Observations on the Entune system with a flash drive

The mp3 playback on my 2020 eats a skanky donkeys ass.. Mp3 that have played flawlessly in 'lesser' vehicles for over a decade..the jbl sometimes plays them all the way no issues, sometimes scrambles halfway through the song, gets hung for a split second, then skips to the next track. if you hit back, the file will be gone and you cannot replay the song that was skipped. (it returns when you turn the engine on again.) Not only that but it re-arranges the files on your drive to suit what it thinks it wants.
i'd get better result plugging into an aux input if we still had one and running a decades old mp3 player

 

I don't have the JBL system since the manual didn't get that for "reasons" and am on the "premium" system. I have had the system act funky when choosing tracks but never played it glitched out. The glitching tracks could be suffering from bitrot, try downloading new copies of those tracks. I found the best way to deal with playback issues is to format the USB as fat32 then copy my playlist fresh onto the USB. I do this every time I add songs. However since I only add songs maybe once every six months or so I'm not worried about wearing out the USB from excessive writes.

 

Learned a new thing, the internal conversion of FLAC 96Khz to 48Khz has limits in what it can do. I had a FLAC song that was 24 bit and 96Khz with a bitrate of about 3.5Mb/s. The stereo became slow to respond and the song stuttered like a CD player would back in the day going over train tracks. I resampled the track to 24 bit 48Khz which lowered the bitrate to about 1.7Mb/s. This track played fine and the stereo remained responsive. Guess I'll have to look into a way to automatically convert the sample rate from 96Khz to 48Khz for any songs I copy to my USB.

 

When you get some spare time, could you run the FLAC decoder testbench? Curious to see if all the Entune 3.0 units across models behaves the same. I tested in my wife's Highlander, 10 of the 64 files get skipped, and one causes the progress bar to not work. But no other negative effects. Maybe you could share one of your problem files with me?

 

Is placing the files on a smartphone and using Android Auto or Apple Carplay to play them an option? A smartphone shouldn't have a problem with the files of a higher bit-rate should it?

 

I'll try it tomorrow. I would assume anything that uses their current entune will function the same.

 

Ran through the 64 tracks. They played in reverse because toyota. This is on the "premium" audio the pro stick is stuck with. Why they stick doesn't get the JBL system is unknown.
55 stuck at 0 then skipped
52 stuck at 0 then played
51 stuck at 0 then played
50 stuck at 0 then played
49 stuck at 0 then played
48 stuck at 0 then played
43 some channels missing or very quiet
42 some channels missing or very quiet
41 some channels missing or very quiet
40 some channels missing or very quiet
39 some channels missing or very quiet
27 no sound, played until 25 seconds then stopped, required manual skip
26-23 just skipped selecting does nothing, just gets skipped again
03 no sound, timer hesitates/lags

Audio version 1600

 

The results are quite a bit different on my wife's Highlander. The tracks played in order and the unplayable tracks were skipped like they weren't there. I believe the multi-channel tracks were down-mixed to stereo. She has the nav unit, it's not JBL either.

19 - skip
20 - skip
35 - skip
36 - skip
42 - skip
43 - skip
44 - skip
45 - plays, but no progress bar
46 - skips
51 - skip
54 - skip

 

What version of software is the head unit on? You should be able to find it under the main settings. Also what year is her rig? I would wonder if the head unit hardware itself could be the difference.

 

I thought these generic rock, alternative, world etc... images were part of Entune, turns out they're from gracenote. I have a rental Mazda that seems far more picky about the embedded album art.