HTC Hero :: Music Player - Masking Directories And Sorting Track Order

I'm trying to use the in-built Media app but am finding it rather poor for two main reasons.

One is that it scans my entire SD card for music to play, which I really don't want it to do as it finds my podcasts downloaded by acast and the tags in those MP3 files are all over the place so make a mess of the Music Player lists. I've tried adding a .nomedia file to the podcast directory as suggested on another site but HTC's app doesn't pay any attention to that.

The second issue is that despite my files having MP3 track number tags, the Music Player app usually ignores those and sorts the tracks into alphabetical order which just doesn't work for a lot of my albums. It's not consistent with sorting, e.g. if I pick an album off the Albums list the tracks are in order and play in order in the track list for that album so I can hit the first track and it plays in order, but if I go back up to the albums screen and add the whole album to a playlist, sometimes it puts the tracks in order, other times it re-orders them in alphabetical order of track name. If I go to a particular artist or composer and select an album, it normally sorts the tracks by alphabetical order this time instead of tagged track order.. This is all with the same album too so it's not that some albums have track number ID3 tags and others don't.

I copy the MP3s across the USB link, I'm not using HTC Sync as it won't run on my desktop computer (a linux box), so I don't know if HTC Sync can help out here or not.