Here's the trick for adding music and not having to re-sort...sort of...

Create folders A thru Z on your flash drive then drag and drop artist albums into the respective alpha numeric folders. DO NOT drag and drop the main artist folder. In other words if you have several albums for Aerosmith you would drag and drop (or copy and paste) each Aerosmith "album" into the "A" folder. The downside is it will still sort/play the last thing you copied into any particular folder. The up side is it will be in the "A" folder, at the beginning of the drive, not at the end which is normally what happens when you add content at a later date.

The other plus is you eliminate a whole bunch of "Artist" folders. We have a 700 folder limit...which I hit. By going the A thru Z route I managed to wittle it down to 463 folders allowing me to add another 237 albums whenever I choose.

I tested this out this morning. When I had finished copying all of my music I realized one of my CD's hadn't been ripped (Roy Orbison). I ripped the CD and copied it to the "O" folder. Plugged in the drive and scrolled through the folders and good ol' Roy boy was right where he belonged, at the end of the "O" folder, not at the end of the drive.

For random tunes that aren't part of an album...when you scroll through you will see your "lettered" drive. Press the center buttom and you will be able to scroll through the "loose" tracks within that lettered folder.

Really, the only thing missing with this system is the ability to go back up one folder and resume your search. A simple "up one" button on the head unit would be a welcome addition to our Fits audio system That and a higher folder limit. That would allow folks to simply drag and drop their entire collection in one fell swoop...but then you'd be back to having the last "Artist" you added at the end of the drive...

The A thru Z method is the cure (at least for now)

One last thing. Make sure you create all of your A thru Z folders up front even if you don't have an artist "C" as an example. Adding a "C" folder after the fact will end up having "C" at the end...

Hope this makes your flash drive experience more enjoyable!

 

Malice:

I read your A-Z method with great interest. But there is something I don't quite understand...

My understanding is that the system can only handle 2 folder levels. So, with your method, you'd scroll for example all the way to letter "O", and hit center button to go into the "O" folder. WHAT HAPPENS THEN? I suspect you will see all of the music files for all albums for all artists under "O" -- all at the same 'level'. Right? If I have 20 artists starting with "O", and each artist has 5 albums with 10 songs each, it means I would see 1,000 files all in that 'level'.... right? That's unmanageable for me, plus I don't see as way to select a SPECIFIC artist or album within the "O" grouping... can you explain?

 

What will happen using the "O" folder as an example is this...you scroll to the "O" folder (where loose/random "O" artists will be) and you will see an "O" on your display. Press the center button on the scroll wheel and you can scroll thru only the random content based on when they were copied (items that are not contained within an "album") on the "O" drive or...continue scrolling and all of the "O" artist albums will be seen based on when they were copied. It's always going to default to the last file copied within a directory so everything in the "O" directory will be your "loose/random/individual" tunes and continued scrolling will net you all the "albums" in the order they were copied within said directory. This satisfies the "two" folder rule.

Here is what you would see using our "O" example or basic file structure...


and a mish mash of what's in the "O" drive...


This folder has not been sorted (By hitting the F5 key or refresh in Windows). What you see is exactly the order in which they were copied. Notice how "Mystery Girl" from Roy Orbison is at the bottom? See all the individual/random/loose songs not contained within folders? They will show up under the "O" folder and "Mystery Girl" will be the last folder to hit scrolling through the "Folders" in the "O" section...

Do a quick test using this example and you will see what I mean...

Hope this helps.

 

I don't get it! So, when you're scrolling through contents of "O" folder... you see ONLY individual mp3 files, or do you ALSO see folders within (i.e., the albums). I think you need to video tape what you're doing, LOL! I can only get 2 levels... one says FOLDER the other says TITLE at the top of the display.

EDIT: So let's say you're in the "O" folder.... you start scrolling and see MP3 SONG titles that are loose in there.... you ignore them, and continue to scroll until you see an 'album', for example Ozzy's "No More Tears". What exactly do you see? Do you see a single 'item' with the name of the album "No More Tears", you click with center wheel, and go into the album to see all the files from that album? If that's what you get, I CAN NOT MAKE IT happen! Everyone in the forum has complained that you cannot do this... wish we could. Please clarify!

 

I do something like this with the paths and filenames to keep my music somewhat organized.

<Artist>\<Album> - <Track Name>

This way you can shuffle all the songs from one artist.
or if you want to organize separate albums ..

<Artist> - <Album>\<Track #> - <Track Name>

Get your hands on a program that re-organizes music files for you (I use MediaMonkey) and it is a piece of cake.
Looks like we're going to have to live with the folder limitations via usb drive.

 

Malice, chime in when you get a chance... had some questions up there for you buddy!

 

If you are in the "O" folder (by selecting it) you will only see songs in that folder, no albums. Let's say you're scrolling along and you see the "O" folder. One more twist beyond that folder and you will see the albums in that folder. If you select an album you can scroll through the songs "only" in that album. "O" is just another folder with songs in it just like an album (No More Tears for example) is just another folder.

Regarding not being able to select an album and then scroll through songs on that album...mine works fine. One click selects an album. To begin play of that album takes one more click (and by click I mean pressing the center "selection" button). To see the contents you scoll after the first click...to cancel your search you hit the "title" button. Unfortunately this returns you to whatever you were listening to. All they need to do is make the "title" button a multi function button while searching. One click takes you back up one level so you can resume searching and two clicks cancels the search.

How do you have your default display set? By pressing the title button during playback you get 4 or 5 ways to display. Mine is set to Track <tag>...maybe this has something to do with you not being able to view tracks within an album

At this point my only quibble with USB playback is not being able to go back one folder. That and maybe the damned twisting of the knob. Other than that I think I've got a good handle on it now and am very very happy with it overall...My entire collection is on my drive and I can now add new artists and "know" where they will go.

 

Malice: taking this to PM check your mail!

 

Oh gosh, I think I see what you're saying now... if you want to see your albums for artist Ozzy, you scroll to the letter "O", and then CONTINUE TO SCROLL PAST THE LETTER O and you will find the albums... so you don't actually 'enter' the letter "O" folder... if that's the case, it's the same thing basically I have, which I don't really like. I mean, if I want to find a U2 album, I have to scroll though hundreds of 'folders' until I get to the U2 albums at the end.

Ideally, we'd scroll only up to letter "U" (21 items until you hit "U") and then click, enter folder, and find the artists under "U", and then the folder/albums etc. That's not how it works unfortunately.

 

Badabing! And after I just went through a long winded PM You gotta scroll through every danged album beginning at A...to get to Z. That's a lot of twisting. If they switched it to simply selecting the center button and then let you hit the < or > and hold it till you were close to where you want to be it would be a welcome addition. The knob sucks in that regard...

 

OK, ROTF... so you're basically doing it the same way I am... it's terrible for large number of albums. I chose to give every folder/album name the following structure:

ARTIST-ALBUMNAME

But since the display only shows 13 characters, I ended up doing only 5 chars for artist name, and the rest for album. So, for artist METALLICA, album RIDE THE LIGHTNING it shows:

METAL-RIDE TH

I dont like it, but it at least helps me things sorted in order, and I can group all albums for a given band TOGETHER on the huge list.

 

This is closest to the correct answer I've read so far....

USe this program: FolderSort 1.1 download

It will sort the files according to how they sit on the media. ID3 tags and file date have nothing to do with the sort order in the mp3 players file browser.

 

I have a similar issue, but slightly different - let's say I have an 8 GB drive with 100 albums on it. The FIT reads them in order which i put them on the drive. All is good...

But let's say I get tired of albums 10, 15, and 20. I delete those and add three more albums onto the drive...When i attach the USB stick again, the new albums are buried amongst all the albums, which is a giant pain to find and sort out. Can ANYONE figure out how to get the three new albums I added to the very end of the list (i.e. making them albums 98, 99, and 100)?

 

So, after reading through the several threads on this and doing a lot of fiddling and fumbling on my own, here's what i've come up with for sorting my music. This system is designed for people like me who are album junkies and mostly value complete albums, but maybe it could be adapted to whatever your music-hoarding style may be.

First, i should say my original idea was to create a folder for each artist, then rename all files in the format "Album - 01 - Track". That way i could browse through, select the artist, then scroll down to the first file showing the album title that i want. This might work for some BUT i didn't like the fact that i couldn't see the track name while selecting, so i scrapped this idea for now.

Now what i've done is this:

1. I've used Malice's idea of creating a folder for each letter of the alphabet in order on the drive, and then i add subfolders for each artist. This way, when i add a new artist i can add the folder under the correct letter and it should be in the correct alphabetical order when i go to play it. When more than one artist is in that letter's folder, i should be able to use FolderSort on that letter folder only, instead of having to resort the entire drive.

2. I name the artist subfolders in the format "--ARTIST". You can use whatever prefix symbol you want to make it stand out, but "--" works for me.

3. I've also added a small blank mp3 to each "--ARTIST" folder. This tells the player that there's a file in it so it will show the folder on the screen.

4. Then i add a subfolder for each album, with the album's names. Then i use mp3tag if necessary to rename my files in the format "01 Track" so they'll be in order and i can see the track name while scrolling.

So my folder structure for the letter E so far looks like this:



NOW, what all this convoluted mess does in the end is that as i scroll through the folders on the player, I'll see --EELS come up and know it's an artist name, and as i scroll PAST that folder i'll see the Eels album titles until i come to --ELUVEITIE, etc. The alphabet folders do NOT show up but the artists all remain in alphabetical order. If i select the SLANIA album folder, i'll see the track titles. Then i have it set to show track <tag>, and away i go.

Some people may not like this method since it adds even more folders to scroll through, or because it's most useful scrolling forward and not so useful scrolling backward, but so far it's the most efficient i've come up with to display the most info. As i add more and more albums i'll probably get SICK of scrolling with that damn slow knob, but we'll see what happens first — me discovering a better idea or Honda releasing a firmware update.

So is all this process UTTERLY RIDICULOUS to do just to have a stupidly basic organization system? Yes! And this is probably an overkill OCD solution, but if i can load zillions of albums onto one flash drive and never again have to burn another CD or fumble with a stack of scratched-up CDs, it's worth it for me to make the best of this player's severely limited functionality.

 

That's an OK implementation, thanks for sharing.

Im going to start a new thread to get folks organized so we can all send a letter to Honda Corporate to deman... <errrrrrr...request> a firmware upgrade to the factory Stereo. It is absurd that they implemented it the way they did, so much trouble!!!!

 

Justintime and others still having problems:

If you use DriveSort, you really can very easily do what (I think) you want (have your Fit play your music in numerical and/or alphabetical order)

I use the previously mentioned DriveSort program, available from Anerty's Lair - DriveSort

To use this program:

1) plug your flash drive into your computer
2) start drivesort
3) click the left-most icon (says "Open a disk" when you hover your mouse over it)
4) choose your USB drive. It should say something like [FAT32] E: Lexar (16 GB)
5) click OK
6) click the arrow next to the third icon ("Sort Current Folder")
7) from the menu that appears, make sure "Long Name Sort" and "Subdirectories" are both selected.
8) click the Sort Current Folder button
9) you should now be able to see on the right part of the window that your folders and files are sorted correctly
10) click the arrow next to the fourth icon ("Save current folder"). Make sure "Subdirectories" is checked
11) click the "Save current folder" button. This will write the changes to your USB flash drive.
12) click the second icon "Close the disk".
13) close DriveSort
done.

Note: each time you add additional files/songs to your drive, you will need to repeat these steps.

 

I use a Palm Pre (phone) as my iPod/USB device... woks perfect... except for the fact that it starts in the default ringtone directory, lol

So whenever I plug in the phone, the first thing I hear is the default Pre ringtone, slightly annoying, but not to bad

I'll have to take a look at the Drivesort, but I'm not so sure how much I wanna screw around with the directory structure on my phone

 

Just change your ringtone to a cool song!

 

I absolutely agree. I have been using this program since it was originally mentioned in this thread. It works great. I'm only using a flash drive so I can't talk about sorting a phone file system.

 

+ rep on this old post.

Thanks for helping this old man out with the DriveSort info