USB drive max size
Thread Starter
Driver School Candidate
Joined: Nov 2019
Posts: 8
Likes: 2
From: TX
USB drive max size
I purchased a USB 128gb drive formatted FAT32 and added about 3000 songs and it is not recognized but my 32gb drive is. Is there a max size limit for USB drives?
Pit Crew
Joined: Dec 2009
Posts: 148
Likes: 51
From: IN
My 128 GB drive had a similar problem. Not all of the files were recognized. My solution was to partition the drive into multiple folders of 500 or less titles. My folders are organized by musical genre and labeled accordingly.
Intermediate
Joined: Jul 2014
Posts: 416
Likes: 108
From: TX
Keep in mind the limits. I have a 2014 but was excited back then to put a 128 GB USB drive for music. I had a dickens of a time getting it to read all my files. After lots of figuring out, here is what works (note this is for my 2014, but I believe it is similar for Gen-7):
1) Make sure you format to FAT32 as noted above.
2) You can only have a max of 3000 folders (i.e., "albums" at the top level)
3) You can only have 255 files per folder (i.e,. no more than 255 songs per album)
4) You are limited to 9999 files all together (I think this includes folders/albums also)
Once I figured out the 9999 limit, I was 100% good and all my music was there...granted I had to remove some. So now I remove Christmas music for most of the year, then add back in Christmas music and have to choose what other music not to include. So it takes between five and seven minutes for the ES to read all the files and allow the voice commands "Play Music", etc., to work. That's the down side to having a bunch of songs.
I am bummed there is the 9999 limit...again, Lexus [read: Luxury Car/Expensive] can do better (I'm a software engineer and cannot explain any hardware limitation for this--it seems a "lazy" software limitation).
1) Make sure you format to FAT32 as noted above.
2) You can only have a max of 3000 folders (i.e., "albums" at the top level)
3) You can only have 255 files per folder (i.e,. no more than 255 songs per album)
4) You are limited to 9999 files all together (I think this includes folders/albums also)
Once I figured out the 9999 limit, I was 100% good and all my music was there...granted I had to remove some. So now I remove Christmas music for most of the year, then add back in Christmas music and have to choose what other music not to include. So it takes between five and seven minutes for the ES to read all the files and allow the voice commands "Play Music", etc., to work. That's the down side to having a bunch of songs.
I am bummed there is the 9999 limit...again, Lexus [read: Luxury Car/Expensive] can do better (I'm a software engineer and cannot explain any hardware limitation for this--it seems a "lazy" software limitation).
Rookie
Joined: Jan 2019
Posts: 37
Likes: 17
From: TX
In response to wszimmer... I had a handful of songs I wanted to listen to in the car. I put a folder containing the songs on a 64GB drive that holds all my other music (in folders by artist/album), and then I also loaded the songs on a freshly fat32 formatted 16GB flash drive - I just loaded the song files right into the root directory of the drive (not inside a folder). The car wouldn’t recognize the songs on the 16GB drive, but worked fine with the 64. I concluded that the song files have to be inside a folder (as all my music is on the 64)? I haven’t yet gone back and tested with a folder on the 16...
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Rookie
Joined: Nov 2019
Posts: 89
Likes: 29
From: NV
In response to wszimmer... I had a handful of songs I wanted to listen to in the car. I put a folder containing the songs on a 64GB drive that holds all my other music (in folders by artist/album), and then I also loaded the songs on a freshly fat32 formatted 16GB flash drive - I just loaded the song files right into the root directory of the drive (not inside a folder). The car wouldn’t recognize the songs on the 16GB drive, but worked fine with the 64. I concluded that the song files have to be inside a folder (as all my music is on the 64)? I haven’t yet gone back and tested with a folder on the 16...
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Driver School Candidate
Joined: Jun 2019
Posts: 17
Likes: 5
From: FL
One thing to keep in mind is that the car USB does not support Lossless WMA files and a few other audio formats. I had ripped all my CDs to my computer using Windows Media Player back in the day and I selected the Lossless format to ensure full fidelity of the CD audio. The Lexus manual states it supports Lossless audio and that it supports WMA but does not make it clear that it does not support Lossless WMA. My solution was to convert the Lossless WMA into FLAC and those songs now show up correctly and play correctly from the USB. There is still some problem with playing songs from albums in the order they are recorded since the USB file system still is not able to use the track tag to determine the correct play order. That is another whole problem unto itself. It seems to randomly decide on what order to play tracks from an album even when Random play is not selected. It is not using alphabetical or numerical. It does not seem to make any sense as what order the tracks present themselves on the USB.
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flatrocky
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