Observations on the Entune system with a flash drive

Out out curiosity, I added a 3rd flash drive today. Seems 2 is the limit.

 

Does anyone watch video such as YouTube with Entune? (not while driving of course) I find the audio lags way behind the video.

 

Did you ever find out how to fix this? I think my issue is the same as what you are describing.

Example: I go to the USB, select to play By Artist. I select AC/DC. From there I select Back in Black. I would LIKE it to play the entire Album, and then go to the next Album in the list (Highway to Hell). However, after the last song on the Back in Black Album, it will go back to the first song in the Back in Black Album. When I toggle the REPEAT on, it will repeat the current song I am listening to. I do not want to REPEAT the current Album.

On the other hand, it is forcing me to use the voice system more often in order to select another album. Just wish it would automatically go to the next album in my list.

 

Yes, this is exactly what I'm talking about. But I have not found a way to advance to the next album (or a different artist) short of stepping thru the "Browse" functions on-screen (very unsafe while driving) or by using the voice control (also pretty unsafe while driving). My truck is a 2017. I could SWEAR that when I first got the truck it was possible to step through songs, albums, and artists (folders) without resorting to the unsafe menu or voice commands. But that went away with one of the forced updates to Entune. You would think safety would be a primary concern... but apparently not. The "Tune/Scroll" knob, the "Seek/Track" touch control, and the "Up/Down buttons on the steering wheel all do basically the exact same thing... step up or down through the tracks. At least ONE of those controls (preferably the Tune/Scroll knob) should be made to step through FOLDERS... in the interest of SAFETY. I believe that's how my radio worked when I first got the truck.

 

Good option!

 

Mine has been acting up lately. A couple times a day, it seems to reinitialize the flash drives. I haven't changed anything recently.

 

I’m impressed by everyone’s music collection. I have not started one yet and I just feel so far behind. It’s a daunting task.

 

Because Entune won't seem to read NTFS or exFat formatted USB sticks, yet, 32G is the limit. So, I use SoundBee on Win10 to organize music into libraries of around 28G each.

I can copy the folders from "Road Trip" or "Da Guyz", or "WTH Adele FFS" to a stick, copy the playlists I exported from SoundBee, and that stick is ready to go, complete with playlists for short drives, long drives, waiting in the truck outside the smelly-ass craft store, etc.

Sooo much easier on the wife's Kenwood head... One 128G stick.

 

My old JVC unit had no problem with a 128GB usb drive. Only downside was I had to use a program called fatsort to rewrite the allocation table in alphanumeric order.

 

Looks like one of my flash drives was acting up. Could potentially be on it's way out, and was causing both drives to load all songs on random.

It's one of the new plastic SanDisk 128GB drives, and they're quality isn't as good as the last generation metal versions.

 

Just put in the usb into the apple laptop. Copy the entire music folder in itunes to the flash drive (make sure it is FAT32) and it works. I have a mixture of M4a's and MP3's

 

Annoying only 255 per folder.

 

Agreed. But, I have my music in folders by album, artist and etc..... So it is not a problem. I used some freeware to do this. I used MusicBrainz's Picard to organize my music's misc data (track, album and etc...)

 

I'm OCD with my music organization. I have the folders laid like this for my usb drive:

"Artist Name"
> "[year] - Album Name"
> > "01 - Track Name"

Since Entune doesn't organize albums by year, I added the year before the album name in the ID3v2 tags.

 

I was bored this morning. Been seeing conflicting info on wether or not AAC (m4a) files are supported. Seems AAC-LC CBR/VBR is, but HE-AAC isn't on my Entune unit.

 

Hi folks, I just joined this forum specifically to reply to this thread. I own a 2016 4Runner with Entune, and found this thread while researching alternatives to using my old iPod Classic 160 GB connected to Entune. As we all know, the iPod Classic is getting pretty old and mine has been having issues lately, so I wanted to investigate the possibility of using a large capacity thumb drive instead. Anyway, I wanted to reply to see if I can help some of you on here, and also see if some of my questions might be answered.

First, I have read many of you complain about not being able to see all tracks, or having issues searching for music on a USB drive, etc. My suggestion here, and this is based on years of personal experience with portable music files, is that you must have your music collection very organized with a standard naming convention. This is paramount. I have over a TB of MP3 files on my PC on a separate hard drive just for my music collection, and everything is organized as such:

M:\music\Artist Name\Album Title\Artist Name - Album Title - Track Number Leading 0 - Track Name.mp3.

An example of this would be M:\music\Cure, The\Disintegration\The Cure - Disintegration - 04 - Lovesong.mp3 as below:



A few things to note here. First, the FOLDER name for this band is "Cure, The". This eliminates having to scroll through tons of bands that start with "The" and gives you the ability to find the band you want much quicker. ***This only applies to searching on your harddrive, in Entune I think the "The" is automatically removed for ease of navigation. I do this in my folder structure on my hard drive, otherwise you will end up with a ton of folders starting with "The" and it's a pain to scroll through all that, if you have a massive collection as I do.

Also note, this file, folder structure can be varied however you want, but it is important that ALL your music is named and organized in the SAME way. This will give your ID3 tagging program a standard file name to use when applying new ID3 tags. I know a lot of you are already shaking your heads because the answer is YES, this does take some work to organize and setup. I've been doing it for well over a decade, and it just depends on how important it is to you to have your music collection with you while you sit in traffic for 3 hours a day. For me, IT IS.

Now, a quick lesson on ID3 tags. This is the method by which audio playback devices sort, read, and display track info, such as ARTIST NAME, ALBUM NAME, etc. Without proper, standardized ID3 tags on EVERY SINGLE FILE your digital music playback devices with have trouble reading the files in any sort of orderly fashion, making the use of said device(s) annoying and frustrating. So you NEED to have your ID3 tags standard too, which is why I suggest starting with standard files names. Once your file names are standard, you can use an ID3 tagging program to remove the old tag, and apply new tags based on your already standardized file names for your whole collection. (this is one of the things I *think* iTunes does for you, however I loathe iTunes and any sort of DRM software, so I avoid it, but if it works for you, cool)

There are many programs out there, but I have always used a program called ID3-TagIT to apply STANDARD ID3 Tags to each track based on my STANDARD file naming convention mentioned above. This is what the properties of your files should look like if you were to set up your music like mine:



Notice the fields for Title, Contributing Artists, Album and # are the only fields complete for my file. This is because my ID3 tags only contain this info. You can however add genre and other tags if it is helpful, but for me, simplicity is key. Also note, this is under the PROPERTIES of the individual MP3, under the DETAILS tab. You can directly edit ID3 tags via Windows this way, one file at a time, but I do not recommend that!!!

So, using that method, I have NEVER had issues with Entune organizing my music in a very user friendly, searchable fashion. I think those of you on here who have issues have haphazardly organized collections that fail to have standard file names and possibly missing or broken ID3 tags. It is a lot of work to get your collection organized, but it is simple if you start from scratch using a CD collection, for instance. I can give more tips on this if some of you are interested, but the bottom line is, your music collection MUST be organized, standardized and properly ID3 tagged or you will have lots of annoying problems with not being able to find tracks, etc. The programs I have been using for over a decade now consist of CDex (for ripping CDs to my computer), 1-4a Rename (great program for easy bulk file renaming to a standard format) and ID3-TagIT (super easy, bulk ID3 tagger, which you need to do once your files and folders are organized and standardized).

So, hopefully that info helps some of you, I can elaborate a bit for those of you who are not so tech savvy on any of these points, if needed.

Now, on to my questions:

1) Are we 100% positive 9,999 files is the limit? Has anyone done any experimentation to see if there are ways around this outside of splitting your music collection between two thumb drives? Currently, my 160 iPod has almost 20,000 files on it, so I will need to pair back my in car music by at least 50% to keep it under 9999, which is not a huge problem, just annoying.

2) Has anyone tried the partitioning idea with any success?

3) Does anyone know if there are any issues, differences in behavior, or problems when using different USB thumb drive versions (USB 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1)? I'm thinking no, but just wanted to see if anyone had any info regarding this.

Anyway, thanks!

 

1. I've tried many suggestions from here and other sources. 9,999 does indeed seem to be the limit.

2. Partitioning doesn't work, however, Entune will read up to 2 thumb drives with a usb hub.

3. With the exception of trying a usb 1.0/1.1 drive, the protocol seems to makes no difference.

Like you, I'm very particular with my folder structure and tagging. Entune doesn't seem to sort albums chronologically even with proper ID3v2 (mp3) or atoms (m4a), so I've had to append the year before the album name on my usb drive. Also, Entune doesn't seem to account for "The" in artist names. So "The Cure" will appear that way on Entune.

 

When you say chronologically, you mean you want to sort by release year and Entune does not recognize the release year in the ID3 tag? I've never bothered with tagging the release date on my music, I just have way to much I don't really worry about when a record was released, so alphabetical organization is preferred for me. I bet Entune only looks at certain tags and ignores all others. I only tag Artist, Album, Track Number and Track Name. Now that you mention it, I can't recall what Entune does with the "The", but it definitely ignored it on my iPod, and Entune just displayed what the iPod had going I believe. I need to go buy a 128 GB stick and load it up and do some testing. Worst case, I will buy two and one of the USB splitters and break my portable collection into two halves.

I have a small 32GB drive in the T4R right now, and one thing I noticed is it seemed to work a whole lot faster than my old iPod Classic, but that is also likely because it is much smaller and it is solid state, as opposed to the iPod which still has a hard drive with seek time. I'm really hoping a couple thumb drives is an adequate solution for me. It will make loading and moving music around a lot simpler for me too, since I won't have to mess with 3rd party software like ML-iPod, iTunes or WinAmp to get music moved into the vehicle. Just Windows and I am good to go!

Also, I don't see my favorite KMFDM releases there, kid. Where is UAIOE and Money?

 

I still have an iPod classic. I never use it though. It didn't always get along with my last stereo, and I hate iTunes.

Back when my collection was small, I didn't bother with tagging. I didn't use media libraries, just a well organized folder structure. Now, I'm more ocd with tagging.

 

Yeah, my collection took form when I ripped my massive CD collection back in the early 2000s. I didn't start getting OCD with tagging until a few years later, but it was really easy since my file naming convention has always been super tight. Right now my MP3 collection stands at almost exactly half a TB, with several folders of music I have yet to properly sort...