I've looked all over the forum but haven't seen an answer to this (I may have missed it though). How do the audio files need to be organized on a USB drive in order to navigate through them through the radio? I have Mini Connected w/ Nav. I've tried several different ways and nothing seems to be working very well.

 

I don't have Nav, but I put mine in folders. (Driving Music, Celtic, Bluegrass, etc) so when I go to the USB, the folders show up, I choose a folder, choose the first song in the folder, and it then shows the songs as they play, and plays the folder until I change it. Is that what you mean?

 

Yeah, I had mine arranged by artist but I have to dig pretty deep in the drive to get to it. I wonder if it has anything to do with using a Mac vs a PC.

 

Without nav, you just plug in the USB, choose 'USB' from the options on the radio screen, then you see your folders. Same as with an iPod or iPhone, it appears just as the flash drive does. Using Pandora is a bit more problematic, sometimes if you want to skip songs, it won't.

 

get an ipod or iphone

soo much more you can do with it

 

I don't know about Mini Connected, but the regular stereo reads the playlists on my USB drive and sort by artist and album too. My folders are organized by artist and album, but I don't think it was necessary. It reads the ID3 tags to display artist and song titles.

I used to plug my phone into the aux port for music, but this is so much easier.

 

Yes like get it stolen.

Yah, my mini connected with nav screen can sort by artist, song, genre,etc. just like an ipod. I can't get it to find playlists from itunes though although I've only tried once. Detours, how did you get yours to pick-up the playlists?

 

you can do it thru either the Connected -> Plug in or under CD/multimedia. That one is the 3rd option down after selecting the device.

 

Mojito, thanks, but my problem isn't finding the playlist selector in the Mini. The problem is that when I select playlists it says no entries found. So I am not sure if I didn't copy the playlists properly from itunes to the flash drive, or if there is a problem reading them on the flash drive. This is the last hurdle to save me from buying another ipod.

 

oh, lol. can't help you there. Connected really wouldn't work. an ipod touch would still give you most of the Connected features and playlists. Just no data options, unless you have a hotspot on your phone.

 

I don't know if this will work for iPod playlists, since mine are .m3u playlists that I made with Winamp. Anyway, I copied them to the root (top level) directory of my thumb drive, and it works like a charm.

My playlists need to be in the root directory because they use a relative path to find the songs. For example, one of my playlist entries is 'Boston/Third Stage/Amanda'. My folders are organized by Artist/Album/Song, so the playlist needs to go in the folder above 'Boston' ... in my case, the root folder.

If iTunes isn't copying your playlists to the USB drive, you may have to export them and copy them over manually. They probably go in the root directory like mine.

 

detours thanks I'll give it a try.