Hidden files on USB thumbdrive and Entune

New guy here. I saw a few threads regarding people having issues with getting music transferred to a USB thumbdrive to display and play properly.

I spent some time researching here and on other forums and trial and error and have figured out what was causing problems so I'm posting this in case others have this problem.

1. Entune does not recognize Apple Lossless as a valid file type. So if you have some or all of your music in iTunes as Apple Lossless you will need to create a mp3 copy of the music you want in your car.

2. When copying music over to a thumbdrive, iTunes also places some hidden files on the thumbdrive that you will not be able to see in Finder (on a mac). These hidden files will absolutely cause Entune problems where some artists/albums/songs cannot be found.

3. There are two possible "fixes" - both involve removing the hidden files. One involves the "Terminal App" on a mac and some command line scripts. The other involves simply inserting the thumbdrive into a Windows PC and looking at the thumbdrive contents. I used the Windows route as I was not comfortable using command line scripts for fear of deleting something important on the mac.

4. When you look at the thumbdrive on a PC - click through your folder structure (mine is "artist", "album", "song"). When I drilled down to the song level within each album I found the hidden files - they all start with a "._" and will otherwise be duplicates of the mp3 files you want to keep. Sort by file name, highlight all of the files beginning with "._" and delete them.

5. I suggest finding some artists/albums/songs that Entune cannot find/play and performing the deletion of the hidden files as described above and then test it to see if Entune can then find your music files.

I'm sure there's a more elegant want to accomplish this but this is what ended up working for me in the end.