2026-01-19

One of the great things about the FOSS world is that if you have
a specific computer problem...someone probably already wrote a
utility to fix it.

In today's episode of cool linux tools, we are talking about
'fatsort' and why it is great.

So let's start with some background. As an elder millenial, I
absolutely refuse to pay for music services like Spotify to play
music in my car. Nay friends, I only trust my USB flash drive and
all of the MP3s that I've acquired over these past 30 years.

Like most modern'ish cars, my Honda supports reading MP3s from a
USB flash drive and you can put your MP3s into folders and the
Honda will have a rudimentary file browser that allows you to choose
the song. I should note that my Honda is a 2018 model...so the head
unit is a few generations behind.

The issue is that like a lot of old school hardware MP3 players,
the Honda will order all of the folders and MP3s according to the
FAT filesystem table of the most recent file transfers to the
device. As you can imagine, people rarely copy over their entire
library in alphabetical and chronological order just one time. I
routinely add and delete songs.

So it is rather annoying that when you browse your list of MP3s in
a given directory, your most recent songs are at the bottom of the
list instead of ordered by something sane like 'Artist/Band' name.

Enter fatsort. This linux utility will sort the directory structures
of FAT32 and exFAT to make the files appear in the correct order
in your MP3 player. It has been a godsend.

If you are still listening to your Napster/Kazaa/iTunes MP3s you
collected from yesteryear in your car and all of your songs are
out of order in your car, definitely give fatsort a try.

On Fedora it is available straight from the repos!