I have a very old car radio that can play music from USB fash drives when they are formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, but it sorts files by the short 8.3 file name, not by the long file name.
I want to play audiobooks that are divided into multiple files, but Windows sometimes generates f***ed up 8.3 file names.
Here's an example of the output of dir /x
of a folder that contains Internet1.mp3 to Internet7.mp3:
Short Long
30.12.2020 15:59 2.186.859 INTERN~1.MP3 Internet1.mp3
30.12.2020 15:59 2.507.643 INTERN~2.MP3 Internet2.mp3
30.12.2020 15:59 2.423.319 INTERN~3.MP3 Internet3.mp3
30.12.2020 15:59 2.110.163 INTERN~4.MP3 Internet4.mp3
30.12.2020 15:59 2.007.345 IN1FAB~1.MP3 Internet5.mp3
30.12.2020 15:59 2.921.422 IN64EF~1.MP3 Internet6.mp3
30.12.2020 15:59 3.290.689 INB914~1.MP3 Internet7.mp3
As you can see, the files Internet5.mp3 to Internet7.mp3 will be played before Internet1.mp3 to Internet4.mp3 since they have the random short file names. Some of my audiobooks are divided into more than 100 parts, so i'd like to have a script (Batch, Powershell, Python, whatever) that automatically sets the short file name to something usable, I.e. INT1.MP3 to INT7.MP3 There is no problem regarding which folder to play. The long file names contain an ascending numer (here 1 to 7) that gives away the correct order of the files.
You can use this to change all files matching the
Internet*
pattern toINTxxxxx
You can change
ls Internet*
to justls
to ignore the prefix and rename all files in the folderUpdate:
Unfortunately you can set short names for files on NTFS partitions, as it's the restriction right from the
SetFileShortName()
Win32 APITherefore the only way you can do for a FAT16/32 partition is rename all your files to a short 8.3 name like this
Of course you can also use the
INTxxxxx.MP3
format like aboveYou can manually hex edit the partition to set the short names and recalculate the checksums but it'll be fragile unless someone writes a tool to automate all those things
Note that names like
IN1FAB~1.MP3
orIN64EF~1.MP3
are not random. They're the hash of the file names because it's obvious that theFile~NUMBER
pattern doesn't work if there are more than 9 files with that prefix in the folder so something more robust must be used