What are you using for music storage?

Apple music and bluetooth

 

I was about to say,didn’t know people still listened to CDs

 

I still do and I still like to buy them.

 

+1...Still buy them cds too. 80’s Metal. \m/

 

Rock on!

 

Love the avatar you have there. Up the Irons!

 

Thanks Bud! Eddie likes your comment!

 

160 Gb ipod classic. Never had any lockup issues with it. It's a little slow to startup when it gets below freezing overnight, but otherwise fine.

 

Still buy them too. Put them in the computer once to rip on the NAS, then never use the disk again.

 

Interesting, between my wife and i we have 4 iPod Classics that all lockup and have done it to one degree or another in 6 different vehicles (5 Ford Fusions and this Tacoma).

 

Still buy cds too. Bout 1 a week.

 

Spotify.

$9.99 a month, almost any song/artist you could think of at your fingertips within seconds, ability to download any song to listen to when there is no cell coverage, great sound quality over Bluetooth...

 

Does the Entune head unit have a hard drive to store things or do you need to leave a USB of some type plugged in all the time?

 

gotta leave something plugged in all the time.

i use an old 60gb iPod from high school

 

Posting this here as it seems like a good place. Sorry in advance for the long read but I'm pretty excited about this!

I've had the 256GB Apple iPod Classic for years. It's the only Apple product I still use and I think it's great for what it is. Only problem I've had is it doesn't hold all of my music. I ended up splitting my collection into an "A" folder and a "B" folder and was only syncing the former to the iPod. Then I had to start limiting the syncing of the A folder to full albums from most recent year descending until the iPod storage is full. It's gotten to the point where I'm only able to sync back to 2010.

Yes, for most people, this is more than enough music to listen to while driving. Not me. I want my whole friggin' library in the car. FYI, I have 3 day weekends every week plus 8 weeks of PTO and end up spending most of my time off taking road trips and camping in places that don't have service.

I have been looking at 500GB thumb drives as these were suggested by most people for storing large collections and being able to play them through the factory USB/Entune stereo. But, none of the 500GB USB drives made are low profile and I wasn't a fan of having a normal length thumb drive protruding from the dash directly above the cup holders. So, I'v been wondering if a portable SSD, which could sit flat in the cubby beneath the dash, would work instead. I wasn't able to find confirmation anywhere on the forums or elsewhere though and these drives are typically pretty expensive just for testing purposes.

But, Amazon has had these Sandisk Extreme 500GB SSD's in a rugged, water, dust and shock resistant, USB-C powered enclosure, on sale for $100 all week (they're still on sale right now):

$125 SanDisk 500GB Extreme Portable External SSD - Up to 550MB/s - USB-C, USB 3.1 - SDSSDE60-500G-G25

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078SWJ3CF/. At that price, I figured if it didn't work I could use it for something else. The other day I pulled the trigger...

And... it does work! Much better than the iPod even. Browsing from the head unit is noticeably faster. The drive is much smaller than the iPod (3.79 x 1.95 x 0.35 in to be exact) and takes up practically no room in the cubby.

There were two small details that I had to deal with to make this work. The first: After plugging the drive into Windows I noticed that it was formatted to exFat by default. I think that's a great file system as it can be read by both Windows and Mac and there isn't a file size limit like Fat32, NTFS, etc. But, the Tacoma doesn't read exFat. So, I went to format to Fat32 but that wasn't an option, only exFat and NTFS. Come to find out, this is a limitation in Windows OS, not with the SSD itself. A quick Google search brought me to this article with super simple instructions and screenshots on how to format the SSD to Fat32: https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/format-ssd-to-fat32.html. I just so happened to have a copy of that software on my computer at work after having used it to expand a drive partition on a server a while back. The software worked great for that too BTW.

The second issue: the supplied USB C cord is only like 1.25" long. That doesn't leave you enough room to set the drive anywhere. I already had several USB-A to USB-C cables b/c that's what my phone uses to charge. Although, the shortest cable I had on hand was 3' which leaves quite a bit of slack hanging out. I think I'll end up replacing with something like this ~8.5": https://www.amazon.com/AUKEY-Samsung-Perfect-Portable-Charger/dp/B0746C244X/.

The only other thing is, now I kind of regret not going with the 1TB version SSD. After loading up the drive with my entire library, I only have about 25GB of free space left.

Anyway, hope someone else finds this as useful as I did!

 

Nice to hear that works.

I'm guessing you didn't read through the rest of the thread though, based on your post.
You can use certain usb splitters/hubs to actually have 2 usb sources show up in Entune. I had to do this simply based on the file/folder limitations of Entune.

 

Another option to consider: it's not that hard to swap out the internal drive on an iPod Classic. Put the SSD in it! Then you could actually continue to use the iPod to manage your library (I think itunes makes it easier to manage all the metadata). I put an sd-card reader in mine, but the ssd would perform the same role. Hunt around on youtube; there are lots of tutorial videos!

I connect it with USB use a right-angle usb adapter to clean up the cables and run it straight into the glovebox. Works well enough.

 

Flashdrive and FM radio - what can I say, I'm low tech...

 

Channel 62 XM radio.

 

Nice, does Entune have a 9999 file limit?