How to Reorganize the Playback Order of Songs

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

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by Mark Harris
Brings music expertise, including a background as a music producer and composer, to digital music articles.
Updated April 29, 2019

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.

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.

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.