Organizing your USB flashdrive
 

Hey guys,

I bought an 8gb flashdrive and am going to use it in my 350. I know people have used the same flashdrive and complained about the availability of the music once the flashdrive is plugged into the car.

I was wondering if it matters if I organize my songs in individual folders based on the artist or just throw all the songs on the USB. Will it look different when presented on the screen of the car?

Any feedback will help. Thanks

The car does not seem to be able to play anything more than the first 255 files in a directory, so spread your files out.

Sort your files in different folders.
However, each song will have an mp3 tag to it, so you also have to alter this tag.
If you do not do that, one folder containing one artist will be listed with several differnent names of the same artist if you tell the car to play an artist by voice comand.

If you just use the buttons to select songs and only select song from the folders you have created, you'll be fine without altering the mp3 tags.

Does anyone have any trouble with displaying the album artwork? I turned off that garbage Gracenote, and my mp3s are still not showing the artwork properly. However, the artwork displays properly on my phone and on my ipad.

In addition, I once in awhile experience the same problem that the audio system doesn't pick up where I left off.

also in what order does it play the mp3 files ? how can i arrange my songs so that it plays in a specific sequence

Changing mp3 tag?
 

How do you change the mp3 tag?

Another user in here tipped me off about changing the tags, but I'm no good with computers, so I don't know how to do it.
The reason I need it was because a lot of the songs I have are missing the tags, and those songs does not respond to voice comand at all.

Ya I have a feeling im going to have the same problem. I download all my music so I cant imagine all of them having an mp3 tag. I guess ill mess around with it. Thanks for the input!:thumbup:

It plays in the order the file system puts them in. You can download free utilities to set this order for you.
Google 'mp3 usb sorter'

I use Mp3tag for tagging the files, to make sure it has the same artist name, record name and genre. For sorting files on the stick, I use a german program called DriveSort.

Just use the free version of MediaMonkey. I linked directly to the CNET download so you don't have to click through their site. It can auto-organize and auto-tag. I manually tagged mine since I like stuff in certain categories. It also prevents you from having to use different programs.

This thread seems to have many tech inclined individuals and any help with the following would be great(!):

I have 110 folders named “Ripped1, Ripped2… Ripped110” on a USB drive, each of which represents a different album, each of which contains WAV audio track files. Each WAV file is titled the name of the track and when you roll over it with a mouse a little blurb pops up with ID tag info, including artist and album names.

Can anyone please recommend software that would automatically organize the folders and files into a 3 level hierarchy from Artists (1st level) --> Albums (2nd level) --> Tracks (3rd level), so I can use a low profile USB drive like the one pictured as my own, makeshift on-board media hard drive.

Thank you!

iTunes by Apple, Inc.

Thanks, but anything other than iTunes?

I have a PC and really, really, really dislike iTunes; doesn't work well on PC at all...

iTunes is ****...and it does not allow you to customize sorting of your library folders at all last I checked.

As I stated in a previous post, use MediaMonkey. This allows tagging and will auto-organize based on pretty much anything you want - genre, artist, album, etc. Before you do that though you likely need to convert the WAVs to MP3. I used AudioGrabber years ago for that. Probably something better out there than that. If you're not "techie," find someone who is.

Edit: scratch that, I guess you don't need to convert to tag WAV files. So just use MediaMonkey. I've got mine organized like: {GENRE}/{ARTIST}/{SONGNAME}.mp3