I read a post a while ago by a teacher at a US school lamenting that their students no longer thought about where they should file a document on their computer, they just saved it anywhere and searched for it later. Devising a hierarchical folder system, as most of us who used early personal computers did, doesn't occur to them.

File not found

This changed approach to document storage is in reflected music players. You may still be able to play a file or the files in a folder - an album or a symphony say. I do that in VLC, which has been around for 30 years. But that's not how the designers of recent players expect you to use them. They scan your music libraries and build an index of artists, albums, and tracks using only the metadata. You can only play an album or a symphony provided the metadata is correct.

Which can be a problem if like me you digitised the music over three decades and entered many ID tags wrongly, or not at all. Yesterday, in the car, I was playing 'Unknown Artist - Unknown album - Unknown track' off an SD card.

(I found that old blog via this reddit BTW.)