I've got loads of MP3 songs on a USB memory stick, but my MINI Boost will only play about a dozen of them.

Does anyone know why?

 

Try creating a single folder called 'Music' and put all your files in it. Solved my problem..

 

You don't say what car you have, what level of audio, regular or HK, etc. Also how is the card formatted? You shouldn't have to shove all the files in one folder for it to work correctly.

 

Make sure they are not DRM protected, will not play those files. e.g. old iTunes music files might still have that on them.

 

During a long road trip with the wife, I had a lot of time to play with this. I started out with separate folders for each album. Discovered when I set it for random, it would only play songs in one folder. Moved the files to the root directory, then ran into the problem of not finding all the songs. Then moved all the files into a single folder, solved the problem.

When you plug the stick in for the first time, it will read the meta data in all the songs and store that data. When you select things like genre, artist etc it will allow you to make that selection. As I recall, it will store meta data for up to 4 different sticks. I believe it's explained in the manual.

 

I didn't get a manual with my (pre-owned) MINI.

Do you know if it is available on-line?

Regards,

Paul

 

Here ya go.. assuming you have a '12+ second gen.

 

USB info is on page 112, just looked it up. I was right, 4 sticks. One other thing I noticed is Mini only supports up to 256kb/sec bit rate..

 

So just to be clear, you have all the individual songs in one single folder on the USB stick? And do you use playlists, if so how are they set up?


Thanks

 

Yep, I have them all in one folder. Playlists? I don't have an option to setup playlists. What year is your Mini? If it's a 2017, that's 3 gen, different than our 2 gen. I looked it up in the manual and only found this -

Popular audio files, such as MP3, AAC and M3U playlists, PLS and WPL, can be played. Depending on the audio file, proper playback can not be ensured in every case, such as for bit rates greater than 256 kbit/s.

Which kind of sounds like you create a playlist as a M3U file?

 

Thanks, I dumped all the music in to one folder and the Mini seems happy...what and odd way to configure it


And yes, I found this thread with a search and didn't notice it was in the 2nd gen section not the 3rd gen section...just a stupid noob mistake I guess. I do have m3u playlists and it seems to see them if they are all in the same folder, I think I just have to edit them so the playlists don't look for music in subfolders.

 

Glad it works, but I'll repeat that something is wrong. You shouldn't have to dump all your files in one folder. I have album structured my USB and it works in two Gen 3's and one Gen 2 MINI without any issues.

 

Sorry, I wasn't too clear there. Using an organized directory structure with artist, albums, etc. the music plays fine and I can play or search albums or artists or genres or a couple other things, but the system doesn't see or recognize playlists.
If I dump all the .mp3 and .m3u files into one unorganized folder I can still search and play by album, artist, etc., but playlists also seem to work. The only thing that seems to be a problem is album art is hit or miss when everything is in one folder...oh and it is kind of messy when a artist has more than one album with the same songs in the same order. Do you have any idea how many Jimmy Buffett albums have Margaretville as track 1? :D


If you know of a way to make playlists work while keeping an organized directory structure that would make my life a lot easier.

 

Many thanks, that's the one for my MINI, perfect!

Regards,

Paul

 

Just a question on the 4 sticks thing, I wonder if I am confusing my poor little MINI by using the same stick but with different content?

Regards,

Paul

 

Good question, I really don't know. I wish the manual had more info on this. For example, how does it know the four sticks are different? It might have something to do with the name given to the stick when it's formatted? If so, what happens if all four sticks have the same name? What you might try is change the sticks name when you make changes to the content and see if it rereads the content, when you plug it in the first time, takes a minute or two to reread the meta data. Hope I'm making sense here

 

I think I stumbled across the key to making USB playlists work and I'm adding the info here to help anyone else that comes across this thread.

M3u playlists work fine, and the music can be saved by artist or album or whatever, the key seems to be the file path information in the playlist. Unlike most everything else I've dealt with, if the Mini infotainment system can't find the files in the playlist it doesn't display the playlist at all.

What works for me is to have all the playlists along with the music stored in top level of the USB drive in folders by artist then album. Then the file path in the playlist would be "artist name\album name\track.mp3".

I have always used more complete path names like "\music\artist name\album name\track.mp3" or "..\music\artist name\album name\track.mp3", but the Mini doesn't like the preceding "" in the path. So using Notepad I edited out the unneeded path info in the playlists and now everything seems to work.