Burning files in other than alpha order

October 22, 2005 10:13 PM

I want to burn a CD of MP3s that maintains an order other than alphabetized. How can I do that without prepending 01, 02, 03, ... to the filenames? I only have Windows XP. Any freeware apps?
posted by mischief to media & arts (11 comments total)

iTunes. Just make a playlist and drag your songs around in the order you want them.
posted by xyzzy at 10:21 PM on October 22, 2005

You can do this with iTunes.
posted by I Love Tacos at 10:21 PM on October 22, 2005

OK, thanks for that. Now, what if I am zipping the files to send via email?
posted by mischief at 10:24 PM on October 22, 2005

You could include a playlist file (.pls or .m3u) that the person receiving could open.

Or you could set track numbers in the mp3's ID3 tags, and have the person receiving order them that way.
posted by gramcracker at 10:31 PM on October 22, 2005

A playlist of any sort; .pls files (a text file containing a list of the filenames in order, one per line) seem to be commonly supported by mp3 playing software on windows.
posted by polyglot at 10:36 PM on October 22, 2005

What you're asking to do is to control the way someone else's operating system lists normal files on a CD. You can't do this.
posted by odinsdream at 11:08 PM on October 22, 2005

Alternatively, you could edit each file in the order you want them displayed, then instruct the person on the other end to sort them by "date modified." But this is probably a really inconvenient way to do it.
posted by hjo3 at 2:55 AM on October 23, 2005

I'm guessing you're looking to play it on a low-end CD player that doesn't sort files, right?

If we were talking about a flash drive, you'd create a subfolder on the drive, copy the files to it, then drag them out of the folder one at a time in the order you want them to play. I don't know how you'd get CD burning software to preserve this, though.
posted by cillit bang at 3:25 AM on October 23, 2005

BTW, iTunes does prepend the numbers. It's just that you don't have to do it yourself.
posted by smackfu at 6:43 AM on October 23, 2005

When iTunes does this, it will strip the artist from the filename and put each mp3 into a folder named after the album inside a folder named after the artist. Your recipient might find this annoying. Just a word of warning. ... I don't know of any way to do what you want to that's convenient for both you and the recipient; the last time I did it I added the numbers in front of the filenames and burned it in Roxio.
posted by Tuwa at 7:31 AM on October 23, 2005

I downloaded iTunes and I am still working at learning it.
posted by mischief at 6:36 PM on October 23, 2005