Hi Guys,
Hopefully you can hope me with some misunderstanding I appear to have with user playlists and virtual feeds.
Heres what Im trying to do:
Import a audiobook that is stored in a folder on my SD card and play back the files in the correct order.
Heres what goes wrong:
I import the folder of files by creating a virtual feed. The first problem is that it organises by name with means that track 10 is ordered after track 1 rather than track 2. If Doggcatcher looked at track numbers they would be ordered correctly because the files have correct id3 tags, but it appears there's no way to organise the files in the feed any other way.
So to fix this issue I create a new user playlist and organise the files correctly. In the audio tab this playlist is selected and I would expect these tracks to be played in order. However once one track is finished it plays the next file from the virtual feed (which is not the next file in the playlist). You can see this in the playing tab. I'm listing to track 8 on CD 1 in this picture and would expect track 9 to play next. However as you can see, CD4 track 4 is up next.
So what am I doing wrong? How can I organise files in a virtual feed and listen to them sequentially?
I'ts on Eric's to do list for DC to use id3 tags for virtual episodes to determine the title sequence - http://mantis.snoggdoggler.com/view.php?id=1540.
Thanks WayneC, this feature would definitely solve my problem. Hopefully we'll see it in the near future.
You should be able to do that by naming your files so they are *alphabetically* in the order that you want. I'm guessing at your filenames but this is the general idea.
01-something
02-something
03-something
...
10-something
11-something
Thanks eric, you should be able to see a screenshot of the filenames in my original post. They are track 1.mp3, track2.mp3, track 3.mp3, track 4.mp3 etc. As you can see it orders them incorrectly. I may be able to rename them as you suggest, I just didnt want to have to rename all my files for several books. For now Im using a different app for audio books.
With regards to the user playlist not working for the virtual feed, what am I misunderstanding here? Do they just not work with virtual feeds?
Cheers
Dave
Yup, so renaming them track 01.mp3 would get the sort order working correctly, but admittedly it's a pain to rename all the files.
Is the user playlist the currently selected playlist or is it the virtual playlist...sound like the virtual?
Yeah this is maybe where I'm going wrong. I click the audio tab, I click the top bar and select my user playlist and then I hit play on the first entry (bottom item) in the list in the playlist that appears. Is this correct way to make it the currently selected playlist?
Despite doing this is warns me "The active playlist is not the virtual playlist.If you want auto play to play virtual feed episode next, please change the playlist to the virtual playlist".
You are doing it the right way, but I need to get rid of that warning. It shouldn't display if you are including virtual episodes in your current playlist. I added a bug for that - http://mantis.snoggdoggler.com/view.php?id=1570
Thanks for submitting that. I think Ive got to the bottom of my confusion. The playlist seems to play from the top down and I was expecting it to play from the bottom up like the feeds do. Either that or I hit the sorting button and reversed the ordering?
So manually reversing the order of the playlist seems to have fixed it (the sort button only changes how its displayed not how its played).
Thanks for the feedback everyone. I looking forward to id3 support, that will make this a lot simpler in future ;)
Has there been any movement on this feature? I'm guessing no because it's been on the radar for almost a year. But, it would be soooo helpful. I end up merging a lot of podcasts together that have Hour 1, Hour 2, etc into one single file. The ability for Doggcatcher to read from the ID3 tags to sort the virtual feed (so that I can see guests, content matter, etc.), rather than filename alone, would be awesome.
Nope not yet, have you tried using a user playlist...seems like that would be a quicker way get them in the right order (if that's why you're merging the files).