Playing music from a USB Thumbdrive

[RobS10]

Anyone have any luck getting their 2022+ Infotainment unit to reliably navigate a USB drive with music on it? Every time I hit Browse then Artist, it only occasionally loads the Artist list, almost always starts playing the very first song by the first Artist, then repeats the whole process when I start over.

 

[4Rums]

Most head units don't have a lot of processing resources and have a very pared down operating system. One thing that can bug them down is corrupted/improper or too many tags in the mp3 files (or whatever format you are using). Clean up the tags, remove the unnecessary ones (album art, comments, etc), leaving just the basic ones (Album, Artist, Tittle, Track) and that usually speeds up the loading process. There are plenty of utilities that you can use for the cleanup.

 

[RobS10]

Most head units don't have a lot of processing resources and have a very pared down operating system. One thing that can bug them down is corrupted/improper or too many tags in the mp3 files (or whatever format you are using). Clean up the tags, remove the unnecessary ones (album art, comments, etc), leaving just the basic ones (Album, Artist, Tittle, Track) and that usually speeds up the loading process. There are plenty of utilities that you can use for the cleanup.

Thanks, I was just testing out the possibilities with a thumbdrive I had laying around, will try and "clean it up". However, it behaved similarly to my iPod Classic in the unreliable way it navigated the music library. Guess it's the limitations of the head unit itself like you said.

 

[numbay]

Same for a 2020. I ended up few 8GB USB drives for different music types. Indexing takes looong time with a big capacity USB drive.

 

[RobS10]

Same for a 2020. I ended up few 8GB USB drives for different music types. Indexing takes looong time with a big capacity USB drive.

So the fewer files the better the head unit can handle browsing? Could explain a lot...my iPod probably has 80GB of music and think the thumbdrive I plugged in had 20 or so GBs. I'll try less music per drive...thanks!

 

[4Rums]

So the fewer files the better the head unit can handle browsing? Could explain a lot...my iPod probably has 80GB of music and think the thumbdrive I plugged in had 20 or so GBs. I'll try less music per drive...thanks!

Correct. The fewer the files, the faster it does the indexing (similar principle with the tags). That being said, since the head unit keeps just one index, if you use multiple drives, the index will have to be rebuild every time you swap drives.

 

[RobS10]

Correct. The fewer the files, the faster it does the indexing (similar principle with the tags). That being said, since the head unit keeps just one index, if you use multiple drives, the index will have to be rebuild every time you swap drives.

I feel like I'm using a floppy drive from 2000, not a USB Solid State drive from
2022, but that's old news.