I have a 2014 Cooper S Paceman with the HK sound system. I have a thumb drive with about 300 MP3 songs on it plugged into the Aux port. The problem is the car seems to cycle through only 50 songs or so. I keep hearing the same songs over and over. I have the Random feature selected so I should go through the entire library, at least that was my expectation.

According to the manual the car can handle 20,000 songs. So, what am I doing wrong?

Thanks for the help.

Curt.

 

Are you able to manually select and play all 300 songs? You might have some songs in a format that the stereo doesn't know how to play.

 

You likely have multiple folders...

 

Okay. I'll check to see if it will play all the songs. Though it does seem like it has in the past but has shortened the list of songs it plays over time.

I'll also check on the folders idea.

I'll let you know tomorrow what I find.

Curt.

 

I played around with the aux drive issue at lunch today. To answer the questions posed by rkw and HorseWithNoName:

1: No, I cannot manually scroll through the songs. For example, I have 12 songs that start with "A" and when I manually go through the list, it plays 1 song.

2: The songs are all in MP3 format without DMA protection so according to what I read, they should play just fine. The thumbdrive is also formatted in FAT 32 which is the recommended format.

3: I cannot seem to find anything in the manual regarding "folders" so if I put them in some folder I don't know how that happened and more importantly, I don't know how to undo any folder stuff I did.

4: I spoke with the local dealer who told me the internal HD couldn't support too many songs and it would cut down on what was played. . . Not sure how to react to this since the thumbdrive actually holds the songs and the manual says the car will support 20,000 songs.

I'll keep trying to figure this out.

 

I suspect its a 'folders' issue too. The 'folders' are on your thumb drive. Plug your thumb drive into your computer and move all of the songs into one basic folder. Some people separate their music by genre, artist etc and this is what you should get rid of and just have all of your songs in one folder.

 

Totally agree...

The reason I mentioned folders in my first post was because my USB drive would only play songs in one folder.

I plugged the USB it into my ultrabook and removed all folders leaving just mp3 songs on the drive.

My drive is 32gb with around 20gb of music and works good now, it does take about 10 seconds to load after I start the car to hear music using the drive.

Some times I use the Jack into my Note 3 and stream music , it sounds a lot better than the satellite radio. (go figure?)

Hope the helps...

 

Having your music in folders doesn't matter. I have all my music separated into Artist folders with Album subfolders and it works fine. For awhile I was dumping it all into the top level thinking it might index faster, but it doesn't seem to make a difference and it's a pain to delete albums when they're all in one folder. I have a 16 GB drive that's mostly full.

It's possible the OP's drive didn't index correctly. There's a hidden file that the car creates when you plug it in called .fseventsd that you can delete to force it to re-index.

A couple other thoughts:

1) Check the file sizes on the thumb drive of your songs to make sure they match what's on your computer HD (basically make sure they copied over correctly).

2) See if you can play the songs off the thumb drive while it's plugged into your computer to make sure they didn't get corrupted.

3) You mentioned that they're all MP3s, but I think the car can only handle up to a certain bit rate (maybe 256 kbps?). Something else to check if you ripped some CDs at one of the higher bit rates.

 

I took a look at the drive this morning and I did not have any of the songs in a folder, in fact there is no folder on the drive at all. Only songs.

I also randomly tried several songs on my computer to see if they played correctly and every one played fine. The bit rates were from 128 kbps to 203 kbps so I should be good there.

I'm thinking of just trying a different thumb drive - perhaps it's wonky - and put on maybe 100 songs to see if that works.

I'm driving the SUV for a couple of days so I won't get back to the Mini until Thursday. I'll let you know how this goes.

Thanks for the help.

Curt.