How does Emplode know the proper order of the songs on the album? I'd want to keep all of the songs on each album in their correct order. Does it automatically sort alphanumerically?

That is an incredibly good question. Sorry I didn't cover it before. As far as actual play order, it does not sort alphanumerically.

Okay, in the screen shot, you can see a column labeled "position", right?... If you click on any of those column headers, the displayed list will be sorted based on the column you clicked on. If you sort on "position", then you can drag the songs up and down in the list and the positions will be renumbered. That's how you can re-order the tracks. The Empeg will play the songs in order of position if "Shuffle" is turned off.

Now, when you're first dragging your songs onto Emplode from Windows Explorer, there's a trick you can use so that they get into the right positions to begin with. But it's complicated and involves learning a little bit about how the crack-addled programmers at Microsoft wrote Windows Explorer. Remember that it's a real snap to re-order the songs in Emplode by hand, so the procedure below is not necessary. But it's interesting.

To begin with, understand that Emplode sorts the songs based on the order they're added to emplode, not the order they appeared in Explorer. So if I want to drop them onto Emplode in order, I can do it one of two ways:

1) I can drag and drop them onto Emplode one at a time in the correct order.
2) I can group-select them and drop them all at once.

Method 1 works every time. Method 2 is screwy because the Microsoft programmers smoke too much crack. When you drag and drop a group of files from Explorer, it doesn't order them the way you see them on the screen. It orders them the way you selected them! And not only that, it's in reverse order, with the top of the buffer being the file your mouse was on when you began the drag operation.

So if you select them from the top down, then grab the middle file to begin the drag, you'll put them in reverse order with the "grabbed" file being completely out of the order.

Here's how to properly group-select files in Windows Explorer so that they remain in "screen" order during a drag-and-drop:

1) Click to select the LAST file.
2) Hold down Shift and use the "up arrow" key on the keyboard to group-select up to the FIRST file.
3) CAREFULLY click and hold on the ICON (not the file name) of the FIRST file, then drag that group to its destination (in this case, the Emplode window).

If you do this exactly, they will drop onto Emplode in the same order as they were on the Explorer screen.

(At least I'm pretty sure that's the way you do it. I wanted to double-check this in Emplode but I'm getting the strangest error message all of a sudden. I think I need to reboot my system.)

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144