UnitiCute and Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 NAS Drive: Track Order
Posted by: nigelproctor on 25 September 2011
I have finally managed to resolve the problem of tracks being read from Western Digital My Book World Edition 2 (2TB) and then being listed in alphabetical order of track title on my UnitiCute. I use Exact Audio Copy to record CDs in FLAC format. The UnitiCute was not reading the track numbers so all tracks are sorted alphabetically by track title.
First and illogically, I needed to deselect the "add ID3 Tag" option in the EAS compression options when copying CDs. This stops ID3v1/2 tags being created. I also set EAS to create the file name as "## TRACKTITLE", ie I set it up so EAS automatically puts the track number before the track title to create the file name begining with the 2 digit track numbers (01 to 99 etc.) then a space then the orginal track title.
Secondly, open all the files comprising the CD in an ID3 tag editor-"Mp3tag" is a free reliable download (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/). You can then set up the tag editor to automatically change the ID3 title tag to be the same as the file name (ie this put the track number before the title in the "title tag"). Sounds very complicated, but once you have done it once it is very straighforward and you can set up EAS and Mp3tag to handle multiple files (ie all tracks on a CD) automatically.It then becomes very quick to do.
The WD NAS drive has a Twonky Media streamer pre-installed which streams the tag information to the Naim. Because it reads the track title tags with the track numbers first it displays them in numerical track order!
I undestand that subsequent version of Twonky may address this problem, but appaerently trying to change this on the WD firmware is complicated and requires considereable IT skills/knowledge-which i dont have!
It would be good if this problem could be sorted by the manufacturers-using a WD NAS drive with EAS to get FLAC format files must be very common. Any thoughts on this?