I've searched, but couldn't find what was looking for.

What is the best way to set up a USB for a 2010 Base Stereo. Should I copy the songs directly onto the USB Drive without any file structure, or should I copy the iTunes library which is set up with a file structure of "Artist>Album>Song?

Thanks!

Larry

 

Put the USB in the computer
Create a folder named music
Open I tunes
Click on a song
Click select all
Right click
Send to or copy to the music folder

400 songs take about 15 minutes if I remember right

 

Thanks!

 

My 2011 recognizes different folders. I have it seperated by genre and full albums are in their own sub-folders. It's really easy to navigate and use. I just select a genre folder, play a song and hit random.

 

You can also right click any song and select "show in finder" (Mac) or "show in windows explorer" (windows) and drag onto your USB stick from there. You can navigate up the folder tree from there if you want to copy the whole folder.

 

I gave up for a while, since I couldn't get the USB stick to read. I think I had too much info on the stick, over 20,000 items.

This weekend I put about 12-14gb on the stick and it plays. However, when the car has been sitting for a while, it takes about 5 minutes before the stick is able to be read. I suspect it indexes the stick very time power is lost after 15 minutes.

Is there a way to avoid this delay?

 

Not with USB. Because there is no internal memory in the HU it has to index.

 

Thanks - That's helpful. I assume fewer songs would index faster?

 

The head unit only holds an "index file" not the actual sound files and once power is lost to the head unit the "index file" is lost. Unfortunately there is no way to avoid this.

Also of note is that the file can only contain up to 20,000 data points. I.E. file location, genre, artist, album name, track name, etc. so if you wnat a lot of music on a flash drive with just the above info you can only indes about 4000 songs. if you remove some of teh information from the mp3 tags then you can bump up the nubmer of songs.

But if you have more songs that the head unit can index at one time it will continue to work but slowly at time as it reindexes another part of the USB sitck. but will loose some of the previous information in the index file. So going back to another song may take alot longer as well.

 

Thanks for the info and being a great resource to the community. Is there a way to do a mass deletion of the tags without going through each song? If I only had artist, album, song and genre, I suspect the USB drive would index faster.

Thanks again.

Larry

 

Yes, less information or less songs means it'll index faster. In iTunes I can highlight multiple songs, right click, then edit all of their information at once.

 

I have an R58 and am using 32G USB flash drive with songs indexed in folders by artist. I have no problems playing the music and the delay after inserting the drive is seconds. My problem is that at every index point the music ending fades out and he music starting fades in. It doesn't bother me so much if they are distinct songs, but when there is a suite of songs, or a live album, the index points are in the middle of a continuous stream of music and the fades are driving me crazy. Anyone know a solution? Someone in another forum suggested this was a way the head unit disguises or deals with a delay.