I have been able to load my music library to a USB Flash drive. In the media function, I primarily select playlist for my driving entertainment. When I want to play an album, and select album in the search function, they appear sorted by artist? I don't want to scroll through the album list to find the one I want. Other than keyword search, is there a setting to sort albums by album name? Thanks for your response.

 

 

Thanks. All music is in folders, the problem is in the search function when looking for an album. I don't have this problem when using CarPlay on my iPhone.

 

This sounds like the music might be tagged wrong. Did you rip the CDs yourself or did you purchase the music from iTunes. If it's from iTunes it's probably tagged correctly.
Another angle, perhaps related, is how the music is sorted into the folders. The usual default is artist/album/title, which again is how it would be tagged if you got it from iTunes.
On the other hand, if every single album is listed by artist, it sounds systematic. So there might be a computer glitch involved somewhere.
When I list albums, they are sorted by album, alphanumerically.

 

Do you think the computer glitch might be on my home computer, I use an Apple Macintosh, or in the Comand system?

 

I don't know. I'm not sure I understand the problem exactly. If it is 'simply' bad tagging (the ways I'm suspecting) I could tell right away by looking at one file.

I'm getting the impression that many music players, like an ipod or a iphone are pretty tolerant of errors, whereas COMAND seems to need to be fed in a pretty specific way. But I don't really understand the problem exactly.
What file format are these? M4A, mp3
Did you rip these yourself from a CD or buy them as digital files from a place like iTunes?

 

I have both ripped files and iTunes files. Thanks for your feedback, but, I think the problem is gone for
now.
I stripped the flash drive of all music last night. I then reloaded my iTunes library and today the albums are showing up in alpha numeric order and not by artist name. I can live with that. On an earlier post, someone suggested it might be a Gracenotes thing?

 

From their website and other stuff on the internet, Here is what Gracenote does:
It takes data from a media source and reads data from those files. It has several different algorithms to check these data against possible matches in its database. As it pulls in data it creates a SQL database of all metadata it needs. From what I can tell, once it finds a match it uses its own set of metadata for the SQL database. But it may also use metadata from the actual source file.
The SQL database and it's software allow you to search it's database in a number of ways. You can search by album, artist, folder, Genre, etc. It's software enables voice recognition and it can be pretty sophisticated. For example if you asked it to play P Diddy or Puff Daddy, it would play albums by Sean Combs. So it is pretty sophisticated that way.
I can only assume that's what is behind our systems, as it is proudly advertised as Powered by Gracenote. So COMAND is software that interfaces the car to Gracenote, I suppose.

Why it is so damn difficult to get this sophisticated system to play songs in the right order (at least in the US) is beyond me.

But it seems some important points would follow:
1) If it uses some of our files metadata, then it can make a difference in how songs are presented. That's something we sort of control, but its a bit of black box.
2) If it creates a SQL database, it stands to reason that you may need to refresh this database as data change. The good side is it doesn't have to create the database every time you turn on the car. But if it retains data, it could retain outdated data. Hence a need to refresh the SQL database. I've reached out to Gracenote to get some insight here. But they may not even respond to an enduser.
3) If it is mostly using its database and algorithms to present what we see, it may be difficult to override those views by our attempts to change metadata. We can't control that.
4) When you use CarPlay you are probably using Apple's media player. The iPhone reads your metadata in a way it is very comfortable with and creates output you expect. When you use COMAND, its Gracenote's game. Same set of data, different databases and algorithms.
5) I can't understand why it works for some people and not for others if Gracenote is so sophisticated.