2012 Fit Base here.

Until recently I had my music library (about 245 albums) working well on my FAT32-formatted, 16 GB USB stick. The folder structure was Artist | Album ... and then song files within each album. For compilations I do not use a separate folder for each artist, I just use "Compilation", so there are under 100 top level folders.

Most of my albums were ripped under Windows using iTunes or MediaMonkey. A few were converted from vinyl manually in Audacity. I'd then apply a mask so that the songs within an album would play by track order, not alphabetical order. I'd also sort by artist at the top layer.

Adding an album wasn't too bad, but re-sorting would have to occur.

For awhile I'd run dual-boot with Linux, but do my masking/sorting in Windows. A few albums were added in Linux but those worked OK too after sorting. Since 2020 I've been on Linux Mint 100%. Initially, adding new albums with Rhythmbox worked fine, but recently I added a handful of albums, and ran into some difficulties. FatSort did OK, but then the tracks were alphabetical. I used Puddletag to add a mask (actually changed file name to append track number), and that's where things went wrong, weirdly wrong.

Currently, the USB connector is only seeing albums that I ripped in Linux/Rhythmbox. It does not see any of the prior ones ripped with iTunes, MediaMonkey, or Audacity. They do show up in the computer's File Manager (Thunar). The only difference I'm able to detect is the ID3 Version (using "puddletag", right click, properties) of the older stuff is "ID3" whereas for the more recently Rhythmbox-ripped stuff is "MP3".

I've tried some different ID3 tag programs like easytag and kid3, but they're unintuitive (compared to puddletag). I even tried VLC, entering track numbers in media information (e.g., 1 of 12), but it won't save the added info. (that would be a manual process anyway). And besides, I have no idea what it would involve/mean to change ID3 type to MP3.

I'd really like to avoid re-ripping over 200 albums ... and not having access in the Fit to 20 or so albums that are either from vinyl or old digital downloads for which there's no CD.

Thanks in advance for any help in getting the stuff on this flash drive formatted/organized correctly and working again.