USB compatibility
01-24-18, 02:27 PM
#1
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USB compatibility
I have a 2016 LS 460 L and downloaded some of my iTunes music to a 16 Gb scan disk 2.0 flash drive since my Lexus doesn't accept sd cards for playing music. The 16 Gb 2.0 usb works. Bought a 32 Gb scan disk 3.0 drive and put 4k+ songs on the drive and although the car see's the drive no music appears. Will or should the LS 460 L be able to read a 3.0 USB drive formatted FAT 32 with less than 65k files and 999 folders etc.?
01-26-18, 08:22 PM
#3
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I have found that the LS 460 L that I have will play the native iTunes format (m4a) music. With the 4k+ songs it takes 6 to 10 minutes to read the thumb drive before play and browsing can occur. I had hoped that Gracenote would index and perhaps retain such index to make loading faster after the first time read, but one has to go through the time consuming process each time. Should you need the file structure that I used let me know and I'll send you an example. Thanks for your response.
Fred
Fred
01-27-18, 05:21 PM
#4
I have been working on setting up a music drive for my 13 lwb awd over the last day or two. I was hoping to use uncompressed files-wav or flac. After reading the manual today and reading these posts I don’t think this is possible. I would have to use lossy mp3 or some Microsoft compressed file type I never heard of. A bit of a bummer given the ML system. If anyone has figured a workaround to get lossless files to the ML let me know. I may need to revert to cds for the uncompressed sound which is a pain. I guess high resolution files are out of the question!
01-27-18, 07:27 PM
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Dolph1 can't discuss that issue, but know that a cd of oldies that I have that has various format music files so far plays. as to usb my take is that iTunes lossless is as good as it's going to get. This is my first lexus so I'm wondering in the dark most of the time. know that .m4a plays but as I've said long time loading with 4k+ songs. Haven't read enough to know if the 16 was significantly upgraded over previous models. know that my dodge challenger srt 2015 is way ahead of lexus as to the sound system most other items of technology. figured the 16 would be a step up with an 85k+ automobile, but oh well love the ride and space. Let me know if you think I can help you. I'm in my 70's so my hearing is such that iTunes .m4a sounds really ok.
09-23-18, 04:18 PM
#6
Anyone know compatibility with a '10 LS460 ML system with USB drives? Manual says MP3/WMA only, just wondering will it recognize mp4, m4a files or if there's a update that changes things?
Figured I'd ask so there was a record of it, may just start copying some files and answer it my self but if anyone has a definitive answer...
Figured I'd ask so there was a record of it, may just start copying some files and answer it my self but if anyone has a definitive answer...
Last edited by DriverSS; 09-23-18 at 04:37 PM.
09-23-18, 05:55 PM
#7
With the 13ls460 you can only play lossy files with a usb drive. No Flac or wav files unfortunately. Apple lossless is the best you can do resolution wise with an iPod or iPhone connected.
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10-12-18, 05:53 PM
#8
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My first post @ ClubLexus, ladies and gentlemen. Glad to be here.
The USB player in my car was problematic compared to other cars I've owned, but since I earn a living as a developer and test engineer, I took it as a challenge, and thought I would share with you what I've learned. TL;DR
Six years have gone by since my car was built, and a LOT has happened in digital audio, from dCS (expensive) to iFi (cheap). Digital audio equipment 10 years old, regardless of cost, is dramatically inferior to what is available today, even the cheap stuff.
One of the breakthroughs in digital audio design was a more thorough understanding of a phenomena known as jitter, a form of very low level latency. Modern hardware allowed designers to reduce these effects to practically zero and nearly everybody who has listened can readily discern this. The other thing that became understood was how sensitive digital audio chipsets are to external RF and EMI interference. On high end gear, the innards are carefully shielded to reduce this to nearly zero.
So cars are horrible places for digital audio, no shielding, a compromised hardware design, vibration, dust, and lots of latency. Satellite radio is awful beyond words--it sounds like 64k mp3. FM radio stations well, never mind. That leaves two options for decent music without commercials. CD players are OK, I guess, but well encoded (LAME at insane) MP3 from WAV masters on solid state media in a car is best, particularly for the density of available music.
If you own a 2012 LS460 with nav, MP3 CD player, and USB, I found that one may have 2.3 tags on one's MP3s, but keep the art very small. Most USB 3.0 sticks seem to be supported, but I had one dud brand, a highly respectable one. The player will skip a song entirely if the tag art is bigger than (I have no idea but around 400k it seems). You can't go by pixels. Mine are all 500x500 or slightly less, but they vary considerably in size. Due to limitations of JPEG compression, very complex visual images tend to make big binary images. The cover for Jethro Tull's "Stand Up" is a great example. Its size is around 400k and it prevented the player from opening it.
Since PC disk space is cheap, I removed the tags completely on a copy of my MP3 collection, and copied them with a Linux machine and a Windows machine to check the differences. The FAT32 file system is so open, and supported for everything (a modern computer boots to a FAT32 disk partition first, before booting to the OS), I was not expecting any differences. The only difference I found was that Windows machines _still_ will not do a single copy to any other device alphabetically. There is a freeware utility for Windows called fatsort that will fix this for you at the end of the copy (fatsort is built into Linux). You will want to do this.
The 2012 LS460's firmware for USB playback is a list of btrees for folders, this is not actually the file system per se, but simply navigating the FAT (file allocation table) directly. There is no sorting. The player plays them in the order they exist on the FAT, so re-sorting after copy or sync is near mandatory if you want to maintain playback order. With tagless playback, the only thing lost to an owner of a 2012 LS460 is the "artist" field. Tagless playback is much faster, since the player skips to the MP3 audio header, there is no awkward delay at the start of a song and songs that go from one to the next seamlessly (lots of Pink Floyd) work correctly now, so that's a plus.
Phew!
The USB player in my car was problematic compared to other cars I've owned, but since I earn a living as a developer and test engineer, I took it as a challenge, and thought I would share with you what I've learned. TL;DR
Six years have gone by since my car was built, and a LOT has happened in digital audio, from dCS (expensive) to iFi (cheap). Digital audio equipment 10 years old, regardless of cost, is dramatically inferior to what is available today, even the cheap stuff.
One of the breakthroughs in digital audio design was a more thorough understanding of a phenomena known as jitter, a form of very low level latency. Modern hardware allowed designers to reduce these effects to practically zero and nearly everybody who has listened can readily discern this. The other thing that became understood was how sensitive digital audio chipsets are to external RF and EMI interference. On high end gear, the innards are carefully shielded to reduce this to nearly zero.
So cars are horrible places for digital audio, no shielding, a compromised hardware design, vibration, dust, and lots of latency. Satellite radio is awful beyond words--it sounds like 64k mp3. FM radio stations well, never mind. That leaves two options for decent music without commercials. CD players are OK, I guess, but well encoded (LAME at insane) MP3 from WAV masters on solid state media in a car is best, particularly for the density of available music.
If you own a 2012 LS460 with nav, MP3 CD player, and USB, I found that one may have 2.3 tags on one's MP3s, but keep the art very small. Most USB 3.0 sticks seem to be supported, but I had one dud brand, a highly respectable one. The player will skip a song entirely if the tag art is bigger than (I have no idea but around 400k it seems). You can't go by pixels. Mine are all 500x500 or slightly less, but they vary considerably in size. Due to limitations of JPEG compression, very complex visual images tend to make big binary images. The cover for Jethro Tull's "Stand Up" is a great example. Its size is around 400k and it prevented the player from opening it.
Since PC disk space is cheap, I removed the tags completely on a copy of my MP3 collection, and copied them with a Linux machine and a Windows machine to check the differences. The FAT32 file system is so open, and supported for everything (a modern computer boots to a FAT32 disk partition first, before booting to the OS), I was not expecting any differences. The only difference I found was that Windows machines _still_ will not do a single copy to any other device alphabetically. There is a freeware utility for Windows called fatsort that will fix this for you at the end of the copy (fatsort is built into Linux). You will want to do this.
The 2012 LS460's firmware for USB playback is a list of btrees for folders, this is not actually the file system per se, but simply navigating the FAT (file allocation table) directly. There is no sorting. The player plays them in the order they exist on the FAT, so re-sorting after copy or sync is near mandatory if you want to maintain playback order. With tagless playback, the only thing lost to an owner of a 2012 LS460 is the "artist" field. Tagless playback is much faster, since the player skips to the MP3 audio header, there is no awkward delay at the start of a song and songs that go from one to the next seamlessly (lots of Pink Floyd) work correctly now, so that's a plus.
Phew!
Last edited by Seejay; 10-12-18 at 08:17 PM.
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HushedRide (04-19-23)
10-12-18, 08:29 PM
#9
Driver School Candidate
@DriverSS It has a very primitive file handling system. MP3/WMA only and very limited. For my 2012, I went tagless MP3 and use a file sorting utility after copy/sync. Firmware support for customers with Lexus LS460s seems to have started in 2013 for some items on the car--could be wrong about this, but that is what I recall poking around the official lexus owner's site.
10-13-18, 05:36 AM
#11
Driver School Candidate
Yeh, that's a bear. I had some ALAC music so I used Foobar2000 to batch convert them to LAME MP3 and FLAC. It took a bit of nerdiness to get the lossless Apple stuff to work in Foobar so I could convert them to MP3.
10-13-18, 11:49 AM
#12
My iTunes catalog of nearly 100K songs... No d/l's in there, digitized every CD our family owned years ago. Most of it is Apple Lossless (ALAC). Still need to go back and redo some stuff I did at 256 VBR. That's just a huge step backwards and screws up syncing to my iPhone (Flac doesn't work on iPhone last I looked).
10-13-18, 12:01 PM
#13
If you have all that Apple lossless get yourself a 5th gen iPod that has been modded. You can find ones on eBay that have flash memory with up to a tetrabyte of storage. Don’t go to lossy! The 5th gen iPods seem easy to update yourself as there is a good video on line. It is on my to do list to buy a used one and modify it myself.
10-13-18, 01:40 PM
#15
My point is that MP3 and FLAC is a non-starter. For most people using Apple products, not wanting to transcode their files or deal with a different tool to sync their music, that is going to be the case. And I've had iPhones with 128GB of storage for the last 3 iterations. Plenty of room for the songs I like to listen to and the playlists.... Guess eventually I'll need to upgrade to a vehicle that simply has CarPlay and this will sort itself out. 