tylerdave.com

Last week I purchased a 2010 Honda Insight and I absolutely love it. One of the features I was excited about was the USB port in the center console. Rather than waste an MP3 player / iPod by leaving it plugged in you can simply load your MP3s onto a cheap USB thumb drive and have access to a ton of music right from the stereo controls. Yesterday I loaded up an 8GB USB drive and quickly discovered my only complaint about the car: the seemingly random order in which MP3s are played.

At first I thought that they may be in alphabetical order, but that didn’t make sense as all of my file names are already prefixed with the track number. After a little research I found that the built-in MP3 player plays the files in the order in which they are actually stored on the drive (in the FAT)! I then thought there must be some option to change the sort order but I was sorely disappointed. This was the behavior of some of the first (cheap) MP3 players in the early ’00s — it is inexcusable in late 2009.

I found a forum thread discussing the problem where it was suggested that you could use a utility called FATSort to reorder the FAT to be in alphabetical order. This seemed like a viable work-around but the utility didn’t recognize my FAT32-formatted drive. I then tried another Linux utility also called FATSort but it reported errors on the drive and couldn’t continue.

Finally a solution:

I was finally able to find another utility that serves the same purpose: DriveSort. I verified that it works on Windows 7 so it should work with Vista and XP as well and it supports both FAT16 and FAT32 formatted drives.

Before following these instructions make sure to make a complete backup of any drives with which you’re going to be working.

Download and run the program and then do the following:

• Click “Disk” -> “Open” and select the proper disk
• Click the arrow on the “Sort current folder” button and check “Long name sort” and “Subdirectories”
• Click the arrow on the “Save current folder” button and check “Subdirectories”
• Click “Folder” -> “Sort”
• Click “Folder” -> “Save”
• Click “Disk” -> “Close”

Now the files should be stored in alphabetical order within the FAT so the Insight’s MP3 player should play them in the proper order.

I still think it’s ridiculous that you have to use this hack to get the player to work as expected but at least there’s this work-around.