How to Reorganize the Playback Order of Songs

Why Aren't My Songs Playing in the Correct Order?

by
Mark Harris
Writer
Mark Harris is a former writer for Lifewire who wrote about the digital music scene and streaming music services in an easy to understand, no-nonsense manner.
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Mark Harris
Updated on November 13, 2019
reviewed by
Jessica Kormos headshot
Jessica Kormos
Lifewire Tech Review Board Member
Jessica Kormos is a writer and editor with 15 years' experience writing articles, copy, and UX content for Tecca.com, Rosenfeld Media, and many others.
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Article reviewed on Dec 29, 2020
Jessica Kormos

Sometimes, no matter how you configure your MP3 player or other portable media player, it simply refuses to play songs and albums in alphabetical order. Some portable's, including car stereo systems, play tracks in the order in which they are stored on the device. Changing the song order in iTunes is a simple task; on other platforms, it can be more difficult.

If you want to play your albums and songs in alphabetical order, using a utility like mp3DirSorter could be the answer.

How to Reorder a List of Songs

  1. If you're using Windows, download and open mp3DirSorter. Since it's portable and doesn't need to be installed, you can use it from any location, including a flash drive. In fact, the program notifies you that it's intended to be used on non-internal drives like SD cards and USB devices.

  2. Make sure Windows can access the files on your storage device by inserting it into your card reader or plugging the device into a spare USB port. Once found, Windows will show it in File/Windows Explorer with the other local hard drives.

  3. Drag the folder containing the audio files directly onto the mp3DirSorter program window to instantly have them sorted alphabetically. To sort the contents of entire drives, just drag the whole thing (click and drag the drive letter) over to the program like you would a folder.

  4. There are only two options for this program. You can put a check next to one or both of these settings depending on what you want to have done: Sort folders alphabetically and Sort files alphabetically

To check that your albums and songs are in the correct order, play the contents of the device once again. You should now find that everything is played in alphabetical order.

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A Second Solution

If mp3DirSorter didn't reorder the songs properly, you can always go the manual route by renaming all the files to be listed in numerical order.

To do this, simply rename the first song you want listed to have 01 at the beginning, and then repeat this with each subsequent song, continuing in order with 02, 03, etc.

For example, the first song might read 01 - MyFavoriteSong.mp3, the second 02 - RunnerUp.mp3, and so on.

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