Quote:
Originally Posted by JakesFriend
I had the same thought, and made a small stab at it. I ripped a CD to my computer to get music files whose metadata was uniform, then imported the files into my Reader. As expected, the Reader made one album with all songs within it.
Next, I deleted that music from the Reader, dragged a song from an entirely different album into the ripped music, then re-imported the files. The Reader did not include the extra song with the album (it placed it at the album level by itself), so there's no quick way to fake out the album metadata.
I long ago removed my metadata editor, and am not certain I want to get another -- just because this small problem seems to be getting larger!
And if it works (as I think it will), this means I would need to do this for any and all music I load on my Reader in the future if I want to play all songs.
So it seems Sony only went half-way with its album-song set up.
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JakesFriend, I did a test too. I agree there is no quick way, but at least it is a workaround. What I discovered is that you can use the album feature to create custom playlists if you will. That's pretty neat! Although I still agree that you have the right to your original rant. It is a reasonable expectation that a next-generation model should add rather than remove features from the previous models. Here is what I did in my test:
Round 1:
First, I picked a mix of songs from different albums and artists. I also made copies of my songs so I wouldn't alter the originals and have to worry about restoring the correct info. Then I edited the tags to change only the album name and the cover artwork. I also sequentially numbered the tracks to force-order them so I wouldn't have multiple # 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. I drag-and-dropped the files over to my ereader. It created an album filled with all of the songs just like you want.
Round 2:
I picked some new songs. I changed the album name and cover artwork to be the same as from Round 1. I did not delete anything from my ereader. I drap-and-dropped the new songs to my ereader to ADD to the original list. I did not change the track number this time because I wanted to test what would happen. I thought it might auto-load them at the end. Instead my new songs kept their original Track #s and got mixed into the Round 1 group. So instead of Track 1, 2, 3, etc I now see Track 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 (multiples). Hope that makes sense.
Round 3:
I deleted the tracks from Round 2 only from my ereader. I left the tracks from Round 1 on there. Then I took the songs from Round 2 and changed the Track #s to be sequential following the batch from Round 1. This time drag-and-drop put the songs at the end of the album list as expected.
I guess my conclusion is to keep the album name the same to force it group your songs together. If you want to add or delete songs, then you don't have to retransfer the whole batch every time. Just make sure that you keep the same album name, and it will group the new songs with the old ones. The interesting part to my testcase was that I had to change the track # to force order the songs. But, if you just want a mix and don't care about order, then that extra step shouldn't matter.