Please note: This article is intended for users who wish to play back music on their network music player, and have the track order and artwork displayed correctly through the Connect App.
The following steps can be taken to ensure that your music is displayed in the correct order, along with album artwork.
In this example, we are using a USB thumb drive, which we've formatted and renamed 'MUSIC'.
Within it, we've created an artist folder named 'The Beatles'.
Inside that folder, we've created a sub-folder called 'Abbey Road'.
Notice that we've also put a JPEG file within this folder named 'Folder.jpg'. This image is necessary to replace the grey folder icon which you normally see when browsing through the Connect app with our chosen image of the artist.
Inside the album folder, we've placed all of the tracks.
Please Note: They are currently displayed in alphabetical order as this is how Windows organises files by default. We've just kept the name of the track itself in the title. No artist or album info, or track number.
In amongst the tracks is another JPEG of the album artwork, again named 'Folder.jpg'. This will ensure the album artwork is displayed instead of a grey folder icon in the Connect app.
After right-clicking on the track and selecting 'Properties' then clicking on the 'Details' tab, we ensured that 'The Beatles' was in the 'Contributing Artist' field. 'Abbey Road' was in the 'Album Name' field and the track number is next to the '#' field. Tagging the media in this way will allow the network player to correctly order the tracks.
After these steps are taken, the results are as below.
This is just one album of one artist, and it required a lot of manual formatting to prepare it for USB playback. If you have a large music library with 100's or 1000's of albums, this would obviously be very time-consuming.
For this reason alone, we recommend using a NAS drive or dedicated UPnP media server with your network player instead.
This would not only save you a lot of time but would also enable you to browse via Genre/Artist/Album etc. USB browsing is intended on our network players as quick, convenient playback of a few tracks and not recommended for larger libraries.