Need A Little Help with USB Audio

[khollister]

I have a 16 GB flash drive I am trying to set up for my Insight. The problem is I don't understand how the radio reads directories/folders on the USB drive. If I try to create a hierarchical directory structure (Artist->Album), it appears to ignore the Artist folder and list just the Album folders. Furthermore, the order of them seems somewhat random as well.

The manual doesn't really discuss nested folders. This will be hard to navigate without some organizing directory structure if all I can do is put one level of directories on the disk.

Thanks for any experience

Keith

[adric22]

Originally Posted by khollister

The manual doesn't really discuss nested folders. This will be hard to navigate without some organizing directory structure if all I can do is put one level of directories on the disk.
Keith

I've never tried nesting folders inside of folders. I just have folders for genres and then about 100 songs in each folder. However, I can confirm that the order of the folders does not reflect what you would see on the computer, so I'm not sure how it decides what order to show them.

Also, it is just me? It seems like when I go into my folder with 1980's music (which happens to be the biggest folder with about 250 songs) and I use the random function, it seems like it always picks the same 20 songs or so. The rest never get played..

[khollister]

I did figure out that the folders with the songs are grouped according to the folder they are in - e.g. while the radio will not display the Artist folder, the Album folders for a given artist will be grouped together at least.

Clearly a USB drive is no substitute for an iPod as far as organizing large music collections. While I will still use the iPod Classic on long trips, I was trying to get a USB flash drive set up to leave in the car for shorter trips around town.

[adric22]

Originally Posted by khollister

Clearly a USB drive is no substitute for an iPod as far as organizing large music collections. While I will still use the iPod Classic on long trips, I was trying to get a USB flash drive set up to leave in the car for shorter trips around town.

I don't own an iPod. But I can pretty much guarantee that the way this thing will work is if you plug your iPod into the USB then the radio is simply going to use the iPod like a USB storage device (looking at the files and folders on the drive) Which means it won't work any different than a USB flash drive. Of course, you could always plug the audio into the auxiliary input of the radio and control the songs with the iPod but that is a royal pain in the butt and will likely lead to an accident.

I'm pretty happy with the USB thing overall. There are some tricks I've recently learned to help me find the songs I want. For example, push the center button inside the volume control once and you can turn the knob left and right to quickly scroll through folders, push it a second time and you can scroll through songs. Push it a 3rd time and it starts playing whatever you selected.

Like I said, the random play function doesn't seem to work very well on my USB drive, but other than that it is great. I have owned the car for a month now and have still never even tried putting a CD in the dash and probably never will.

[jonniedee]

Originally Posted by adric22

I don't own an iPod. But I can pretty much guarantee that the way this thing will work is if you plug your iPod into the USB then the radio is simply going to use the iPod like a USB storage device (looking at the files and folders on the drive) Which means it won't work any different than a USB flash drive.

No - I own a 6th gen iPod and it does many more functions than when i just plug in a folder'ed Flash drive. Just look in the owners manual...

[khollister]

OK - I think I figured out what is happening.

1) The radio ignores empty folders. Therefore an iTunes-like file structure of Artist/Album is useless since only the folders with files in them will be displayed.
2) The folder and file order is determined by (I believe) position within the File Allocation Table for the drive. For a freshly formatted drive, this would be the same as file creation time, but as things are deleted, the operating system will recover sectors on the disk and the order will not be what is expected. I figured this out when the order did not match the file creation or modification timestamps.
3) Be aware that both Windows XP or Mac OS X do not always copy files in the order they appear to the user (usually sorted alphabetically). So grabbing a handful of files and dragging them over to the USB drive may not preserve the order intended. Unfortunately that means copying them individually to be guaranteed of tracks appearing the correct order on the radio.

Net result is that neither file/folder name nor tag info is used by the radio when you browse the contents of a USB drive. However, everything works exactly as expected with a supported iPod. Therefore, IMHO, a USB drive is most useful as a collections of "playlists", i.e. folders with collections of tracks that are intended to be played in no specific sequence (shuffle mode in iTunes-speak). USB drives are a poor substitute for an iPod for large music collections where you want to access specific albums or songs.

[adric22]

Originally Posted by khollister

Therefore, IMHO, a USB drive is most useful as a collections of "playlists", i.e. folders with collections of tracks that are intended to be played in no specific sequence (shuffle mode in iTunes-speak). USB drives are a poor substitute for an iPod for large music collections where you want to access specific albums or songs.

Maybe so.. But the flash drive beats the heck out of having to burn it to an audio-CD.

[khollister]

Originally Posted by adric22

Maybe so.. But the flash drive beats the heck out of having to burn it to an audio-CD.

Agree absolutely. I was originally expecting to be able to use a USB stick as a low cost, disposable (as in leave it in the car and not worry about getting cooked) iPod substitute. It is not from a user interface perspective.

Anything beats CD's (except for cassette tapes) - I am kind of curious how much longer CD drives will be included in car radios.

[jonniedee]

Originally Posted by khollister

Agree absolutely. I was originally expecting to be able to use a USB stick as a low cost, disposable (as in leave it in the car and not worry about getting cooked) iPod substitute. It is not from a user interface perspective.

Anything beats CD's (except for cassette tapes) - I am kind of curious how much longer CD drives will be included in car radios.

The Asian market Honda City (sedan cousin of Fit and insight) only has AM - FM MP3 playback with no cd player!
2009 Honda City First Impressions | bkkAutos.com

[numbness4sound]

Originally Posted by khollister

Agree absolutely. I was originally expecting to be able to use a USB stick as a low cost, disposable (as in leave it in the car and not worry about getting cooked) iPod substitute. It is not from a user interface perspective.

Anything beats CD's (except for cassette tapes) - I am kind of curious how much longer CD drives will be included in car radios.

You could always look for a used ipod nano on ebay. I have a first gen of that and it works great. They've got to be pretty cheap at this point. I just leave mine in the car. I also have one of third gen original ipods, but that doesn't work with the usb plug