iTunes – Filenames with Track Numbers
Yes, I use Linux for most stuff, but I organise my music using iTunes under Windows. I’ve done it this way for years.
Last night I brought the music system in my car into the 21st century by installing a Pioneer DEH-P4100SD. As well as CD and radio it’s got an aux in, iPod compatibility, USB and an SD card slot. I picked up a 16GB SD card for £20 and stuck a few tracks on there. Unfortunately, even though the head unit supports ID3 tags for artist/album/song names, it only supports browsing based on filename. This had the effect of playing albums in alphabetical order! Heresy against the Gods of Metal!
This is where iTunes comes in. It was storing my music without the track number in the filename. In iTunes 8 there is no longer an option for this, so I was a bit baffled as to what to do. It turned out to be very simple… iTunes 8 actually defaults to including the track number, so all I had to do was reimport my library:
Go into Edit->Preferences and select the Advanced tab.
Uncheck “Keep My iTunes Music Folder Organized”.
Exit preferences
Go back into the preferences and recheck “Keep My iTunes Music Folder Organized”.
iTunes will then add the track numbers onto all of your MP3s! Surprisingly it only took a couple of minutes for 3,000+ songs.