Questions About Music Through The USB Port

Yes I searched! I couldn't find anything that specifically answered my questions.

I have a 2011 Trail with the stock head unit.

Up until the other day when my truck was broken into, I was using an iPod Classic as the music player hooked up to my truck through the USB in the glove box. It worked seamlessly (albeit a little slow) through the stereo, and sounded good. Aside from the occasional reboot, I never had an issue.

I will soon have a music collection of over 200GB. It would be really cool to be able to have all of this with me. Instead of buying a used Classic from somewhere, I know that you can hook up an external hard drive to the USB port to play music as well. My questions are these-

How does the folder structure work? I am using a Mac with iTunes.

How much of a pain is it to use a HD to play music through the stereo?

Is it faster than the iPod? Does the performance suffer if you have more music?

Does the music sound different, not having to be processed through two systems?

Does the interface work as seamlessly?

An iPod will load a certain number of songs then spin down. Will a HD always be spinning?

Any help would be appreciated.

I have a 2015 so this may not apply to yours. FWIW I have just loaded music onto thumb drives by genre and plug those into my USB port. I loaded off of CDs and it sounds as good as a CD. Easy to store a bunch of them and makes selection easier than a huge drive.

I second the idea of simply plugging a thumb drive into the USB.
It is the smallest storage device for the purpose, has no moving parts like a hard drive, holds LOTS of music, and is very unobtrusive.
There might be some limitations re: cataloguing and file structure, but, as suggested, this could be resolved by just loading one genre or playlist on each thumb drive.
I have all my tunes on one drive, and it works fine for me. As I start the truck, the stereo and thumb drive immediately start communicating, seamless!

I added mine to a USB drive grouped by Artist and Album, I like having full albums for some reason. It works fine, but it takes a bit to lookup all the tracks and gather all the other info from the drive when you first start up. You can play songs right away, it just takes a bit to gather artist, track names, album art, etc.

Kraeken said:

How does the folder structure work? I am using a Mac with iTunes.

Click to expand...

Try to avoid songs in the root folder. Create subfolders. You can create up to 3000 subfolders. Each subfolder may only hold up to 255 songs (any more and the additional songs are invisible to the unit). Subfolders may be nested up to 8 layers deep (recommended: no more than 2 layers). The entire drive may hold a max of 9999 songs. Regardless of how you structure the subfolders, the unit will merge them into one general playlist. It may be possible to create additional playlists, but I've never gotten that feature to work with USB, it may be an iPod-only option.

Kraeken said:

How much of a pain is it to use a HD to play music through the stereo?

Click to expand...

If it works like an USB flash drive, it should be the same as using a flash drive.

There is a short delay on starting the vehicle where the music begins playing before the songs are fully indexed. You will be unable to jump to the next song until it is done indexing (15 seconds, maybe, but I only have 2000 songs). There is a longer delay before you can request particular artists or songs using the voice interface.

Your mp3, wma, and m4a (AAC) songs must be tagged with artist & song for you to be able to find and play that song while browsing. The filename doesn't matter at all, only the tags. I recently added a wma song to the usb chip and can't find or play it because the newly-created wma had no artist or title tags.

EDIT: one more thought. iTunes has a compression utility that standardizes the volume on all your mp3s by setting a +/- volume offset value in the mp3 tag fields. One of my recommendations in filling out the Toyota surveys after purchase was that Entune read and use those iTune tags. The mp3s on the usb chip play at different volumes where the iPad compensates with each song.

2 issues with FAT32 depending on what win OS your using to format



1. max size is 32gb (win 2000 format utility)

or

2. max size is 127gb (win 98 format utility)


and the root folder is limited to 512 files/folders (including hidden). you can get around this by making files within those 512 to up the amount of files/folders/etc.

Awesome info, thanks! I would be formatting it in FAT 32 via my Macbook pro. Does anyone know what the max size is for that?

I'll format a thumb drive in a few days and try it out to see how it works.

guess someone cant read.

NoDak said:

guess someone cant read.

Click to expand...

If that's directed at me, re-read my post and tell me why I asked that question.

Kraeken said:

Awesome info, thanks! I would be formatting it in FAT 32 via my Macbook pro. Does anyone know what the max size is for that?

I'll format a thumb drive in a few days and try it out to see how it works.

Click to expand...

here is your answer in my previous post :

NoDak said:

2 issues with FAT32 depending on what win OS your using to format



1. max size is 32gb (win 2000 format utility)

or

2. max size is 127gb (win 98 format utility)


and the root folder is limited to 512 files/folders (including hidden). you can get around this by making files within those 512 to up the amount of files/folders/etc.

Click to expand...

you do realize to format a usb in FAT32 you have to use the either the win2000 or win98 format regardless of the OS, even mac have to conform to this.

so again formatting on a mac will still adhere to either formatting the usb to either 32gb or 127gb since FAT file system is not native to apple OS.

edit : since the HFS (mac file system) has no clue on how to format a usb as FAT32/16 etc, it will use a plugin/program to make a FAT file system using your mac. this plugin will either use the win2000 format or win98 format to put a proper FAT32 file system on the usb drive. this goes the same as using unix/Linux to do the same thing.

since FAT32 was created by Microsoft, they defined and licensed it out for others to use, so everyone has to adhere to that requirement.

if we could move away from FAT32 requirement, that was would make things a lot easier.


edit 2 : even on new windows OS, it will still invoke the old win2000 or win98 utility to format a usb since the native file system is NTFS.

FAT32 just needs to die for usb use.

edit 3 : and yes you do see usb drives bigger than 128gb, but those use a proprietary file system called exFAT and those don't work on systems that require fat32.

and formatting a 512gb exFAT usb to a FAT32 will make the FAT32 drive only see 127gb of the 512gb, so that would be a waste of money.

Kraeken said:

Yes I searched! I couldn't find anything that specifically answered my questions.

I have a 2011 Trail with the stock head unit.

Up until the other day when my truck was broken into, I was using an iPod Classic as the music player hooked up to my truck through the USB in the glove box. It worked seamlessly (albeit a little slow) through the stereo, and sounded good. Aside from the occasional reboot, I never had an issue.

I will soon have a music collection of over 200GB. It would be really cool to be able to have all of this with me. Instead of buying a used Classic from somewhere, I know that you can hook up an external hard drive to the USB port to play music as well. My questions are these-

How does the folder structure work? I am using a Mac with iTunes.

How much of a pain is it to use a HD to play music through the stereo?

Is it faster than the iPod? Does the performance suffer if you have more music?

Does the music sound different, not having to be processed through two systems?

Does the interface work as seamlessly?

An iPod will load a certain number of songs then spin down. Will a HD always be spinning?

Any help would be appreciated.

Click to expand...

did they steal your iPod? bummer.

not what you're asking, but i recently resurrected an old, nearly discarded 30GB iPod Video (5th gen) by upgrading it to a 256GB SDXC card. that puppy now lives in my glove box and has tons of room to spare as the music library grows—even with all my lossless files. :smokin:

So i have approx 15k songs on a flash drive however it will only recognize the first 9999, does anyone know a work around for this so i don't have to lose 1/3 of my music collection?

willson5150 said:

So i have approx 15k songs on a flash drive however it will only recognize the first 9999, does anyone know a work around for this so i don't have to lose 1/3 of my music collection?

Click to expand...

The 9999 limit is per folder. If you prefer them into seperate folders, you will be access the additional ones.

CWO4CNO said:

The 9999 limit is per folder. If you prefer them into seperate folders, you will be access the additional ones.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately that is in correct. I think the limit per folder is like 250 files.

All of my files are broken down by artist. so if you plug in my flash drive its sorted by artist, no root folder or anything. so i have 222 different folders. all with subfolders of albums, and then the files inside those.

willson5150 said:

Unfortunately that is in correct. I think the limit per folder is like 250 files.

All of my files are broken down by artist. so if you plug in my flash drive its sorted by artist, no root folder or anything. so i have 222 different folders. all with subfolders of albums, and then the files inside those.

Click to expand...

That's right. Sorry that I miss stated in my reply.