With help from some folks here I found that you can play songs in album order in myGig when you select album if you have software version RER2.043. However this lists and sorts your music in alphabetical order by album name, not artist name. Albums from the same artist get scattered all over the place. The problem I've been running into is that as I upload more and more music on here it's just unmanageable. The human brain tends to think artist name first, then album. It's hard to find and remember album names of like thousands of artists you might have on the drive.
I've been playing around with this and have found a way to get myGig to display the artist name and album name together, and also play songs in the correct album order as well. This may have been discussed or figured out before, but I didn't see anything in my searches on here so I wanted to help if I could. This has been driving me insane. I hope that Harmon Becker will allow albums to play in the correct order when artist name is selected in a future release of the software, but I can't wait for that to happen, and it may never happen.
Here's how to do it. It involves updating the Album Name tag of your mp3's using a tag editor. It's actually very easy, and most people that have this volume of MP3's probably already have a tag editor anyways. I use MP3Tag which is a great and free tag editor. It can be downloaded at: (
Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...))
1) Follow the normal steps to copy your albums to your USB stick using the suggested folder naming method from the manual. I typically put about 5-8 albums on the USB stick at a time.
NOTE: I typically create a folder for each album using the naming standard of "Artist Name - Album Name' for each folder. For example I would create a folder called "System of a Down - Hypnotize" and copy my files to it. If you have multiple albums from the same artist on one USB stick you'll need a separate folder for each album at the root level of the USB stick. I think that is how the manual says to do it was well.
2) Open your tag editor and open the folder on your USB stick that you want to update. Note that you will want to open the folder that is on your USB drive, not the folder where your original mp3 files came from. You want to make changes to ONLY the MP3 files on your USB stick, not your original files unless you want to update the tags on your original files also.
3) Change the tag for "Album" to now include Artist Name and Album Name in the format "Artist Name - Album Name". The screen shot below shows me editing this tag and what the tag looks like before and after the change. Note that your Mp3 Tag Editor should have a batch tag rename or search and replace function so that you don't have to rename these manually one by one. In MP3Tag this is done using the Quick Action replace, then selecting Album tag name and telling it what to replace.
Before Changes to "Album" Tag Name
During Changes to "Album" Tag Name
After Changes to "Album" Tag Name. All Album Tags now include Artist Name - Album Name
3) Upload your music to myGig using your USB drive/stick like your normally do.
4) Browse music and select Album. You should now see the music you just uploaded displaying the Artist Name - Album Name in alphabetical order. When you click on the selection, it maintains the original track order of the album. It should look like this. You can now search by Artist name while you're in album mode, find the artist you're looking for and select the album and it will play in original track order.
Albums shown in order of Artist Name
You can see here that the correct track order is still preserved when I select the album
That's it. The steps are easy but it does take some extra time. Does it suck to have to do this just to get songs to both show Artist Name and play in alphabetical order based on Artist Name? Yes completely sucks and is totally ridiculous. For me it's worth it b/c the music I'm putting on here will pretty much stay on here for good and I won't have to do this again. Most of my main music collection will go on here and I use an iPod for the stuff I download and change more.
Anyways I hope this helps anyone else really wanting your music to show up like this. This should work well for anyone still uploading their music or ready to revamp things. If you already have a bunch of music uploaded, probably not worth the effort to have to delete and re-upload just to get things to show up like this. The other caveat is that if you actually do want to sort or search specifically by album name, that funcitionality is lost with this hack. I should mention the same logic used here could probably also be applied to monkey around with the "title" or "track number" tags to force myGig to play songs in the correct order when in Artist mode. I'm going to play with that next but I have a feeling tags would have to be modified one at a time versus being able to use batch search and replace which is much, much faster.
I called Harmon Becker today and will keep calling until I can get someone to tell me if they're planning to fix this in a later software release. Since they are supposedly using the same software and systems in the 2010's, I'm hopeful they will resolve this since they will need to continue supporting it. Let me know if you run into any issues or have any other ideas to make this work better.
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