Re: Is a USB cable for data, or only power; how to tell without testing it?

In comp.mobile.android, on 4 Dec 2021 11:13:57 GMT, Frank Slootweg
<[email protected]> wrote:

>micky <[email protected]> wrote:
>[...]
>
>> A few of you might remember my last trip 3 years ago where the car radio
>> sorted all the songs alphabetically by file name, which starts with the
>> artist name.  It did this wihout my asking it too, and I find that
>> remarkable.  
>> 
>> So it would play all the songs by Brenda Lee one after another, when the
>> radio station was wise enough to mix them with others.  I noticed this
>> when it played the same song by Brenda Lee 3 times in a row. Finally I
>> realized it was separate instances of the same song. 
>> 
>> For one reason I had to change cars and the next car didn't do this. (I
>> was supposed to keep track of which make did it and I've forgotten.  I
>> should have written it down.)  There are no English-language stations
>> where I vacation so I really need music) 
>> 
>> So now I'm playing them on a Sandisk Clip Sport, maybe the smallest MP3
>> player Sandisk made, and its doing the same thing, sorting
>> alphabetically.  I just played Romeo and Juliet for the 3rd time in a
>> row.  I have another MP3 player, AGPTEK A20, and if I'm lucky it wont'
>> do this. I'm looking at its manual and of course it doesn't go into such
>> detail, neither manual does. 
>> 
>> The other choice is shuffle, but it does not have as a choice, "as
>> stored on the SD card". Just like the original File Manager, on Win 3.1,
>> which had no option to display in the order it was loaded or stored or
>> say on the drive. 

Sorry for the delay.   My PC broke a couple hours after you posted here.
Didn't even have email for a wwek.   Just catching up on this ng. 
>
>  Why don't you play the music on/from your phone (instead of from an
>MP3 media player)?

Loads of reasons.   I don't carry the phone all the time; when I do, I
don't turn it on all the time; when I do, I don't plug it into the car
all the time; it uses more power than the mp3 player, esp with
bluetooth; I don't want to take up phone storage (over 1.5 gigs for 640
songs) storing songs I will in practice only play in my car or a rental
car.   That means I can leave the player in the car while the phone goes
with me in my pocket, or isn't with me at all. 

Actually when the songs played in alphabetical order, it wasn't from an
MP3 player but from a usb flash drive, that I played by plugging into a
jack right in the rental car dashboard, connected to the radio I guess.

But mostly I like undertanding all this, regardless of what I actually
end up doing.    


It's amazing  to me that something is sorting the songs into
alphatbetical order by file name instead of just playing  them in the
order they are stored on the flash drive or mp3 player.  The flash drive
was empty when I loaded  the songs and the MP3 player only had what
Sandisk pre-installed, a few songs. 

The flashdrive had over 600 songs. It didn't do the sorting so the car
radio must have done it.  Why?   And where is the logic to do the
sorting?   And what other kinds of logic does the car radio have, that
we don't know about?  And why does the Sandisk Clip, which is only as
big as 2 or 3 matchbooks stacked head to toe, have sorting logic?  And
if they go to the trouble to write sorting into it, how come there is no
option to not sort, or to sort on creation date/time or some other
field. Why is file name so important? 

IIRC, in windows 3.1, when File Manager had no option to display the
files in their physical order, neither did MSDos or PCDos, but Norton
DOS did. Reading its DIR options is what made me notice the issue.
Norton DOS is still avaiable, both free and pro, but the free version
does so much I've never fighured out what else the paid version might
do.  I forget its current name right now. 

>  Nearly every music app can sort music (most) any way you like.
>Currently I use Samsung's 'Samsung Music', but on my previous
>non-Samsung phone, I just used VLC, highly recommended.
>
>>   In the US, I don't have a USB jack in my car radio, only AUX. 
>
>  What do you want a USB connection for? There are probably inexpensive
>adapters for most anything you want to do.