Question

How to copy files in alphabetical order across a directory tree?

Asked by: cuziyq

My phone has an MP3 player on it which I use frequently, but the player software on it sucks.  You can list songs by artist or by genre, but not by song title.  The songs tab simply lists all the songs by the order in which they appear on the memory card's FAT table.  If I copy the files to the phone by dragging the folder to it, Windows behaves the same way (the files are copied in whatever order they happen to appear in the NTFS directory structure, which is usually (but not always) the order in which they were originally copied to the NTFS filesystem).

The good old XCOPY command copies the songs in alphabetical order, which is exactly what I want, but it's in alpha order per directory.  I have my music collection broken down into folders and I do not want to put them all into a single "flat" directory.

Does anyone know of a way to copy the files to the memory card in alpha order irrespective of the directory it's in, but still maintain the folder structure?

BTW, I am proficient with Linux, so if it takes a Linux command to do, then I'm open to it.

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Asked On
2008-05-01 at 11:20:02ID23369560
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Answers

 

by: cuziyqPosted on 2008-05-01 at 11:21:45ID: 21481166

Oh, I forgot to mention . . .

The songs tab lists the songs in the REVERSE order they were copied to the memory card.

 

by: CehotecPosted on 2008-05-01 at 11:29:42ID: 21481233

Found this by google'in

There are a lot of mp3 players out there that don't play the songs in an alphabetical order - instead, they ignore the filenames and play the files in the exact order they were copied to the device. And with these players, a problem rises from the fact that Nautilus handles file transfers in a somewhat random order instead of sticking to an alphabetical order.
 
What i'm going to suggest here is a simple workaround to this problem. I found this little tool called fatsort (http://fatsort.berlios.de/). You can either get it from this link, or through Synaptic, it's up to you.
 
How it works:
You just copy the files/directories to your mp3 player without worrying about the copying order. You then run fatsort, and it sorts everything in your mp3 player in an alphabetical order.
 
As an example, if your mp3 player is located at /dev/sda (as mine does), you type:
 
fatsort /dev/sda
 
And within less than a second, everything in the player is sorted alphabetically :KS
 
edit_1: Note that you need to make sure the file transfer is totally over before running fatsort. Please read the 5th post in this thread for more information.
 
edit_2: With the latest version of Fatsort(0.9.7) you first have to unmount the usb device (right-click on its icon on the desktop and select eject) before running fatsort. This prevents the problems i mentioned in edit_1.

                                              
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by: leewPosted on 2008-05-01 at 11:30:35ID: 21481238

Command from a command prompt - this will list the files in alphabetical order and copy them one at a time to the memory card in that order.

for /f "tokens=*" %a in ('dir /o /b /a-d') do copy "%a" x:

Where X: is your Memory card drive letter - or specify a full path on the memory.

 

by: rgautierPosted on 2008-05-01 at 11:30:46ID: 21481239

If xcopy works, why not use xcopy /s to copy the subdirectories too, and just use it from the parent directory?

 

by: sl8rzPosted on 2008-05-01 at 11:31:27ID: 21481248

You could use a batch file to copy all songs from nested folders to a single folder in alphabetical order.  The downside is you'd double your storage for songs.

 

by: cuziyqPosted on 2008-05-01 at 11:59:07ID: 21481511

rgautier;
I do use XCOPY /S.  The problem is that it copies all the files (in alpha order) in directory A before moving on to directory B, which makes them still out-of-order in the MP3 player's flat list of songs.

sl8rz;
If I did it that way, the MP3 player would list each song twice :-)  I still need them to be broken out into directories on the phone (although the MP3 player application ignores it) because you can still do things like modify MP3 tags, move things around, etc.

leew and Cehotec;
I like leew's suggestion because it's easier to not have to boot into Linux to get the job done.  But Cehotec's suggestion has the advantage of being able to add songs at will without having to erase/rewrite the entire memory card (which takes like 45 minutes with 4 gigs of music).  I will try both suggestions to see if they work.  I will probably wind up splitting the points.

 

by: leewPosted on 2008-05-01 at 15:02:12ID: 21483126

Could the phone be listing things by the file creation date?  Have you experimented with this at all?  If it is, you could possibly use linux to set a date on each file sequentially a few seconds (or minutes) apart... and PERHAPS that would allow you to "inject" files in the middle.  Sorry, I can't help with the details on this theory...

 

by: cuziyqPosted on 2008-05-13 at 20:53:55ID: 21561138

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you folks on this.  I haven't had time to experiment with your suggestions, as fiddling with my phone is pretty low on my priorities list.  But I will award the points because I am confident that the two solutions will work for what I want to do.

Thanks folks.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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