[JTeale]

I have tried numerous ways of moving my mp3 files to the 8 gig card in my 9800 -- resynch and usb copies with and without DM. No matter what I do, I have the same problem.

When I call up the media player, it sorts the file by track number first, so all the track ones try to play, regardless of what disc they came from, rather than sorting in a more rational manner. I've tried using the file browse to bypass this, but the dimwitted operating system keeps STOPPING the media player, causing a loss of place. It's a pain to have to step through 125 tracks to get back to the proper place.

At this point, the media player on the 9800 rates a very poor second to that found on my old 8820.

Is there any way to cause the media player to sort by filename? Alternatively, is there any way to prevent the media player from being preempted by other processes?

[JasW]

I'm assuming there are track numbers in the titles of the songs on the 9800 because All Songs in the BB Media Player sorts numerically first followed by alphabetically. (So if you have "01" in the song titles, e.g., the song "01 Aardvark" by one artist would come first, followed by "01 Abnormal" by a different artist, etc.) That's the only thing I can think of that would lead to your problem.

It's not a problem for me, but I have three albums that for some reason show up with the track number in the title, and the songs from these albums are listed first in the "All Songs" list on my BB. It's not a problem because I only use "All Songs" to shuffle play; otherwise, I play either by Album or by Playlist. I would suggest using Playlist to listen to your 125 songs, so you can arrange the songs as you like or as they should be. You can easily create a playlist in either iTunes or WMP and it'll be ported over to your BB when you sync.

You can also try to get rid of the track numbers in the titles. For some reason, the BB will (in my case, very very rarely) pick up the track number as part of the title from the mp3 file name when that file name has the track number in it. This happens even if the mp3 song title tag associated with the file does not contain the track number. In such cases, you can try renaming the actual mp3 file on your PC to remove the track number from the file name and then resync to your BB. (I would delete the songs from my BB before resyncing, though, and would do so via the PC to ensure that I have deleted the BBthumbs.dat files.)

Another possible explanation is that you dumped the songs from your 8820 onto your PC, which in many cases can cause WMP to preserve only the track number and song title; artist, album, and other info get lost for some reason. This happened to me when I got a new PC at work last year. I play music at work on my PC, so when I got the new PC, I just copied over the contents of my BB music folder. Well over half of the music just shows up in WMP under "Unknown" listed only by track number and title.

[JTeale]

I found a solution to the problem.

I just got out a big hammer.

The hammer was in the form of a free software package (Mp3tag) that allows me to manipulate all the tags, particularly the track tag, in all the files of selected directories. It solved my problem in about thirty minutes, although I still have some files that I have to tweak for other inconsistencies.

[JasW]

Yes, Mp3tag is worth its weight in gold for manipulating mp3s (track numbers, album covers, etc.). Note you can manipulate the mp3s already on your BB with the program, too. I've had to do that for album covers a few times.