E465 Error handling Duplicate Album Names and Other Issues

[Lucky13ESP]

First off, I've found this site both informative and entertaining and I greatly appreciate its existence. I've been a longtime lurker who finally was not able to find the answer to his question on ABI so I figured I'd register. I'm filling my girlfriend's father's E465 with MP3s ripped from his CD collection. Basically, I follow this process...

CD>>EAC>>FLAC>>foobar>>MP3>>Picard>>MP3Tag (cleaning up anything)>>Winamp>>E465
(yes I know EAC can be made to output FLAC and MP3 simultaneously)

I've run into the following problems...

1. He has many albums titled "Greatest Hits." The Sony treats them all as one album when searching by album. Furthermore, it plays the first track of each album, then the second, and so on. Is there any way to fix this behavior besides renaming all the albums to include the artist name?
2. The Sony play multi-disc albums wrong, again playing all the tracks tagged 1, then those tagged 2, then those tagged 3, etc. Does it not read the discnumber tag? Is there anyway around this without renumbering all the tracks?
3. I prefer to search by album artist. Is this possible on the Sony?

I hope someone can shed some light on these issues. Thanks in advance.
~Lucky

[CrowdAds]

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

Unfortunately, when it comes to the issue with "Greatest Hits" albums, the only solution I've found is the one that you mentioned. I've not only had this problem with "Greatest Hits" albums, but in other cases when two (or more) artists release albums with the same name (examples: The Flirts and the Carpenters both released albums named "Made In America" and Michelle Wright and the Carpenters both released albums named "Now And Then").

When it comes to album names, I prefer each album to have a unique name just to avoid confusion. Putting the album artist after the album's title is a simple way to do this, and much less confusing that others ways I've tried (such as putting a unique number after the album's name when two or more albums have the same name).

As far as I know, Sony players don't read the disc number tag. I've handled this issue two ways: (1) renumbering the tracks (as you mentioned) or (2) including the disc number after the album's name. Both ways have worked for me, but my preference is to just renumber the tracks, I find that much easier to work with.

One way to search for album artists is to search by folders. I use MediaMonkey to load the files on my player, and I have it arrange the tracks on my player into folders as follows:

Album Artist >> Album >> Two-Digit Track Number - Song Title

This makes it easy to access my music by the album artist when searching by folder.

I hope this helps, sorry I couldn't be much help with the first two issues.

[Lucky13ESP]

Thank you for your quick response. I was hoping there was another way to deal with the first two issues but it seems I may just have to do some selective retagging.

As for using MM to transfer, do you know what plugin/dll is used by MM with the E465? I was thinking that maybe it is compatible with Winamp so I don't have to install one more piece of software. Winamp does the transfers fine but I can't find a way to fine tune the folder structure like you suggested. If anyone has any insight, I'd love to hear it. Thanks again.

~Lucky