Quick question... searched through a few of of the USB/Audio threads and didnt see this peice specifically laid out. I know the mini's Stereo at this point can index 20,000 tags. My question is does that just count the actual Song tags or do folders/Subfolders that songs are in count towards that. I just picked up a 16 gig Flash drive and I am planning tag removal and folder structure to fill this up.

 

The 20K is mp3 tags. So if a song has 5 tags to it then the limit is about 4000 songs, NOT 20,000.

Folders structure does not figure into the calculation.

To get any decent kind of sorting the required tags will be a minimum of

Title:
Artist:
Genre:

So you can then get approximately 6500 songs to be indexed at one time.

The other thing you need to consider is that the more songs you have (even above 1000) the more time it takes to index. And it will index them EVERY time the car is started. I found that with 4000 tracks on a USB Thumb Drive it takes about 45 seconds for it to index. If you go over the magical limit (approximately 20K tags) then the indexing takes much much much longer. I went to 5000 songs with 5 tags for each song and the indexing then took over 10 minutes and what happened was that i indexed everything and dropped the first part of the indexing I.E. all the "A" Artists. then when i wanted to go back an play an "A" Artist it would have to re index and the sometimes took up to 5-6 minutes.

It is a system made for small 100-500 track collections. it really does not do well with larger than 500 track collections.

I went to haveing a full blown computer inthe car so that i could have my entire collection (70,000 + Tracks) in my car.
https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...-upgrades.html

 

wow sweet read. My co-worker has an apple TV in his Acura TL. He is going to enjoy seeing your pic's.

Thanks for the info Schatzy. Basically I am doing the math as you laid out I am just trying to plan out how to fill the thumb drive without exceeding the limitations. Glad to hear the folder structure dosent matter. I keep all of my tracks in Music/Artist/Album Organization so I didnt want to have to break that down.

Last night I loaded up the 16gig drive and it put me around 2600 songs. I used MP3tag and blanked everything but Album, Album-Artist, Title and Track#. This morning was my first try at using the stick and music played but things were def not perfect.

The Album-Artist tag does not look to be used at all so tonight I will have to copy my Album-Artist tag info to the Artist tag. I also dont see anywhere that Track#'s are displayed so I suppose I can remove that tag as well. so I should be keeping just the Title, Artist and Album which should put me well under the 20k tag limit.

What do you use to remove tags. I grabbed MP3tag last night and it seemed a little slow but did work through it all (I think that might be from removing embedded album art). I also am not sure if it removed some of the extra tags like Publisher. In MP3tag when I select all the music I can blank out almost all the tags on the left but if when finished you look at the extended tags there is still a few odd's and ends like Publisher or "Encoded By". I guess I will have to play around with the remove all except commands.

Anyway tagging aside I was having some issues getting the random to work. It looks like it will only random on tracks within whichever specified folder I am in. I suppose I will need to make a play list of all of the tracks, play that, and then it will random the whole drive.

Anyway I guess I have a little more work to do to get this working the way I want but I am happy to find out I have room to grow under the 20k tag limits before capping out the stereo. It will keep me from having to get buckwild like you schatzy

 

Copied the Album-artist tag over to the artist field and removed the Track #'s. I left the Album-artist tag because its well under the 20k and I figured it is unused...

I also made a playlist of everything on the drive so that I could random that. Everything works just right now but it went from taking about 1-3 min to show me all the navigation options on the screen to about 15-20 min. I am stripping Album-Artist now. I am hoping it dosent take this long everytime. If so I may go back to having no Artist Tag. I just hope the playlist isnt whats bogging it down.

 

It very possibly is the play list that you have created. it has to scan that in as well and that will take up a lot of data space and time.

 

thats a shame i really want to keep some semblence of folder structure but 99% of the time all I really want is to random everything on the drive. It seems in order to have both its a slow load. I may dump artist all together to see if it helps any. Luckily it looks like when I fired it up this morning it defaulted to the Playlist that was all of the tracks randoming and started there even though the playlist section of the display was not visible or selectable yet.

Quirky indeed

 

I've got a 16gb drive with about 2500 songs and an "everything" playlist. It takes 5-10 minutes to index, and nearly an hour for all of the navigation options to show up. It's annoying, but I'm living with it for now, since it does seem to remember the playlist and continue playing random songs while it re-indexes.

 

im in close to the same boat. Mine takes about 1-2 min before its ready to play songs from the last Play list I used. I have the directory and track names available to me. About 20 min later I have the other organizations (Album/Artist). I have just about everything I can stripped off these tags so I dont think there is a way to really speed it up at this point without sacking functionality.