File order jumbled

[Stephen_A]

I have files in two folders 

Bach_Well-Tempered_Clavier, Book I
Bach_Well-Tempered_Clavier, Book II
These show up in Android's Solid Explorer in logical order. (see first pic)
When searched in Poweramp, the order is jumbled. The playing order shown jumps seemingly at random between the two folders. I have the 'filename as title' option turned on in Lists settings.
Thanks.
 

Edited June 1, 2021 by Stephen_A
Added 'thanks'

[andrewilley]

From the Search screen, when you click to drill down into an album, the songs within that album should be sorted by whatever method you have previously chosen for viewing Album Songs. This sorting order can be changed by tapping on the three-dots icon at the top-right of the list of album songs (i.e. in your third screenshot) and selecting List Options.

If your music is not correctly tagged with metadata, which I assume is the case here, I would suggest using 'By Filename' or 'By Path' as the sort method. As your filenames are all neatly prefixed with double-digit track numbers, that should work fine.

Andre

 

 

[Stephen_A]

Andre thanks for answering. I'll get onto that.

[andrewilley]

Of course a better long-term solution would be to properly tag all your audio files with embedded metadata rather than relying on displaying filenames, but that's a much longer process.

Andre

[Stephen_A]

Yes this is job I need to do. Could you be so kind as to point me to a suitable reference? Thanks very much.

[andrewilley]

There are lots of ways to do it, but I would certainly suggest using a PC rather than a phone for the ease of seeing everything and quicker multiple copy/paste operations. Good programs are TagScanner and MP3Tag. Personally I like TagScanner for large batch work. Make a backup work copy of your music collection on your PC first, in case you accidentally mess anything up.

I would start by dragging the entire music folder into the program (might take a while to import) and then on files with no tag data use the Generate tab to build initial tags from the filenames. Block-select the files you want to work with, in case some files are already OK (sorting the whole list by Track# or Title would help, so untagged stuff shows at the top). You can specify a name formatting scheme, so the first digits (up to the dot) would be imported into the Track# tag, then the next words would be the Album tag, then the remainder (after the hyphen) would be Title. The formatting scheme to do that - based on your screenshots above - would be "%track%. %album% - %title%". Preview the changes first to make sure you've got it right.

Once that's done, you can scroll through to check you are happy with the initial automated results and tweak as necessary.

Andre

[Stephen_A]

Thanks for the pointers Andre, especially the recommendation for Tagscanner. Bewildering choice out there.