music playback: any issues w/ not recognizing 1st song in album folder?

I have songs on a USB stick, organized as: root folder contains folders for artist name, and within artist name folder, folder(s) for album name, and within album name folder, the individual songs (either as mp3 or wma files), along with album art jpeg files. All songs were ripped from CDs on my PC, which created the directory/file structure automatically, and then just bulk copied to the USB stick so no manual intervention of the file structure on my part.

The problem:
In a couple (seemingly random) cases, the listing on the dash screen for certain albums doesn't recognize the first song. And bumping the selection forward 1 song from the last song still doesn't see the first song. Same is true if I bump the selection back 1 song from the second song.

Has anyone else noticed this before? There doesn't appear to be anything different about the album folders or file contents that this happens to, versus all the others where it does see the first song. But it consistently misses the first song of the same albums, so it's not entirely random.

And I've inserted the USB stick into my PC and was able to see and play the songs that the Tacoma can't see for whatever reason, so the files are not corrupted.

Any ideas?

 

I have used a thumb drive that has the original CD title and artist listed but individual songs are numbered. The playback in my Taco plays all 001 songs, then all 002 etc with only a song number on screen. It is sort of like random play except it goes thru each song listed in a predetermined numerical order.

 

Its a problem I have with windows media player. I have not yet used a cd or usb with my truck. Are you using wmp to transfer to the usb?

 

I used WMP to do the conversion, but it wrote the resulting files to my PC's hard drive, and I just bulk copied them from there to the USB. I also bulk copied the same files to an SD card for a different vehicle and it reads all those just fine. It seems to be something specific to the Tacoma.

 

I use an old iPod classic and one thing that I've noticed is that occasionally, when I select a new artist to listen to, it will show all of the information for the song that I selected, but it will play a different song still in the same album. However, if I skip forward a song, and then go back, it will play the correct song. It doesn't happen all of the time, but a little frustrating when it does. however, a simple skip forward and then back will fix the issue.

 

Giving this a bump since many people were probably away for the holiday weekend. Anyone else had this issue where the first (and sometimes the first and second) songs in a given album are not being seen by the Tacoma's USB playback system? Any fix for it?

 

Update: I spent some time browsing alphabetically through my albums stored on the USB stick (using the truck's interface), trying to figure out how many albums were missing the first (and sometimes also the second) song. I got to "U" and there were 2 listings in the Album category called Unknown Album. Inside both those folders were all the missing first or second songs from the other folders. And I have no idea why it created 2 separate folders or why it chose to put some in one folder and the rest in another.

While I still have no idea WHY it's doing this, at least if someone else comes across this problem in the future, you'll know to look for the "Unknown Album" folders as the dumping ground for the missing songs.

 

I get reliable playback by making sure the MP3 tags are correct.

If the MP3 tags don't exist, it appears Entune uses the filename, which gives random results.

A free MP3 tag editor, like MP3Tag, is easy to use, sequences song titles, associates MP3 song titles with filenames, etc.

 

Thanks for the tip. I have a mix of mp3 and wma files, so I'll have to take a look whether it's only the mp3's that this happens on.

 

Entune sucks a bag of dicks. I’ve tried everything with the USB stick with music, I’m now playing everything in alphabetical song order, nothing else works. Not fun.