Any tips for USB audio file organization or playlists ?

[pkts]

I prefer to have my audio files on a USB stick over playing off my phone, however a chunk of songs are old imports and my metadata is a mess (track numbers all over the place, weird filenames at times) which makes it hard to navigate in the car esp since there's no search feature. I tried organizing by folders but the car seems to look at the metadata over the folders even when I tell it to look at folders. Ideally creating a playlist on my laptop and putting that on the USB stick would be best but I don't know if that can be done.

 

Any suggestions ?

[Vince Donald]

I use a bit of software called MP3Tag to modify the metadata, you can edit say the Album name or Artist for the entire Album at once, you just need a bit of patience I'm afraid if you have a lot of files, I've got a 32Gb thumb drive and its physically tiny, when plugged in theres only a few of mm visible.

Vince

[ikeja]

What format should the music be in to play via a usb stick?

 

[pkts]

9 hours ago, ikeja said:

What format should the music be in to play via a usb stick?

 

FAT32...also must be MBR boot sector (if you are on a MAC)

[Herbie]

12 hours ago, pkts said:

FAT32...also must be MBR boot sector (if you are on a MAC)

That's the format for the flash drive itself (can also be FAT16 too but no one would want that) but the music files themselves are different.

I suppose it may depend on which car and how old, but I do know that my November 2013 RX450h Advance will only play MP3 or WMA files - it won't play FLAC, OGG or others.

I have them arranged on the drive as follows:

Parent folder = artist
Sub folder = albums

so

Pink Floyd
     Dark side of the moon
     Wish you were here
     etc., etc.

AC/DC
     Highway to Hell
     High Voltage

and so on.