DFW

I have a USB drive I'm going to take along on our trip today.
Thought about trying out the USB port for some music for the trip.

I have looked through the Nav manual and I don't see anything that tells me the filesystem format required or any directory structure required for artists/album/music classification.

Since this is MS under the covers, I assume it should speak NTFS.
Anyone have a repurposed laptop drive to hold media for use through the USB port -- that is working? What filesystem did you use for the partition and what directory structure did you set up?

Chipsky

Last I tried, Sync will not recognize NTFS... all my drives are FAT32. If you have a larger drive, you can configure it to recognize the entire volume.

shortride

iTrader: (1)

The artists/music classification on the USB flash drives I use only display the artist and title of the song on the dash display. When giving voice commands it will recognize either "Play Artist ?" or "Song Title."

There is a lot of information in the Sync booklet in with the Owners Manual.

I use 4 different 16gb flash drives for my favorite catagories of music.

You can give a voice command "USB" without having to turn the head unit on first.

Yippie21

I had an online chat with a SYNC tech at the official SYNC website and she told me that SYNC will not open folders. All music mp3s have to be in the root directory. Mine works fine this way, though it took awhile to dump everything into the root directory. Also, mine wouldn't read mp4 files.

Also, remember to ask it to play unknown artist or various or unknown track... cause unless everything you've got is ripped from CDs, chances are, some of the file date, Track, albumn, genre, will be incomplete.

Russ from OKC

I installed a 500gig hd and just copied all of my music folders into it after formatting it to fat32. Works great other than the protected content(iTunes purchased crap). Getting a large drive into fat32 is a little bit of a pain in the ****, but just google "converting large hard drive to fat32". Awesome "mod"!! I velcroed it to the back of my glove box and ran the wire to the usb2

user_name

I dumped a bunch of mp3's onto a 32GB flash drive formatted fat32. Everything works. It is picking up the artist and song name from the metadata. I used mp3tag to fix a few of those.

I've had it tell me something along the lines of "not in folder mode" before. I'd like to be able to jump folder to folder. I can't find an option to enable that mode.

Riccochet

I did the same with an old 120gb laptop drive I had laying around. Bought a cheap 2.5 IDE to USB enclosure off Newegg and plugged it in. Works great. Though sometimes when I turn the truck back on, if I turned it off while playing from the hard drive, it will get stuck in "Initializing" and never play. Need to unplug the USB cable and wait a couple seconds then plug back in. Sometimes it takes a good 5-6 minutes to index the drive before being able to play. I do have about 90gb of music on it.

SYNC does not recognize folder structure, only Artist/Song/Genre. So, it really sucks picking another artist if I want to browse the library. Media Menu>Play Menu>Explore USB and use to the **** to scroll from the beginning or end. I also found that if you have folders nestled, lets say for a discography, under the main artist folder simply pressing the /\ or \/ arrows or using the **** to change artist while not in the Explore USB will skip those types of folders. You have to navigate to them via Explore USB and OK into the sub folders. Kind of annoying. Once you are playing from a sub folder using the arrow buttons or **** will change folders between sub folders. You then have to go back to explore usb to go to any other artist. Or if you selection Play All from the main sub folder it will play every file in all the sub folders from that folder. Voice recognition for artist names has been hit or miss with me.

I've been slowing making playlists for every album as it's easier to scroll through the playlists than it is to use explore usb.

pappcam

Not on my vehicle. My first test when I got my truck was with a USB stick that had all the artists in separate folders along with separate album folders and SYNC had no trouble with them. It was a bit of a hassle dealing with how it dealt with the songs once you were inside a folder so now I have about 10GB's of music on a new stick that has all the songs on the root of the drive but SYNC had no problems opening folders folders with the other stick in my case.

Yippie21

That's good to read. I figure there must be a way for SYNC to read folders... seems crazy to dump everything into the root directory. I'm setting up a 120 gig USB drive to put in the glove box... what I wonder about now though, is how long it will take SYNC to initialize a large load of songs....

I'll try the FAT32 too. Hadn't thought of that. Thanks!

DFW

An NTFS formatted laptop drive just threw the system into "initializing .." mode until I powered the truck off. Didn't really expect it to work, but you'd think it would at least throw an error and not just lock up.

A 4GB thumbdrive formatted FAT32 worked for some mp3s, but not others.
The ones that worked were in the root folder and were smaller much lower quality mp3's - Car Talk podcast downloads - about 25MB.
I have another set of files that are about 300MB. I had them in a folder an it let me see the folder and select the files in the folder when using the "Explore USB" option. They seem to pause the player - I could cancel and go to other files in the root folder so at least it wasn't locking up.

None of these files have DRM.

I'm converting the laptop drive to FAT32 now.