Bucknut2006

I wanted to share my experience with a 64GB thumb drive and building playlists. It's a fairly straight forward, but feel free to ask any questions.

First, while I like that the SD card takes up basically zero space, it is limited to 32GB. However, thumb drives tend to be bulky, especially with larger sizes. I found this 64GB drive from Patriot:
http://patriotmemory.com/product/det...d=1491&type=23

http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It hides easily behind the screen and is barely noticeable. Also comes formatted as FAT32 and allows the full ~60GB to be accessible out of the box.



Creating Playlists

For building playlists, I have been using the freeware Windows program foobar2000. It can be found at http://www.foobar2000.org/.


The program has a pretty straight forward interface, but also has a lot of flexibility if you want to convert audio from one format, adjusting audio gain or fixing tags.



First, insert the SD card or USB drive into your PC and open the drive to view the current files. Copy any additional music over to the removable media.

To create a new playlist, click File -> New Playlist:


Using the designated SD Card or USB drive, left click and drag the files to the new playlist.


On you have added all the songs you want in the playlist, left click on the playlist tab, select Rename playlist and give it a name that you would recognize. Once that is complete, left click on the playlist tab again and select Save all playlists...


You will be prompted to select the playlist format froma drop down list. Select M3U and click OK


Navigate to the top folder on your SD card or USB drive and click Select Folder


This will create a separate file on the root of the SD card or USB drive for each playlist.



From there, insert the media into the car like normal. It may take a few minutes to index the contents of the card, but once complete, the newly created playlists will show.

grandpawmoses

Windows Media Player also does a good job of creating playlists.

Tom/99

Great information, thanks.

CaryKen

They may have fixed the following behavior in recent production runs, but the early-adopters among us found that if your playlist includes a track title with unusual characters in it, the playlist simply didn't show up on your selection menu. Very confusing and mysterious when it happens, as you can still see other playlists you made! I can't be more specific as to which characters were okay and which caused problems... I don't think anybody set up stringent test lists. Maybe I'll do the experiment some day. Watch out for apostrophes, hyphens, asterisks, ampersands, and other punctuation marks. If you can't find your playlist on your car's infotainment screen, go back and look for punctuated titles in the missing playlist.

nmvettec7

Could also go with the 32GB Low Profile Sandisk Cruzer.....about 3/8 " to 1/2" tall when inserted into the USB port.

Under $16.00

themonk

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/cont...=REG&A=details

bbrown450

can anyone confirm the 64 gig USB will work and all 64g is accessable ??? Curious as tro why 64g SD will not ???

Jay_Davis

People playing with the SD card for the PDR figured out that the only reason the SD cards larger than 32gb didn't work was the formatting, so reformatting them for fat32 allowed them to be used. I would think that would also be the case for using it as a media device, but someone would have to try it out.

CaryKen

No, it's a different issue than the formatting. There is a standard for SD cards that does not exist for USB sticks. SD cards labeled as SDHC are only able to address up to 32GB of data. That is the type of card that the infotainment system can handle. To get over 32GB on an SD card, it must be an SDXC card. That was a different, later standard agreed upon by the industry.

For whatever reason, the infotainment system only supports SDHC cards, therefore 32GB maximum. Reformatting the card won't help. The HC/XC standards are not used on USB devices, so you can shove any old stick in the USB slot.

The PDR system came out later, so if it handles larger SD cards, they must have implemented the newer SDXC standard in that device, which is completely separate from the music playback hardware/software.

Jay_Davis

If the infotainment system only handles SDHC cards, then yes, its a 32gb max. I've only used a USB stick with it so far, and an SD card only with the PDR, so hadn't figured out all the details yet.

Bucknut2006

I have about 40GB full on the USB drive at this point and can access all the music.

It is SDHC so 32GB max. That was my first experiment before looking for a smaller USB drive.

CaryKen

I will also confirm proper operation with more than 32GB on a USB stick. Some things to think about before loading gigantic music libraries on your device...

1) When you start your car, it attempts to do some indexing (or at least index checking... hard to tell what's going on). It will instantly play whatever song you had been last listening to, but you may not have access to other music files for a bit. The more files, the longer it takes. This is most noticeable if you use voice commands to access your music... The screen selection is often available before voice selection becomes available (you ask for a song by voice and the system says "No content of that type is available"... But you can select it from the browse screen with no problem). That's when the device content hasn't changed. When you insert a device with new content, the voice-indexing process can easily take 10 minutes or more if you have many thousands of files.

2) Below 4000 files, you can just say "Play <song name>" and it finds and plays the requested song. Between 4000 and 8000 files, you have to say "Play song" and then wait for a second prompt to give it the song name. Same limits apply to album names. Over 8000 files you can't voice-access songs at all. This bugged me, so I keep my content reduced to a maximum of 8000 songs at any time.

3) Unlikely, but if you have more than 4000 playlists, artists, or genres (huh?) the system will not let you voice access those categories.

This is covered in the Infotainment Manual on page 66, but is easy to gloss over.

NavyBlue2

Yes, I just need to go on a 20 day road trip to listen to all the music on my 32gb usb...

Best feature I love is to set a favorite a few favorite music tracks on the InfoTainment to go straight to my fav song.

Curahee

I was really sorry to hear that Apple will no longer produce the I-pod Classic. It's so nice to have your entire library (over 1400 albums in my case) at your fingertips. When mine finally dies, I guess I'll have to learn all this other stuff.

Woodson

This is great info. I have been confused on this issue, particularly since I could use by large capacity SD card in the PDR slot but not the glove box slot.

So a 128 GB USB 3.0 flash drive will work in the glovebox slot? I ask this because my ipod Classic is wonky in the car.

bluedevil 1

can you confirm that this would also work to gain additional time on PDR?

Woodson

You can use the large capacity SD card with the PDR if you format it correctly.

Bucknut2006

Only tried the 64GB drive. Don't have a 128 on hand unfortunately.

Woodson

Ok, I'll be the guinea pig. I'll pick one up today and let you know how it goes. I'm tired of unplugging and plugging back in my ipod and having to bring it in the house to charge.

Curahee

My I-Pod charges while playing plugged into the USB port.