CD folder structure question

Hi all, I've had my 2010 Prius II for a couple weeks now and I'm hoping someone can give me a quick answer to a question I haven't been able to determine for myself.

I burned several CDs with MP3/WMA files to play in the car as an alternative to plugging in my Zune every time I take a 15-minute drive. Each CD is a single artist, for example I have one for Beatles, one for Bob Marley, etc. - and each CD is organized by folders containing individual albums. What I'm getting at is that each CD has only one level of folders, and none of them have folders within folders.

What I haven't been able to figure out (and to be honest haven't spent a lot of time trying to figure out) is whether, if I select "random" play, will the CD player automatically play tracks from across all of the folders on the CD, or does it play tracks only from within the currently selected folder, just in random order?

Thanks -

 

NEVER MIND; I found the answer to my question (tried to delete this post but couldn't). Files play randomly only from within the selected folder.

 

I believe that the radio reads the tags for each track to create the text you see on the screen. When I click on the "Text" button on my radio it shows either the song title, artist name, album, or file name (basically the song title with a 2-digit numeral preceding it so that songs play in the correct order according to the album). Tags are different from the file or folder names. All audio files have tags (you can look this term up anywhere to learn more) for artist, album, genre, etc., which can then be manipulated in WMP or any other music playing software. (In Windows 7 you can manipulate all tags directly in Windows Explorer, which is a great feature.)

When you rip your CDs to MP3, you can designate how it organizes your music and it can automatically organize it by folder into Artist/Album/track or other configurations. For example, I like artist names to follow the "last name, first name" convention - so I revise those from the way most online music databases automatically tag a CD when I insert it in my machine. And if you download MP3/WMA files from any other source, once they are on your hard drive you can organize and tag them however you like.

It could be that regular CDs that you play would not show all this tag information on the screen - but any CDs that you burn can be organized any way that you want to, into folders or not, etc. and using tags to help you navigate.

However, I don't think that if you rip your MP3/WMA files to CD using WMP that it will organize them into folders. It will just dump all the tracks onto a CD, probably organized alphabetically by track name from A-Z.

I organized my MP3/WMA CDs so that each CD is a single artist, and then it contains separate folders for each album. I used the Roxio CD burning software that came free on my computer. Once you create a project and tell the software what files you want to burn to the CD (by dragging and dropping them into the interface), you can then revise the folder names and file names in the Roxio software without affecting the actual source files at all.

That is probably more info than you wanted, but I hope it helps.