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Old March 31st, 2022, 03:11 PM
Total Noob Total Noob is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 578
Downloading in a specific order?

I binge serial podcasts like "Serial" in the car (2018 Camry with low end entertainment package) by downloading the episodes at home each week as they come out and then cut and pasting them to a 4G Lexar keychain stick memory card every so often (typically after binging something else).

The podcasts invariably have file names that reflect the drop date or the episode number, either overall or for that particular run. The file names go something like this: Episode_01_First this happened Episode_02_Then that happened or 202203310923A_NPR_Here_is_todays_top_story.

That makes them easy to organize in File Explorer or whatever it is currently called. And of course they are preorganized by meta creation date, download date, and so on, and I do keep all that metadata.

Here's the problem: the car will only play episodes in the order they were fully downloaded to the stick memory. There's nothing I can do to stop that; there's no play listing capability and no File Explorer capability. I am literally stuck with the order in which the files moved from my download computer to the stick.

And cut and pasting those episodes in sets of 20 or so at a time results invariably results them being moved out of sequence. Last time I tried it, there were 27 episodes of "Freaknomics" to move and the first one to go over was the twentieth one in the sequence. Then it picked up the alpha and date created sequences after that, and though I suspect they moved sequentially, there were probably some occasions in which a particularly long episode completed the download to the stick after the next one in listening order and may thus be out of sequence.

Before asking the ultimate question, I know some of you are considering alternative strategies, such as CD (my car doesn't have one) or phone (a major hassle to playlist episodes just so on VLC, and it doesn't always work, and some episodes simply evaporate, and a major distraction to try to find the next episode while driving if not playlisted).

There's also the possibility of downloading the episodes directly to the stick, but that requires me to pull the stick from the car every week, and I can lose my place on the rest of what is on the stick or corrupt the files of half-heard episodes.

Or I could try to chase my tail by fooling around with the order on the car stereo as I am driving or perhaps after pulling over, but dangerous and a hassle.

So these are DOA.

What remains is shifting the files from computer to stick in the specific order they need to be heard in, which is one at a time unless someone has a better idea how to move a lot in bulk and make them land in the one and only acceptable order.

Thanks.
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