchase for FiiO M11 DAP

[Matt B]

Hello,

I just received my new M11 yesterday. I loaded a 400GB micro SD card with a bulk of my FLAC library - about 250GB of files. My player has the most current firmware (1.0.7) and player app (Fiio Music Version 1.1.5) installed. 

I usually search by Artist - Album and play entire albums.  In the FiiO music player app, the album tracks sort and play alphabetically, which does not work for me. I listen to albums in the order they are intended to be heard.  I can't listen to an album like Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon out of order. If I play from folder view, the tracks play in the correct order - probably because I have METICULOUSLY named my files formatted as Artist - Album - Track # - song title.FLAC

I have confirmed that the tagging information is correct in my files.  I spent an obscene amount of time over the years ensuring the tagging information is perfect.  Yes, I am OCD!  The track #'s are listed as 1/6, 2/6, 3/6, etc. Yet when I go to the "track information" on the M11, the track number listing is 0 (zero). I understand that if there is no track # information in the file, the player will resort to alphabetical sorting.

As an experiment, I changed the track #'s on one album to 1, 2, 3, etc., deleting the  (Track)"of"(Total) slash. This fixed the issue with this one album.  However, with Many Thousands of tracks in my library, it is unacceptible to have to go back and make this minor tweak. Especially since all of my other players work with the track numbering in this format: Sonos, Winamp, Windows Media Player, etc.

It appears that the FiiO Player app does not support track numbering in the x/xx format, just whole numbers.  I have gone through every setting I can find on this player, all to no avail.

Would Poweramp solve this problem?

[andrewilley]

PA can cope with track number (of total tracks) as lots of my files are encoded that way. And also disc number (of total-discs). I can't swear how FLACs handle it though, as all of mine are MP3 (so ID3, mostly v2.3, tags) whereas FLAC uses Vorbis tags.

[Edit] Just tested it by adding a 'total number of tracks' value to some FLAC files in TagScanner, and the revised files work fine with PA set to sort albums by track#.

Andre 

[Tarheel25]

I cannot find the setting to sort the list in this order:

Artist

Album

Track

I want it to play the album in track order.  I used an auto tagger and the track numbers are correct but it only lists the tracks in alphabetical order.  Any help is greatly appreciated.

[andrewilley]

Go to the Library view and choose 'Artists' as your desired category. That allows you to select an Artist name first, then choose an album of theirs, then songs from that album.

Sorting at each of those levels is controlled by tapping the three-dots menu icon in the top-right and choosing 'List Options'. I have my levels set so Artist names are listed alphabetically, their Album Titles are listed by year of release (which suits me better than alphabetical, especially for artists whose catalogue I know well) and finally the songs level is sorted by Disc# & Track# (which I find best for multi-disc albums, as you don't want all the '1's, followed by all the '2's etc).

Andre

[Tarheel25]

Thanks for the prompt response.  I have a follow up question though.  As I read my initial question, I should've asked if there is a way to have the all songs list sorted by artist then album then track.  Does that make sense? It is just a little cumbersome to go into each album.

  Thanks again.

[andrewilley]

Not at present, no. You can look at a flat list of all of an artist's songs, but as any given list can only have one sort order, and anything within each sorted item would (such as songs within a year, or an album) would then be sorted alphabetically.

Andre

[Tarheel25]

Thank you very much.  It's never been an issue in the past, but with live albums, it allows it to flow.  Been using PA for years, so it's not a deal breaker...  Thanks again and have a good one.