Album Tracks Out of Order? Here's The Fix

[Jason Dunn]

<img border="0" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//zt/auto/1212008126.usr1.png" /><br /><br />Have you see the above problem with your Zune music library? I've seen it on quite a few of my albums, and I was having a really hard time figuring out what was going on - why was it listing the tracks out of order? I dug deeper into the metadata and discovered something interesting: if the metadata lists the &quot;Disc&quot; field as zero (0) instead of one (1), it will show those tracks before Disc 1 Track 1. I'd never had this problem before, so it's something that the Zune 2.5 software does differently than Windows Media Player 11. <MORE /><br /><br /><img border="0" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//zt/auto/1212008142.usr1.png" /><br /><br />The fix then is to select your track(s), right-click, select EDIT, and change the value for DISC from 0 to 1. What if you have this problem on more than a few tracks? That's the situation I found myself in: only about 10% of my songs were correctly tagged as &quot;Disc 1&quot;. Unfortunately the Zune multi-album editing interface doesn't allow you to change the DISC metadata tag, so you need a better tool for the job: go download a free copy of <a href="http://www.mediamonkey.com">MediaMonkey</a> and use it to change the DISC metadata tag in batch mode. Point it at all your music, press CONTROL+A to select all your tunes, press SHIFT+ENTER to open the metadata editor, put a &quot;1&quot; inside the disc field, check off the box next to that field, and click OK. Give it some time - it's pretty fast, but if you have 1000's of tracks, it might take 10 minutes or more.<br /><br />What's that? You have songs that really <em>are </em>part of disc two? It's probably easiest to change all your music to disc one in batch mode, then go back and manually change the disc two tracks to...disc two. Or, do what I do: create separate folders for multi-disc collections so that the folder and album title says &quot;Disc Two&quot; but the tracks are really from the same disc.<br /><br /><em>Jason Dunn owns and operates <a target="_blank" href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com">Thoughts Media Inc.</a>, a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys <a target="_blank" href="http://photos.jasondunn.com">photography</a>, mobile devices, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.jasondunn.com">blogging</a>, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog.<br /></em>

[Adam Krebs]

Yeah, the problem's really annoying, but fortunately you can use the multi-edit feature of the Zune software to change this up. If you select songs from more than one album, just use the Edit tool and change only the Disc field (which is greyed out but should be usable). No need for third-party tools!

[rzanology]

the way i fixed it was to sort the song by album in song listing pain on the right. lol....that drove me craaaaaaaazy for days before i figured it out.

[aaronwe]

Any idea how to mirror this behavior on the Zune itself?

While it's great being able sort a box set by disc in the Zune software, the Zune doesn't follow that sorting. The tracks get listed 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, etc.

The only workarounds I can come up with are splitting each disc out as a separate album, or manually re-numbering each track so that (for example) 4 discs of 15 tracks each are numbered 1-60.

[Jason Dunn]

Yeah, the problem's really annoying, but fortunately you can use the multi-edit feature of the Zune software to change this up.

Ah, I see where I went wrong - I was trying to edit the albums, but you have to select and right-click on the songs themselves to get the option to edit the track. Crazy.

[Jason Dunn]

The only workarounds I can come up with are splitting each disc out as a separate album...

Yeah, I think that's the best approach and that's how I do it now.

[Talyn]

Anyone know if this is doable from mp3tag? I've tried adding the DISCNUMBER tag but when I check from the Zune software, I'm not seeing a change.

[Talyn]

mp3tag can indeed fix this. I made a small addition for it to Shawn Oster's Zune source script for mp3tag, which he added to his official scripts.