USB not showing Playlist/Artist/etc on 32GB flash drive

[adc]

Is anybody using a large USB stick having issues displaying/using the Artist/Playlist/Genre etc features?

I've switched from a 30GB iPod Photo to a 32GB USB stick, mainly because my car won't charge the iPod at all. The USB flash drive has some 20GB of music on it.

I expected the car to take its sweet time to parse the folders, files etc in order to build the song index (and it sure did, took a few days), the radio finally showed these browsing options after about 1 hour driving yesterday.

Chronology:
- For a few days, only DIR browsing was available. I figured the car is building the song index.
- After 1 hour driving (and listening), the other browsing options showed up - Playlist, Artist, Album etc.
- After shutting the engine down and restarting later, I was back to DIR browsing only.
- Driving back 1 hour didn't bring the Artist/Album/Playlist options back.


Anybody else experiencing these problems?

[robertdelrusso]

originally had a lot of trouble with the 32 gig itouch. switched over to an older version of nano 4 gig and it works like a charm, or at least as they claim it does. the songs, playists albums, artist all show up immediately. hough the navigation wasn;t thought through very well. Kind of stupid navigationally Awfully expensive unit for what it actually does.
CHEERS

BOB

[1Ronnie]

I'm running a 20 Gb external HDD with 13000 songs, I find it takes a while (10-15 mins) to populate after I remove it and add new music, but once that's done generally it populates within 2 minutes after I start the car.

This could significantly be affected by the speed of your USB stick.

Still for me, I find it takes way too long to scroll through 100 artists, so I only use Dir to select songs and have a hierarchy setup, 5 sub dirs (#-e, f-k, l-p, q-t, u-z), then a sub dir for each letter inside that, then the artists. So the most I have to scroll is about 10 names in a given letter.

There's quite a few variations on this theme, there's a thread on this somewhere.

[Lester]

I have a question - why not buy three or four $10 USB sticks of smaller size, say 4 GB - then keep them sorted by artist or music type. That should solve the 10,000 song index problem. It seems like there is simply too large a volume for the device to manage properly. It's like anything else - spreadsheets, databases, word documents etc. - there is a theoretical maximum size - and a practical, useful size.

[1Ronnie]

Personally I like the way I've got mine with the sub directories, and swapping out USB sticks will leave you with a minute or two's delay every time you swap before you can use the populated groupings.

But the great thing is it's you car and you can do what you like !!

[Mega Man]

USB Sticks = the new Cassette Tape

[untouchableE82]

i tried to do this with a usb hard drive and it didnt even read it at all. bmw only expects people to use ipods or itouch, though another devicce can probably do a better job .

[corpsman]

I just want to be able to choose playlist,artist, or album. I have USB with "Y" cable. All I can do is play from playlist.
30G ipod classic. Am Idoing anything wrong?

[1Ronnie]

How many songs, also are thet MP3's or iTunes AAC ? This should work fine though.

[m7ammed]

http://www.1addicts.com/forums/showp...57&postcount=5

this might help you , seems to a solution to the same problem

[corpsman]

Are files supposed to be AAC?

[adc]

Originally Posted by robertdelrusso

originally had a lot of trouble with the 32 gig itouch. switched over to an older version of nano 4 gig and it works like a charm

Originally Posted by arrons1969

I'm running a 20 Gb external HDD with 13000 songs, I find it takes a while (10-15 mins) to populate after I remove it and add new music, but once that's done generally it populates within 2 minutes after I start the car.

This could significantly be affected by the speed of your USB stick.

I bought the fastest USB stick I could find - 180x speed Kensington unit.

I think I may have solved the problem, or at least found a way to get around it.

I tried with just 4GB of music on my SDHC card with the mini-reader and it worked flawlessly.

I then tried the same 4GB on the USB stick and again it worked fine.

I then increased the amount of music on the USB stick to 15GB and it took about 5-10min to index the songs, after which I got the Playlist/Artist/etc selection.

Now I'm thinking it may have trouble with contents too big - either in GB or number of songs.

I'll try with another couple of GB (just to get over the 16GB limit) and report back.

[Lester]

Originally Posted by Mega Man

USB Sticks = the new Cassette Tape

Not quite - a 4 GB USB Drive can hold the equivalent of about 50 casette tapes.

[adc]

Originally Posted by Lester

Not quite - a 4 GB USB Drive can hold the equivalent of about 50 casette tapes.

Depends on the quality of the encoding - certainly not at full lossless CD quality.

[1Ronnie]

Originally Posted by corpsman

Are files supposed to be AAC?

No both MP3 and AAC are supported.

MP3 is the norm, AA3 is usually "copy protected", if you have iTunes purchased AAC you must use the iPod "Y" cable to play it in the car, in this case the iPod actually decodes the audio, and sends it as a line-level signal to the car.

If all your music is MP3, you do not need the "Y" cable as the MP3 data file is sent to the Head and the car decodes it.

The only thing I have not tried is non-DRM AAC, has anyone tried that without the "Y" cable, as far as I know the HU is MP3 only and you would still the "Y" cable.