Fix 4 Sensus Song Track Listings

[SnineT]

Hello,

Recently picked up an S90 and had issues with compilation albums showing as 15 albums from one album folder, spent hours m3u creating only to run into the 100 playlist barrier resulting in only the first 100 playlists showing up in Playlist option,

So how did I finally get round it? well having read numerous historic threads on the issue where none really sorted it for me I accidentally found a 100 % working fix,

Here's how to do it,

Get Mp3tag and install it on the PC

Assemble your albums into a group folder each (Beach Boys-Greatest Hits-Hit the Sand-Brian's Favourite Hits) (Pink Floyd-Umag-Dark Side-) etc

Now drag one whole individual Artist folder into Mp3tag

Select all files

In the field Genre select one for all of that artist in your folder and save it

In the Artist field write the artist name properly to how you want it to look and save it

Now the magic

CAUTION - Don't edit song names or artist ones that you want to keep and don't appear in the two crucial fields

You have two fields, one is called Artist and the other the Title

You will find by swapping them over so what was populated with lots of different names becomes one artist by cut & pasting then saving them the Sensus will read Artist first and base it's listing on that regardless of the rest of the tag, you only need to cut n paste the artists variable names, if you cut the album title once and put it in the top slot of Artist you can save it (select all - make sure the correct album title is in Artist in the lefthand boxes) and save and it will populate the lot for you

Now when you load up sensus all your music files will list properly and as complete albums that play 1-10 in order as long as you've tagged them correctly

I went a step further and re-numbered all my double albums so they play through as one album in one folder, you must make sure the track numbers are edited to match though

If you do this you get all your genres in order, track numbers in order of play, and no variations in how the artist name is written, so Robby Williams or robbie Williams becomes Robbie Williams throughout, the more inline with each other the album info is the more likely you won't see a 10 track cd listing as two folders with 8 tracks in one and two in the other

For best control edit offline, if you edit online you get everybody else's prior mistakes and need to start again

It's intensive but worth it, to make it faster do away with artist name and simply replace it with the album title, save and you're done,

Once you familiarise yourself with the various functions in Mp3tag you'll be able to fine tune everything even better, it gives you 3 choices for each function, Keep - Blank or the cd artist & title in various states of spelling, choose the best one for you

Hope this is an easier and better explained way to get your music in a readable order.


You will find this word for word at another Volvo forum, I joined that one without realising it was an American site so I'm shipping my 3 help posts over to here for more localised interaction.

[MarkF17]

Hello and thank you for taking the time to post this workaround. Not wanting to appear rude, and I really appreciate your post, but I cannot seem to work out from your suggestion exactly what to do. The instructions read as one long sentence and is difficult to understand the actions required to make this work. Could you take a look over your comments for me and refine the instructions, apologies if it's me and clear to everyone else! Thank you.

CAUTION - Don't edit song names or artist ones that you want to keep and don't appear in the two crucial fields

You have two fields, one is called Artist and the other the Title

You will find by swapping them over so what was populated with lots of different names becomes one artist by cut & pasting then saving them the Sensus will read Artist first and base it's listing on that regardless of the rest of the tag, you only need to cut n paste the artists variable names, if you cut the album title once and put it in the top slot of Artist you can save it (select all - make sure the correct album title is in Artist in the lefthand boxes) and save and it will populate the lot for you

[SnineT]

Originally Posted by MarkF17

Hello and thank you for taking the time to post this workaround. Not wanting to appear rude, and I really appreciate your post, but I cannot seem to work out from your suggestion exactly what to do. The instructions read as one long sentence and is difficult to understand the actions required to make this work. Could you take a look over your comments for me and refine the instructions, apologies if it's me and clear to everyone else! Thank you.

CAUTION - Don't edit song names or artist ones that you want to keep and don't appear in the two crucial fields

You have two fields, one is called Artist and the other the Title

You will find by swapping them over so what was populated with lots of different names becomes one artist by cut & pasting then saving them the Sensus will read Artist first and base it's listing on that regardless of the rest of the tag, you only need to cut n paste the artists variable names, if you cut the album title once and put it in the top slot of Artist you can save it (select all - make sure the correct album title is in Artist in the lefthand boxes) and save and it will populate the lot for you

No I understand why this might not read straightforward.


The reason not to delete things is if you do it can sometimes leave you with a album that has a name but nothing more than the track numbers, the Sensus unfortunately reads things back to front i.e it sees the song before the album hence why to swap the fields over hence why so many people struggle with it, doing what I wrote tricks it into re-filing in a more organised way, sometimes you just have to accept you're not going to see the song name etc but being able to locate the whole album in one folder at least means you have it available to you rather than digging around for it, it's also worth mentioning the an album say The Eagles Hotel California written in the rip as 01 the Eagles will split from the next track written 02 The Eagles or 03 The eagles etc, when you load your CD in to rip it so you can use it in the car that doesn't have a cd player and you rely on Gracenote etc to tag it for you it will sometimes tag a 10 track UK cd with a database from a 12 track Japanese import etc which than can throw the track listing and song titles all over the place, my method works best for compilations as you can add say 24 songs to one folder and as long as you re-tag it all the same in the album, artist, genre, year, fields you should end up with one complete album within a folder which will then play as an original cd would, you need to add track numbers to them or they default to the alphabet. It's a while since I did it myself so I'm a bit cloudy on it without the tag program sat in front of me.

[Sotosound]

Originally Posted by SnineT

Hello,

Recently picked up an S90 and had issues with compilation albums showing as 15 albums from one album folder, spent hours m3u creating only to run into the 100 playlist barrier resulting in only the first 100 playlists showing up in Playlist option,

So how did I finally get round it? well having read numerous historic threads on the issue where none really sorted it for me I accidentally found a 100 % working fix,

Here's how to do it,

Get Mp3tag and install it on the PC

Assemble your albums into a group folder each (Beach Boys-Greatest Hits-Hit the Sand-Brian's Favourite Hits) (Pink Floyd-Umag-Dark Side-) etc

Now drag one whole individual Artist folder into Mp3tag

Select all files

In the field Genre select one for all of that artist in your folder and save it

In the Artist field write the artist name properly to how you want it to look and save it

Now the magic

CAUTION - Don't edit song names or artist ones that you want to keep and don't appear in the two crucial fields

You have two fields, one is called Artist and the other the Title

You will find by swapping them over so what was populated with lots of different names becomes one artist by cut & pasting then saving them the Sensus will read Artist first and base it's listing on that regardless of the rest of the tag, you only need to cut n paste the artists variable names, if you cut the album title once and put it in the top slot of Artist you can save it (select all - make sure the correct album title is in Artist in the lefthand boxes) and save and it will populate the lot for you

Now when you load up sensus all your music files will list properly and as complete albums that play 1-10 in order as long as you've tagged them correctly

I went a step further and re-numbered all my double albums so they play through as one album in one folder, you must make sure the track numbers are edited to match though

If you do this you get all your genres in order, track numbers in order of play, and no variations in how the artist name is written, so Robby Williams or robbie Williams becomes Robbie Williams throughout, the more inline with each other the album info is the more likely you won't see a 10 track cd listing as two folders with 8 tracks in one and two in the other

For best control edit offline, if you edit online you get everybody else's prior mistakes and need to start again

It's intensive but worth it, to make it faster do away with artist name and simply replace it with the album title, save and you're done,

Once you familiarise yourself with the various functions in Mp3tag you'll be able to fine tune everything even better, it gives you 3 choices for each function, Keep - Blank or the cd artist & title in various states of spelling, choose the best one for you

Hope this is an easier and better explained way to get your music in a readable order.


You will find this word for word at another Volvo forum, I joined that one without realising it was an American site so I'm shipping my 3 help posts over to here for more localised interaction.

In my P3 V70, the way that music tracks on my memory sticks are organised depends upon how they're organised as files on my Windows PC.

So, for me, top level is a folder called "Music".

Within this is a separate folder for each album artist, e.g. "Beatles", "Stevie Wonder", "Queen" etc. The artist-specific folder with the most albums in it is the folder for the artist called "Various Artists".

Within each "artist" folder is a folder for each album by that artist.

Within each album-specific folder is a set of files, one per track, normally sorted by track number.

So, using my V70's Sensus screen and either the thumbwheel or rotary control I effectively scroll and click up and down the file structure to select the correct artist, album, and track to play.

When a selected track is being played, the V70 displays metadata for that track.

Metadata is "data about data'. In this case the music is the data and the metadata consists of track number, artist, title etc.

That metadata is, however, embedded in the individual file for the track. It is unconnected to the names of the Windows folders that I use for navigation, and it can't be seen using Windows File Explorer.

Only tools like MP3tag can display this metadata because they look inside the individual music files.

So I can organise my albums as I wish using Windows File Explorer, but I can only alter individual track data using a specialised tool such as MP3tag.

That's the P3 Sensus version of things.

How does it work for SPA-platform vehicles?

[SnineT]

It's all about the meta data Soto, this is what causes track 3 to drift off into it's own folder. Iirc when I first got the Volvo I simply copied my collection onto another stick for the car and when I had loaded it into the 2016- Sensus they were all jumbled up where they had been all in order on anything else I using to read the stick.

[Sotosound]

Originally Posted by SnineT

It's all about the meta data Soto, this is what causes track 3 to drift off into it's own folder. Iirc when I first got the Volvo I simply copied my collection onto another stick for the car and when I had loaded it into the 2016- Sensus they were all jumbled up where they had been all in order on anything else I using to read the stick.

It sounds as though your S90 builds its own index of the tracks using track metadata, and not using folder structures or filenames.

Now, that's worth knowing....

[SnineT]

Originally Posted by Sotosound

It sounds as though your S90 builds its own index of the tracks using track metadata, and not using folder structures or filenames.

Now, that's worth knowing....

That's exactly what it was doing, totally ignoring folder structures.

[SnineT]

I should also mention a lot of mine I ripped from vinyl with a USB turntable, I had a wall of them to get through and it took months what with having to split the tracks with Audicity after a complete side was sent to the PC.

[Zhoshua Bawerman]

Hello. I got the car from my grandfather in fairly good condition and I do not want to sell it. But the radio does not work in the car. Let me know if it is possible to change the radio. Preferably Android. For example, I bought a radio with a large screen for my old BMW, as in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHsUgOB_YCE

[Sotosound]

Originally Posted by SnineT

I should also mention a lot of mine I ripped from vinyl with a USB turntable, I had a wall of them to get through and it took months what with having to split the tracks with Audicity after a complete side was sent to the PC.

Months? I can believe that! Some techie people will say that it's easy-peasy, but they won't talk about the time that it takes.

I've always shied away from doing needle drops because: -

1) The time and effort needed per record to get from vinyl to a clean digital file complete with metadata, which is massively greater than when ripping CDs - as you've already indicated.

2) The sheer volume of work required, given that most of my vinyl collection is on single (~8,500) rather than than album (~1,000-ish).

3) The worry that if I upgraded my vinyl playback system in any way, i.e. turntable, tone-arm, cartridge, phono preamp etc. then I'd need to do it all over again.

Instead, for digitally-stored music, I've focused upon CD plus the occasional downloaded MP3; and fixing my digital rips has been enough of a distraction all by itself.

Since my mileage has plummeted since the pandemic began, my need for portable music in digital form has also greatly reduced, and I suspect that my vinyl music will now remain permanently as vinyl-only, even though I'm now unlikely to upgrade my vinyl playback gear any further.

Having said all of that, I must try a needle drop, if only to see whether or not it can improve the sound on some of my rarer and rougher-sounding singles, i.e. wherein the single mix is either unavailable or very expensive in digital form, and wherein they were acquired in a very much 'used' condition.