Notices

I don't understand how the media player organizes my music.
I copy/paste a folder with a bunch of mp3's in it from my PC to N900's "sounds" directory, where all the preloaded songs are as well. But after, when I open the media player in N900, click 'music', there are a few songs from that album scattered around and not even in their own folder, just like scattered by themselves, not even all of them! That's super annoying since now I dont even know which song is from what folder that I copied. Sorting doesn't help either. It's just ******ed! I want my mp3's kept in their own folders like on PC.

Apparently I'm the only one who has a problem with it....

personally I would recommend you to get media monkey, once installed browse to n900 sounds folder. choose show all. then you either manually merge/edit the mp3' id tags or use the autotag feature.

Do your mp3 files have populated tags to define the tracks correctly?

yep, as JuhS said - you need to tag your music - media player doesn't use filenames/folders apparently.. I don't like that either (as e.g. for OST albums, music gets scattered according to artists' names) - on the other hand, there is bunch of other media players available..

as in separate app? how come there arent any in the app manager to download?

will they enable "folder reading" in future updates?

another problem you may be having is that even when your music is tagged correctly....or at least you think it is, if you have a tag input for say an album with a capital letter at the beginning then the same tag input for another song from the same album but that songs album name input doesnt have a capital letter to start it off then the music player seperates them. eg.

whitney houston - greatest hits
Whitney Houston Greatest Hits
both same songs same spelling but just because one has capitals and the other dont the songs in the albums get split all over depending what has capitals and what doesnt its so annoyimg. especially when you load 34gig of music onto the phone. hops in later firmware release they make it able to read folders an not just tags.
by the way as suggested use some software to batch tag i use TAG&RENAME. does a fantastic job an simple to use.

I would like a folder sorting option too.
My use case : an 80's compilation where I want to keep the original album info for reference (track #, album, artist). I don't want to have as many "media player folders" as there are albums/artists in my compilation. I also have full albums, so I don't want to just list tracks, or the tracks for the full album would be scattered through the huge list (15GB of mp3, mostly 190kbps), and take a long time to find.

My DAP does this (Cowon D2), but my N900 is way less comfortable to browse through.

You can use the file manager to navigate through folders and play back music. Alternatively, create .m3u files (these get imported as "Imported Playlists" in the media player).

Martin's MediaBox (http://maemo.org/packages/view/mediabox/) does support navigating by folder I think, but it's not yet in the Extras repository. He's probably busy with FM radio, but feel free to kindly ask him to promote the mediabox package to Extras-Testing (contact info in the link above).

Or write your own media player: http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/5.0-final/mafw/