I just went on a bit of an adventure with VirtualBox trying to get USB passthrough working right, and it was all for not. I wanted to use the LFNSORT utility on my MP3 player since I didn't find anything comparable in the SuSE distros. After being up until 3AM and finally just biting the bullet and launching VBox with sudo, the usb connection was made (Win2K guest)! Yay!!! Win2K blocked direct access as if it was an internal hard drive (LFNSort failed to initialize drive F:)! Boooooo. All that and back to the drawing board.

Some more poking in Google and I found FATSort! Apparently, this utility is available in the Debian repositories (incl. Ubuntu), but I didn't know that before, my system only hosting SuSE. Others can simply download the source and go directly to make (it's a standalone utility, no ./configure required).

It worked right off! Now all my mp3's are played in alphabetical order, directories first. Of course, you might find this utility useful for other reasons too (say software distribution lists that don't sort themselves), but it seems the MP3 album order is a common thread that got interest in such a utility rekindled.

Thank you Joe Forster and Boris Leidner.

Homepage of FATSort Utility

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Now if only there was a FAT/NTFS defrag utility in Linux.