Arch Linux

Llama

Banned

From: St.-Petersburg, Russia

Registered: 2008-03-03

Posts: 1,379

'Copy files in order' utility

Hi,

There are mp3 players which play files in order of copying. It makes copying files by subtrees difficult: the order of playing turns out to be random. I asked questions, googled thoroughly, but found next to nothing. Somebody even made me a gift: a homemade GUI utility (Qt4) intended precisely for the purpose. By homemade I mean that the author never bothered to make it available to the public, despite its GPL licence.

On the Web a script or two can be found, or FATSort, and that's pretty much it. It's a bit hard to believe that a common problem could be all but neglected. Maybe I'm just overlooking something?

UPD:

Ah!.. fatsort even made its way into the AUR

Last edited by Llama (2009-06-22 09:24:46)

Procyon

Member

Registered: 2008-05-07

Posts: 1,819

Re: 'Copy files in order' utility

Does `touch` change this order?

Llama

Banned

From: St.-Petersburg, Russia

Registered: 2008-03-03

Posts: 1,379

Re: 'Copy files in order' utility

Does `touch` change this order?

How do you mean?

Procyon

Member

Registered: 2008-05-07

Posts: 1,819

Re: 'Copy files in order' utility

I was thinking of for instance touch *

But you meant how LongFile01 LongFile02 -> LongFi~1 LongFi~2

I have no idea then. touch won't make a difference.

You could try renaming all files according to an index in a playlist.

Llama

Banned

From: St.-Petersburg, Russia

Registered: 2008-03-03

Posts: 1,379

Re: 'Copy files in order' utility

We are probably talking different things. I mean just preserving the alphabetical order of directory/file names. For the players in question it is to be achieved by copying entities sequentially in alphabetical order, which is no law of nature with Linux .

Last edited by Llama (2009-06-22 10:29:07)

the_isz

Member

Registered: 2009-04-14

Posts: 280

Re: 'Copy files in order' utility

Procyon:

I had such an mp3 player once as well. These things list the tracks in the order in which they are found on the file system (typically fat) and not in alphabetical or whatever order. To keep them in an
order you like, you have to copy them in the desired order.

I wanted my tracks to be ordered the same way as they are on the album and wrote a short shell-script which parsed the m3u playlist files and copied the files in order of appearance.

Llama:

If you (or anyone else) are (is) interested in that script, just say and I'll post it here after work.

mikeklimczak

Member

Registered: 2012-05-11

Posts: 1

Re: 'Copy files in order' utility

We had a similar requirement when copying large amounts of data from USB drives to our servers (not MP3 players). With the file copy not happening in alphabetical order we found it difficult to tell how far the copying process had progressed. We've found lots of forums with similar questions.

We solved it by instead of using "cp -Rv /source /destination" we started using rsync "rsync -av /source /destination" and the files were copied more sensibly in alphabetical order. This might be an easy solution for you and others.

There is a full description here at our LINK REMOVED BY ngoonee

Last edited by ngoonee (2012-05-11 09:17:23)

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,358

Re: 'Copy files in order' utility

We had a similar requirement when copying large amounts of data from USB drives to our servers (not MP3 players). With the file copy not happening in alphabetical order we found it difficult to tell how far the copying process had progressed. We've found lots of forums with similar questions.

We solved it by instead of using "cp -Rv /source /destination" we started using rsync "rsync -av /source /destination" and the files were copied more sensibly in alphabetical order. This might be an easy solution for you and others.

There is a full description here at our LINK REMOVED BY ngoonee

Sorry, but a quick view of your website convinces me that your primary motive here is to advertise it, there wasn't any need to link it in. Removed.

Also closing this thread due to its age.

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