USB track order

[Required]

My 2014 PCM seems to have a curious problem when playing from a USB device.  The first time I played anything it started somewhere in the middle of an album.  I concluded that the track numbers in the ID3 tags were incorrect, so I spent a considerable amount of time confirming track numbers on 3 GiB of music.  With no result.

It looks like the track number tags are ignored and PCM plays tracks in alphabetical order.  I'm pretty sure that even as long ago as 2014 there were thousands of music programs that knew about track numbers.  Maybe it's the German engineering principle - Ve believe zat ze mann is ze servant of ze machine (see Peter Ustinov's Gibraltar Grand Prix).

It seems that you can enforce track ordering by creating a playlist for an album, which is a bit of a hack, and makes it harder to search for an album.  Also, of course, you can play the tracks in random order, but this doesn't work too well when the order matters, as is the case with most classical music.

[Jon61]

I don't think Porsche put most of their efforts into designing their ICE equipment, either in terms of its quality or its ease of use. I also think there is more than one way of selecting music on the PCM, which doesn't necessarily help. The PCM builds some sort of database of the tracks it has access to, based on the ID3 tags, and I think this database is what it uses if you ask it to 'Find Music'. I never select music this way though, and always play music by folder (by selecting 'Track List', and then going up the hierarchy to other folders for different albums or artists), which it sounds as if is what you are also doing. For me, this works very well, but that's because all my MP3 filenames are automaticaly prefixed by the track number (so a file may be called eg "01 Elephant Stone.mp3") so they are automaticaly played in correct track order by default. (My files also have ID3 tags which are used for display purposes but are not used for selecting tracks.)

I use iTunes to rip CDs and maintain my music library on a PC before I copy it elsewhere (for historic reasons, not that I would necessarily choose it nowadays), and I'm not sure if the track-number prefixes are something I've selected in the settings or whether it's the default behaviour, but it may be worth exploring if there's an easy way to get whatever system you use to do similarly. I do find that it makes it easier to play the MP3 files in the correct order on all sorts of devices (phones, tablets, smart TVs).

Alternatively, if you're not currently using the 'Find Music' button to select music, you may find that by doing so, the database would then play the music in the appropriate order, by using the tracks in the ID3 tags rather than just the filenames. But as I don't use this method, I'm not 100% sure if its database includes all the tracks on the USB device as well as those on the jukebox (though I think it does, as when I re-insert a large USB memory stick, I think it takes a while to reinitiate the database).

[daz05]

Had zero issue with mine works and plays in order perfectly every time.