Ah, I think that explains the problem then. Since the music wasn't ripped from a CD then the ID tags of the MP3 files would not have automatically been filled in by the Compact Disc Database. If that is the case then there is no information for the Boom Box to pick up on and display.

What you can do is right click on one of the files and then left click on Properties and you should see a bunch of tabs listed. Click on the details tab and it should look something like this:


If I remember correctly the three main things an audio player looks for are the Title, Album artist and Album. If those are missing then there is nothing for the Boom Box to recognize. All you have to do is click in each blank and fill it in. You can select all the songs in an album by clicking on the top one, holding down the shift key and then clicking on the bottom one. Once they are all highlighted you can right click on the group, click on Properties then click on details and fill in the Album and Album artist for the whole group so that all of those match and that will keep them organized in the player. Then just right click on each one individually, click on Properties then click Details and fill in the Title for each song. That should get the information added that the Boom Box needs to recognize and play the song files. If I remember correctly the number that you see highlighted will order the songs in the album. If you want them in an order other than alphabetical you may want to make sure that field is set the way you want it for each song also.

Alternatively if you just want to select certain songs and skip some you can hold down the CTRL key and click on each one you want to highlight.

I have had to do this in the past for unknown MP3 files to show up properly in Windows Media Player and other such playback utilities.

You may want to do this on your computer so that once you have them the way you want them you can back them up on a CD or something for safe keeping.

Good luck.