BAlbright

Just came back from playing with the new car---was trying to get the USB to randomize play as shown on page344 in the manual. For the life of me, I can't find that screen. Nor can I activate the "browse" icon I see at the bottom of the screen so that I can quickly get to a particular album.. I've read and read the manual and spent way too much time tinkering in the car. Any help out there?

BAlbright

Well--as it turns out, I don't think that the screen shown on page 344 exists on the F model. I have Navi in mine. Turns out you can randomize with the icons at the bottom of the screen--the one with the lines that cross. Pushing it brings up a text that says what it's doing. Now to figure out how to "browse" my 1000 or so albums that are on the stick.

c141heaven

Just got a new 2015 ES300h.

Finally got the USB stick to play ... For testing I put about 10 directories on it, each with a different album. Located and clicked on the random 'x' down at the bottom of the screen but it seems to only play randomly within the directory it's currently in, not across all directories. I'm guessing what might be needed is to load up a bunch of files in a single directory instead of spread over many.

BAlbright

If you click on that same spot again, it will go to randomozing all your songs and will display rnd fld in the window

BAlbright

By the way, you can also access any album ,song, or artist with voice command. A very handy feature..especially for me when I use a 64gig stick with about 1000 albums on it

c141heaven

Thanks. When I did that, the RAND vs. FLD.RAND message at the top appears....but it still seems stuck on playing a single directory randomly no matter which of these is selected. My solution for the time being is to give up and just put all the files in a single directory (999 max per the manual) and just put that one directory on random.

All my MP3's have full tags but the voice command doesn't seem to work for these files ... I will keep plugging away at it and see what happens.

BAlbright

I think what you need to do is to create an artist older. Create an album folder and drop that albums songs into that folder. Then take one song...preferably the shortest song you have from that artist and drop it into the artist folder by itself. So if you open the artist folder..you will see all the folders(albums) by that artist plus that one song. I bought an aftermarket head unit from Crutchfield one time for my 350z and couldn't get it to display albums. After calling Aiwa, that is what the guy told me to do. I can't remember why it was necessary to do that, but it worked after doing so. It won't take but a few minutes to do this and I'm 99.9% sure it will solve your problem. Hate to see you lose all the flexibility that you have with a USB stick!
With respect to voice commands, be aware that if you say, for example, "play artist Beatles" , or "play album Dark Side of the Moon" that it might not do it immediately after starting up the car. The car reads the stick in the background when it first starts to play and prepares it for voice recognition. It seems like it's 5 or 6 minutes for it to be read. If it is not yet ready, you will hear a reply back saying something to the effect of "preparing for voice recognition". Once you tell it to find an album and it is, in fact, ready, it will go to that album and a new screen will appear where there are several blocks with letter of the alphabet in each block...like A-E...then F-J..and so on. This makes it real easy then to access a particular album. As I mentioned before I have over 1000 albums on my stick. Trying to scroll one album at a time from the beginning to get to an album in the middle of the stick..like say Moody Blues..would take forever. Because of this handy feature, I'm planning on getting a 128gig stick which will hold every cd I own..around 1500 of them. Hope this helps you!

c141heaven

I made two directories with about 200 files in each.
It would play with reasonable randomness in only one directory, not switching to the 2nd directory regardless of whether I had clicked only once or twice on the 'x' (random) option at the bottom of the screen. (RAND or FLD.RAND displays).

It's no big deal at this point. 255 files in a single directory gives plenty of driving time (about 17 hours!) which is way longer than I can drive at one shot.

I can force a specific playlist order easily by just putting a 3 digit number prefix on the file names on the thumb drive ....e.g.,

001_beattles_abc.mp3
002_rolling_stones_def.mp3
...
255_bob_dylan_xyz.mp3

And then don't go random they will play in that order. If you then decide to go random it will do that within the confines of their random play functionality.

This is on a 2015 ES so I'm guessing that some update to the player logic may be making it work differently than on 2014 or earlier models. I've created a simple program to take a bunch of files and assign a random 3 digit number as a prefix, so it is not a big time-consumer for me to create a random list that is far more random than the players built-in brain dead random number logic. I've been fighting this battle with MP3 players and CD players that can handle Mp3's for years. It's insane that the guys who can come up with these types of pretty complex systems can't make something as simple as this work properly.