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Issue: Music Doesn’t Play in the Correct Order
Nycebo has been helping me fix a problem I’ve had with my Mercedes music system. It has not been playing music in the right order. As we worked through this we thought it would be helpful to share what was learned with the Forum. This solution is currently limited to MP3 files and we hope the Forum can help solve the issue with other file types.
What the Problem Looks Like
Typically when you start the car with media for the first time, one finds the album listing music in the correct order. By “correct” I mean the songs are played in the order they appear on the album. Using Boz Scaggs “Silk Degrees” as the example, the songs play in the order What Can I Say, Georgia, Jump Street, etc. .
When you leave this album and search for new music under “Artist” or “Album”, the songs will list in the wrong order. If one selects Artist >Boz Scaggs> Silk Degrees the songs can appear in two different orders which are both wrong. In some cases the songs will appear in alphabetical order. In such a case the song order is Georgia, Harbor Lights, It’s Over, etc. These are the 2nd, 5th, and 7th songs on the album. In other cases the songs will list in alphanumerical order: What Can I Say, We’re All Alone, Georgia, Jump Street. These are the 1st, 10th, and 2nd and 3rd songs on this ten song album. In this case 10 comes after 1 alphanumerically, but before 2. If there were 15 songs on the album the second song would play after tracks 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
This is crazy.
How to Fix the Problem.
The metadata on the files needs to be replaced.
Track numbers need to be listed with leading zeros. So instead of 1, 2, 3, 4,… 10, 11, the track numbers should be 01, 02, 03, 04, … 10, 11. This can be fixed using MP3Tag which is free. Instructions on how to do this are here:
You can do this all at once with every album in your music library if you need to. But you might want to test it on a few albums first.
Now you have to rename the filenames of each song. MP3Tag makes this easy. Select all the songs you want to rename. Select ‘Convert>Tag – Filename’ and a box will open with Format String: and a text box. Enter $num(%track%,2)_%title% in the text box and hit Okay. This will now rename every file with the structure 01_Song 1, 02_Song2, etc.
Now that you are done with all the tagging and renaming Save everything to disk. You can then drag everything onto your SD Card or USB drive under a master file name Audio. It goes without saying that it is helpful to have the file structure Audio>Artist>Album>Song Filenames. Now your music will play in the correct order no matter how you select it!
Major Limitations and Remaining Challenges!
This approach only works with the lower resolution .mp3 files. I have tried this approach with AAC-encoded M4A files and it does not work for me. However, Egonvdv and others have reported they have success with that format and we're currently trying to figure out why it works for some and not for others.
It is a major disappointment that FLAC and ALAC files will not play in the correct order if they are selected by Artist or Album, only by Folder. Hopefully someone has found a solution for this, but we tried hard and failed in this regard. My suspicion is that the file container for FLAC and ALAC is sufficiently different that COMAND can’t regularly pull correct metadata tags and just defaults to a simple but incorrect song order.
It would be really helpful to get learn what other users' experiences are. It seems the problem is solvable if all the right variables are controlled. This problem has been noted generally with many different music players in other cars (e.g. Tesla) and even Android music players. So it isn't unique to MB COMAND. If you have had success, I may reach out to you by PM to get further details on your software/file system/approach, etc.
Once again, major kudos to nycebo for the hard work and insight he's put into finding this solution!
I use JRiver exclusively and not encountering this issue with voice & menu functions and never seen the tracks not in sequence of the album in COMAND. I am total AD&D about music files, path names and album art being correctly displayed! I have spent so many hours correcting & cleansing my library it's crazy to work properly with COMAND. It always comes down to ensuring the tags are correct and updated or else COMAND will do weird things.
JRiver will do all you need so check your settings & options for tag management during your sync. You don’t need an external tag editor with JRiver.
You can manipulate all files using the Library tools provided for rename, correcting, mangling.
Tags are updated using Library>Update Tags (from Library) function to write any changes to the tracks directly. Read up on tagging as it is very important. It can be used in bulk as well.
Comments:
Formats for my tracks are varied like 01, 01. 01 – 1-01. Each work and properly being indexed. My preference is 01<space>TrackName.flac
Formats like 01-TrackName DO NOT WORK. You need a space delimiter between the track number and trackname.
My path format is \Music\[Album Artist]\[Artist]\[Album]\[Track#] [Trackname]
Having a path >200 characters chokes & pukes COMAND and causes a hang & reboot
I use both SD card and USB SSD drive. Both are formatted using NTFS.
File formats on my media are flac, mp3 & m4a exclusively.
DFF, DSF formats will not be indexed and will result in no tag or album art being displayed. I use the encoder function to downgrade to 192KhZ flac.
How is your sync job setup? Here are some screen prints of my setup and yellow highlights which maybe you can check on yours.
Sync settings for the SD card
Formats for my tracks are varied like 01, 01. 01 – 1-01. Each work and properly being indexed. My preference is 01<space>TrackName.flac
Formats like 01-TrackName DO NOT WORK. You need a space delimiter between the track number and trackname.
Hmmmm. This is very interesting. I use an underscore between the track number and the track name. I will remove the underscore and replace it with a space to see if I can get a good resolution.
Additionally, and I mentioned this to grossmsj offline earlier this morning, I'm wondering if the disconnect is that MP3Tag appears to write track numbers to the 'TRACK' field. While this works for MP3s, FLACs appear to use Vorbis commenting and thus appear to need the track numbers written to the 'TRACKNUMBER' field. The FLACs that I have looked at are missing that field. I'm going to manually add it tonight and see what happens.
Either way, this is now my favorite thread...well, this one and the Mercedes Me thread where Rod tried for weeks to remotely connect to his car!
I use JRiver exclusively and not encountering this issue with voice & menu functions and never seen the tracks not in sequence of the album in COMAND. I am total AD&D about music files, path names and album art being correctly displayed! I have spent so many hours correcting & cleansing my library it's crazy to work properly with COMAND. It always comes down to ensuring the tags are correct and updated or else COMAND will do weird things.
JRiver will do all you need so check your settings & options for tag management during your sync. You don’t need an external tag editor with JRiver.
You can manipulate all files using the Library tools provided for rename, correcting, mangling.
Tags are updated using Library>Update Tags (from Library) function to write any changes to the tracks directly. Read up on tagging as it is very important. It can be used in bulk as well.
Comments:
Formats for my tracks are varied like 01, 01. 01 – 1-01. Each work and properly being indexed. My preference is 01<space>TrackName.flac
Formats like 01-TrackName DO NOT WORK. You need a space delimiter between the track number and trackname.
My path format is \Music\[Album Artist]\[Artist]\[Album]\[Track#] [Trackname]
Having a path >200 characters chokes & pukes COMAND and causes a hang & reboot
I use both SD card and USB SSD drive. Both are formatted using NTFS.
File formats on my media are flac, mp3 & m4a exclusively.
DFF, DSF formats will not be indexed and will result in no tag or album art being displayed. I use the encoder function to downgrade to 192KhZ flac.
How is your sync job setup? Here are some screen prints of my setup and yellow highlights which maybe you can check on yours.
Sync settings for the SD card
Tag settings
Rolling Stones example at source
Thank you very much MikeO3. I use JRiver for my music management. I've never used it to actually sync my USB drive because it's installed as a server on a dedicated computer and it's nearly impossible to get to the USB ports on it!
Now that I'm properly motivated, I'm giving this a try using your settings and the path format (cut and pasted from your email). Keeping my fingers crossed.
Nope.
Reformatted my USB stick to NTFS
Synched handheld via Jriver using the path: \Music\[Album Artist]\[Album]\
Filename was written as shown:
Ejected USB disk and put in my car. Started the car, files loaded. Initial sort Track List upon starting music:
01 Rocks Off
02 Rip this Joint
03 Shake Your Hips.
Then I went to Search>Artists>Rolling Stones and selected Exile On Main Street.
Selected Exile on Main Street and the track list is:
01 Rocks Off
02 Happy (the 10th track on the album).
Go to select by Folder and I get the track order:
01 Rocks Off
02 Rip this Joint
My copy of this album is exactly what it was when I downloaded it from iTunes in M4A mode.
When I view my Jeff Tweedy FLAC file I can see TrackNumber listed using Extended Tag view in MP3Tags. It does not show a value for Track in the left panel of the simple file view.
When I view Exile on Main Street (AAC, MP4) using simple file view I can see the integer values for the track. Using Extended Tag view in MP3Tags shows just the Track listing with the same integer value. No TrackNumber.
So both of these seem to be alright.
I also wrote a custom tag to the Tweedy FLAC album that would write "TRACK" as well as the already written "TRACKNUMBER". So when this file is viewed with extended Tag View it shows both Track and Tracknumber.
I don't see track numbers in COMAND, but I see them on the Windows 10 pc. They are also part of the file name, 01 TitleA, 02 TitleB, ... I'm using Exact Audio Copy to re-rip my music collection to flac. I already have wav files on disk but some of them have errors/spikes in them, thus the EAC choice. EAC is slow but it can correct errors using external sources.
Ah, I see says the blind man... I know what your talking about now as you had me puzzled. I put in pictures the problem I believe your trying to resolve.
When selecting an Album >> You see the tracks alphabetically and not track order as per the album tracks. I never really noticed because I mostly use playlists & random playing!!! No idea how to solve the problem unfortunately.
in COMAND Song 1 of 18 is All Down The Line however on the album real track 01 is Rocks Off and All Down The Line is really track 15.
The light went off when I scrolled with the wheel thing and the tracks went to a preceding album then I scrolled back to the tracks on Exile On Main Street... See in the following pictures that the track sequence is 11057 for Rocks Off and 11058 for Rip This Joint which are Track 01 & Track 02 on the album & file folder.
So we can attribute:
Selecting an Album sorts Alphabetically apparently.
Yep. That's the problem MikeO3. It's playing alphabetically. Even though it lists the files as 1, 2, 3, they aren't actually the first, second, and third song on the album.
You would also really notice this playing Dark Side of The Moon. Everything is out of sequence and it's just a mess.
This WAS a problem even for MP3s, but nycebo has the solution to that. And that is a big step forward.
At least I'm not crazy, although this problem is getting me there faster than I hoped.
Thanks for putting your efforts into this though!
I like where this tread is heading. I too would like to exploit COMAND as much as possible and have my music in the best accessible format.
Firstly I should preface this by stating that I have a W204 with COMAND NTG 4.5, whereas you have COMAND NTG 4.7. From what I have read previously, the backend of COMAND for music has not changed.
I too am a huge supporter of MP3tag, and is a mandatory part of the process of getting music loaded correctly. I use Windows Media Player for ripping which does 90% of the work, but it’s the 10% that it stuffs up that annoys me! That’s where MP3tag comes into play.
Until reading this thread, I was unaware that COMAND supported AAC. So trying to duplicate the problem of alphabetical listing of tracks on an album, I used iTunes to to rip m4a files from my Boz Scaggs “Hits!” CD (don’t have Silk Degrees, but it’s got Lido Shuffle so I’m good). So I opened the folder containing the m4a files with MP3tag and the tags were all good. I copied to USB and imported into COMAND. I cannot duplicate the alphabetical list of tracks in an album - mine show in the correct album sequence.
My filenames always start with a 2 digit track number (with a leading zero), and a single space as a delimiter in the filename - no dashes or underscores.
I wonder whether COMAND is sorting by “title” rather than “filename”, but makes no sense if it’s working for others. Is there a sort option in your version of COMAND?
Another thing I use MP3tag for is to put the year in the front of the album name, like “1983 Let’s Dance”, so when I search by album cover, I see all of David Bowie’s albums in chronological order.
I would ideally like playlists on the Music Register, but must be on the USB or SD card (with all the songs copied as well, even though they are already on the Music Register) - how crazy is that! Maybe this has changed with your version of COMAND.
I would love to know the COMAND disk partition naming structure and point the filenames in the playlist to the existing files in the Music Register. This is something I’ve been working on lately.
Cheers!
Last edited by MBpippo; 01-16-2019 at 11:44 PM.
Reason: spelling
Hmmmm. This is very interesting. I use an underscore between the track number and the track name. I will remove the underscore and replace it with a space to see if I can get a good resolution.
Additionally, and I mentioned this to grossmsj offline earlier this morning, I'm wondering if the disconnect is that MP3Tag appears to write track numbers to the 'TRACK' field. While this works for MP3s, FLACs appear to use Vorbis commenting and thus appear to need the track numbers written to the 'TRACKNUMBER' field. The FLACs that I have looked at are missing that field. I'm going to manually add it tonight and see what happens.
Either way, this is now my favorite thread...well, this one and the Mercedes Me thread where Rod tried for weeks to remotely connect to his car!
Don't take this the wrong way, but I do love you!!
2019 Dune Silver Metallic E-450 Mercedes Cabriolet NEW Mercedes 2020 GLC300 graphite gray SUV
I'm still trying to get my COMMAND to recognize my voice commands regarding songs on my I-phone music app. I can't imagine messing with the USB or SD card. Why does MB makes this so hard? On my previous Cadillac ATS, the CUE system would recognize my commands regardless if it were music on a stick or my I-phone......no fancy maneuvering!
I like where this tread is heading. I too would like to exploit COMAND as much as possible and have my music in the best accessible format.
Firstly I should preface this by stating that I have a W204 with COMAND NTG 4.5, whereas you have COMAND NTG 4.7. From what I have read previously, the backend of COMAND for music has not changed.
I too am a huge supporter of MP3tag, and is a mandatory part of the process of getting music loaded correctly. I use Windows Media Player for ripping which does 90% of the work, but it’s the 10% that it stuffs up that annoys me! That’s where MP3tag comes into play.
Until reading this thread, I was unaware that COMAND supported AAC. So trying to duplicate the problem of alphabetical listing of tracks on an album, I used iTunes to to rip m4a files from my Boz Scaggs “Hits!” CD (don’t have Silk Degrees, but it’s got Lido Shuffle so I’m good). So I opened the folder containing the m4a files with MP3tag and the tags were all good. I copied to USB and imported into COMAND. I cannot duplicate the alphabetical list of tracks in an album - mine show in the correct album sequence.
My filenames always start with a 2 digit track number (with a leading zero), and a single space as a delimiter in the filename - no dashes or underscores.
I wonder whether COMAND is sorting by “title” rather than “filename”, but makes no sense if it’s working for others. Is there a sort option in your version of COMAND?
Another thing I use MP3tag for is to put the year in the front of the album name, like “1983 Let’s Dance”, so when I search by album cover, I see all of David Bowie’s albums in chronological order.
I would ideally like playlists on the Music Register, but must be on the USB or SD card (with all the songs copied as well, even though they are already on the Music Register) - how crazy is that! Maybe this has changed with your version of COMAND.
I would love to know the COMAND disk partition naming structure and point the filenames in the playlist to the existing files in the Music Register. This is something I’ve been working on lately.
Cheers!
So this is interesting.
You don't have a problem with the M4as. Even if you back out of the song and come back in via Artist>Boz Scaggs>Hits? That's where it bites me. Not on the first listing but on the second entry in.
egonvdv and I exchanged files. I sent my files for Exile on Main Str. that didn't load correctly in my car and he sent me his files that load fine on his car. I could not get his files to list properly in my car. When he loaded my files they loaded in the correct order! (Thanks egon!).
So at least two variables. Variable 1: Egon loads his music via iTunes using DoubleTwist. If I just drag them over or use JRiver it doesnt work. Variable 2: Both Egon and you are outside the US?
I have no idea why either should matter. But I am wary that Gracenote has a role in this. They put it in the system for some reason, ostensibly to help us organize our music. I don't know if this is active outside the US.
MBPippo - Are you using a PC (Windows) or a Mac?
I've bumped this up to Mercedes Benz. When I contacted MBUSA their response was "Ask your dealer, he has access to MB technical support". So I sent this to my dealer.
If there are any MB technical people looking at this thread (say, Vic Viper, as an example) we could use some guidance on how COMAND reads and uses metadata. I would imagine MB is a very big organization and it can sometimes be difficult to get to the one person in the organization who really knows this stuff.
I'm still trying to get my COMMAND to recognize my voice commands regarding songs on my I-phone music app. I can't imagine messing with the USB or SD card. Why does MB makes this so hard? On my previous Cadillac ATS, the CUE system would recognize my commands regardless if it were music on a stick or my I-phone......no fancy maneuvering!
Why not just connect your iPhone via Car Play and ask Siri to do what you want with your music on the Music App?
Okay, I did some back and forth with naming convention and tag number convention last night. In short, FAILURE. The search by album stills results in an album track sort order by alphabetical name instead of track number with FLACs.
Here's what I tried:
Rename files names from '01-sampletrackname.flac' to '01 sampletrackname.flac'. Fail.
Edit all track numbers from '01' (with leading zeros) to '1' (no leading zeros). Fail.
Edit all track numbers from '01' (with leading zeros) to '1/10' (no leading zeros and total tracks). Fail.
Edit all track numbers from '01' (with leading zeros) to '01/10' (with leading zeros and total tracks). Fail.
Reformat SD to NTFS and try all the above again. Fail.
As source material, I used the files that grossmsj sent me as well as one of my own albums (I rip all jazz and classical to flac).
Also, to reiterate, I do NOT have this alphabetical album sort order problem with MP3s.
I have one more plan tonight and that is to manually create a TRACKNAME field for the FLAC files. I ran out of time after doing all of the above. If that fails, then I suspect that COMAND simply has issues with FLAC files.
Lastly, to confirm that there are some users that do not have this issue: are you able to go to the search menu, scroll down to album, scroll down to the album with FLAC files, click it, watch it bring up the tracks and ABSOLUTELY see them in album track number order (and correct track number order that is NOT 1,10,2,3,4,) and NOT in alphabetical order? If you are pulling up the album by going to FOLDER, then we already know that it works because it sorts by track name and we have solved for the issue by prepending the track number with leading zeros. Thanks.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I do love you!!
Right on. One of these days I'll buy you a beer when I'm next in TPA! Might even see if I can get you to drive your car around in an afternoon rainstorm (perish the thought!)
Okay, I did some back and forth with naming convention and tag number convention last night. In short, FAILURE. The search by album stills results in an album track sort order by alphabetical name instead of track number with FLACs.
Here's what I tried:
Rename files names from '01-sampletrackname.flac' to '01 sampletrackname.flac'. Fail.
Edit all track numbers from '01' (with leading zeros) to '1' (no leading zeros). Fail.
Edit all track numbers from '01' (with leading zeros) to '1/10' (no leading zeros and total tracks). Fail.
Edit all track numbers from '01' (with leading zeros) to '01/10' (with leading zeros and total tracks). Fail.
Reformat SD to NTFS and try all the above again. Fail.
As source material, I used the files that grossmsj sent me as well as one of my own albums (I rip all jazz and classical to flac).
Also, to reiterate, I do NOT have this alphabetical album sort order problem with MP3s.
I have one more plan tonight and that is to manually create a TRACKNAME field for the FLAC files. I ran out of time after doing all of the above. If that fails, then I suspect that COMAND simply has issues with FLAC files.
Lastly, to confirm that there are some users that do not have this issue: are you able to go to the search menu, scroll down to album, scroll down to the album with FLAC files, click it, watch it bring up the tracks and ABSOLUTELY see them in album track number order (and correct track number order that is NOT 1,10,2,3,4,) and NOT in alphabetical order? If you are pulling up the album by going to FOLDER, then we already know that it works because it sorts by track name and we have solved for the issue by prepending the track number with leading zeros. Thanks.
Sorry to hear this nycebo.
I also had no success with M4A (AAC) files.
I dusted off my old Mac, created a new iTunes Library and loaded it with Exile on Main Street. This is the same album egonvdv tested in his system in France. I ran DoubleTwist on a newly formatted (exFat) USB drive which synced that album to the USB drive. No success. In this case after backing out and selecting Artist>Rolling Stones>Exile on Main Street it loaded the files such that Happy (track #10) was the second song played.
Lastly, to confirm that there are some users that do not have this issue: are you able to go to the search menu, scroll down to album, scroll down to the album with FLAC files, click it, watch it bring up the tracks and ABSOLUTELY see them in album track number order (and correct track number order that is NOT 1,10,2,3,4,) and NOT in alphabetical order? If you are pulling up the album by going to FOLDER, then we already know that it works because it sorts by track name and we have solved for the issue by prepending the track number with leading zeros. Thanks.
So here's some pics...
The CD.
CD ripped with iTunes.
Contents of USB drive for COMAND import.
Search by Albums. Boz selected.
Album tracks in correct order.
Playing Lido Shuffle.
Back to Search by Albums.
Album tracks in correct order.
I notice on MikeO3's pics that COMAND drops the track number so they are therefore sorted alphabetically, which is what your problem is. I'm thinking this is going to be a firmware issue with COMAND.
i think gracenote is active here in France grossmsj.
however i have not tried to jsut stick YOUR album on the usb directly. will try this tomorrow & report back.
(will put both your and my copy )
From what I've read about Gracenote in the COMAND manual, Gracenote is only used to identity CDs put in the CD slot of your car - according to my version of COMAND. The Gracenote database is on the hard drive of your car and is updated in conjunction with navigation maps update performed by the MB dealer. The idea being that your COMAND display will show album art, track name, artist, etc, as this info is not contained on the actual CD.
No doubt about it, you are not having the problem I'm having, and its with an M4A container file (AAC encoded). It also seems you have a somewhat different version of COMAND as you mentioned.
My guess is it's a firmware issue too. From what I've seen, the system appears to read some of the more important metadata. For example, it seems it reads the tracknumber data because under some conditions it plays files in alphanumeric order based on track number (the 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4 order), and it reads the titles because it sorts those alphabetically under some conditions.
From what I've read, the MP3 container format with ID3 tags is most primitive and most widely accepted. Nycebo's scheme with leading zeros in track and filename fixes that problem. M4A is the next one up the sophistication level and that seems to work for you and egonvdv. I was hoping that would work here because I believe that container also supports ALAC which is lossless (like FLAC). Haven't seen any examples of people getting FLAC to work, but maybe nycebo can win that battle too.
Separately, I spoke to my dealer about this and sent him the URL to this thread. He said he'd buck it up to his factory representative for their attention. Hope that can get some MB eyes on it.
For the record, do you know if you have Gracenote on your system?
01-16-2019, 07:07 AM
