Control write order (LBA) of files when creating an ISO

[Justin67]

I'm looking for an ISO creator that will write files in a user-specified order, therefore resulting in files with ascending Logical Block Address (LBA) in that same order.

Background: My car in-dash CD MP3 player will play the files in a folder in order of ascending LBA, that is, the order in which they were written to the CD. Most ISO creators, and most CD burners, will write the files in alphabetical order, which then becomes the play order for that folder. The crappy workaround is to put numbers at the beginning of each file name, to alphabetize them in the desired order. The better solution is to have an ISO creator which allows the user to specify the write order, then burn the ISO to CD.

I have used the program MP3 BR Imager, but it requires registration and it's no longer supported so you can't register. Any ideas?

[Joe Forster/STA]

In general, there is no solution for your problem: the ISO 9660 (= CD file system) specification explicitly prescribes that directory entries are sorted alphabetically. Read this: http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html#S3-46. (It suggests a non-standard solution, too!)

[Justin67]

Joe, thanks for the quick response! So if I want to do this (write in non-alphabetical order), the disk is non-standard. Fortunately, the non-standard disks I have created so far do work in my car player. Unfortunately, the program that I used, and that the CDRFAQ suggests as a solution, is orphaned so I can't use it anymore.

If anyone else knows of a method to create non-standard disks, I would appreciate hearing about it.

[Justin67]

One more followup for anyone who is interested:
I tried out the Linux program mkisofs, which is accessible for Windows through CDR Tools, to see if there was a solution. It turns out not. There is an option for mkisofs (-sort) that will write the file data in a user determined order. I was therefore able to write the MP3 files to an ISO (then to disk) in whatever order of LBA that I wanted. However, it turns out that my in-dash MP3 CD player is following the order given in the directory of the folder, and the -sort option doesn't change this. Using IsoBuster, it's easy to see that while the files have the LBA order I wanted, a sector view of the directory shows the names are still in alphabetical order, and that's what the player uses.

[Joe Forster/STA]

Quite a weird behavior, if you ask me: changing the sort order of directory entries is much easier than moving around file content.