USB Thumb drive anyone? 2012

I have a 2012 (non Entune) and was thinking about trying a 16gb thumb drive in the usb port instead of my ipod .Anybody tried one? How was the navigation thru the head unit?

 

I have an 8GB Sandisk stick, it's very small and the usb cover almost closes when it is in place. Using a usb stick works fine, but an ipod does have faster response. When going through folders or artists on the ipod, the titles show up almost immediately. With the usb stick, there is a bit of a delay. But for me, it works. I like that I don't have any wires and an ipod to worry about hiding, and I generally just use the usb when I get to the parking garage at work and the XM signal gets lost. The display does show the song, artist, and album titles, and the steering wheel controls will scroll through the song list.

One strange thing I noticed is that the usb stick will play the music in the folder order as it was copied, so I copied all the music I wanted to put on the usb stick into a directory on my pc (artist/album folder structure) first and had them sorted alphabetically. That way when I copied them all at once, they were in alphabetical order by artist when I scrolled through the folders using the radio controls. Works except for the last folder shows up first, then it starts with A. Not a big deal, but just odd. When I get to the point of adding more music, it would get appended at the end.

 

I have opinions. Many opinions.

http://www.tacomaworld.com/forum/audio-video/202832-new-pioneer-inbound.html#post4511689

TLDR; The industry doesn't want your stinky USB business.

 

I talked to Pioneer about this quirk, and they recommended sorting the drive with a legacy utility: http://www.anerty.net/software/file/DriveSort/

I think this quote from the application's creator sums up the issue well:

It is this general lack of resources or engineering in current HUs that adding an iPod addresses. The iPod offers up library services that the HU manufacturers are not willing to add yet. I would not have an issue with this separation of duties, but I don't agree with having to buy a $230 iPod to make my $300 HU work correctly.

 

Interesting. I bookmarked the DriveSort link you provided. I'll have to try it when I add more files to my usb stick. Thanks.

 

Yes, Drivesort works great for this little "anomoly".

As for HU manufacturers in general, not sure, but Pioneer, IMO, is biting the big one on USB drives (disk or stick). I've had 3 Pioneer HUs over the last 5 years or so. The first one, a P6900 I think, handled USB sticks quite well. The index time was 10-15 seconds on a 16GB thumb drive, the sort was alpha, and the HU would index the drive on power up no matter what source it was on. Allowed you to start up on the radio, allow the drive to index, then switch to the drive and it only needed to be indexed once per power cycle.

The last two HUs, a P690UB and a P4300DVD, really took a "USB crap". They both required 55-60 seconds to index the same 16GB USB stick, will not index the drive until the USB source is selected, and the sort was by date. Since it will not index the drive until USB source is selected, you will wait that time each time the drive is selected, even if you started up on USB, switch to radio, then back to USB, the drive will need to be indexed again the second time. 1 minute does not sound like much, but try starting up, turning the sound off and wait 60 seconds,,, longer then it sounds.

How did I fix this,,, yup, moved to an iPod for storage. Ended up buying my son's old 2nd gen 16Gb iPod to replace my USB stick. Price wasn't too bad, but the principle really sucked!

So, to agree with Jason, Pioneer definitely sucks for non-Ipod USB support!!! Too bad I like everything else about the 4300.

 

Is their a limit to how much it can read? I have about 10gb of music on my drive (all mp3) and not all of it displays on the console...what gives?