by Timpanogos Slim » Thu Oct 16, 2025 4:03 pm
My truck has a Kenwood DNX7100, a dvd/nav/mp3 head unit that is old enough to vote. Which is fine because the truck is much older.
I used to burn dvd+rw discs full of mp3 for it, but the optical drive has trouble ejecting now. So, I'm finally switching to USB, which it also supports.
Since it's from 2007, it's pretty dumb, and if i navigate by file folders, it plays in the order the files were written to the device (presumably it is reading the FAT and just going with whatever the order is there).
It did that with burned discs, too, of course, but due to the nature of how burning a data disc works, they were always in the numerical track order.
It also supports playlists, but the playlist functionality is less rich than file folder navigation. It's not possible to skip to the next playlist, for example, while it is possible to skip to the next file folder.
Since a lot of my music is in FLAC format, I'm using device sync to auto-transcode them to mp3, and my guess is that the files get copied over as soon as their conversion is complete, rather than in the order they entered the queue.
In the DNX7100, the usb device i synced to ends up showing the files in nowhere near the numerical track order, despite the filenames starting with the track number.
Someone is gonna say, doesn't kenwood have software for that? Not really, not for this unit. Their tool, for other head units, builds a database.
But if there is a program that will re-arrange the files so that they will appear in order in the HU, that could be fine too. I found one tool on sourceforge from 2009 that looked promising - Car MP3 Organizer - but it's designed for head units that treat a mass storage device as though it were a cd changer and does not appear to address the issue i have.
Are there any suggestions?
My truck has a Kenwood DNX7100, a dvd/nav/mp3 head unit that is old enough to vote. Which is fine because the truck is much older.
I used to burn dvd+rw discs full of mp3 for it, but the optical drive has trouble ejecting now. So, I'm finally switching to USB, which it also supports.
Since it's from 2007, it's pretty dumb, and if i navigate by file folders, it plays in the order the files were written to the device (presumably it is reading the FAT and just going with whatever the order is there).
It did that with burned discs, too, of course, but due to the nature of how burning a data disc works, they were always in the numerical track order.
It also supports playlists, but the playlist functionality is less rich than file folder navigation. It's not possible to skip to the next playlist, for example, while it is possible to skip to the next file folder.
Since a lot of my music is in FLAC format, I'm using device sync to auto-transcode them to mp3, and my guess is that the files get copied over as soon as their conversion is complete, rather than in the order they entered the queue.
In the DNX7100, the usb device i synced to ends up showing the files in nowhere near the numerical track order, despite the filenames starting with the track number.
Someone is gonna say, doesn't kenwood have software for that? Not really, not for this unit. Their tool, for other head units, builds a database.
But if there is a program that will re-arrange the files so that they will appear in order in the HU, that could be fine too. I found one tool on sourceforge from 2009 that looked promising - Car MP3 Organizer - but it's designed for head units that treat a mass storage device as though it were a cd changer and does not appear to address the issue i have.
Are there any suggestions?