How to sort files in exFAT drive alphabetically?

Question

I have an MP3 player that uses a micro SD card as storage. The SD card is formatted in exFAT. When I browse files in the MP3 by folder location, the order of album tracks is not in alphabetical order but instead the files are in the order in which they were added. I have added the track number in front of each song (e.g. "01 TrackA" and "02 TrackB") but it still doesn't show in order.

The only workaround I've found is to transfer the files to the SD card, then after transferring is completed, I take all the tracks out of the album folder and sort them alphabetically in Windows File Explorer, then I move the tracks back to the album folder. That way, they show up in alphabetical in order when I browse them on the MP3 player.

I would like to find a way to automatically sort all the files in the SD alphabetically instead of having to go through the above process for each music album. I've heard of some programs that can sort FAT32 drives but haven't seen any for exFAT.

Answer 1

I found SD Sorter which sorts on FAT, FAT32 and exFAT

Answer 2

FATtools is a collection of open source Python scripts derived from PyDiskTools for managing FAT partitions. One of its features is sorting FAT entries, including the ones in exFAT drives

Born to re-sort in an arbitrary order the directory entries in a FAT32 root table to cope with some hardware MP3 players' limits, it now provides full read/write support in Python 2.7 (32- and 64-bit) for FAT12/16/32 and exFAT filesystems, for hacking and recovering purposes.

https://github.com/maxpat78/FATtools

To sort just save the following as a Python script, e.g. sortExFat.py, set the drive (X: in this case) and the order you want to put the files in new_order

from Volume import *

# Assuming we have DirA, DirB, DirC in this disk order into X:
root = vopen('X:', 'r+b')

new_order = '''DirB
DirC
DirA'''

root._sortby.fix = new_order.split('\n') # uses built-in directory sort algorithm
root.sort(root._sortby)

then just run python sortExFat.py