Looking at the multimedia owner's manual for 2024 NX, it states max USB drive capacity is 32 GB. That seems overly small these days. Anyone tried using a larger USB drive? Will the car recognize it?
I was thinking of getting a 256 GB drive as my music library is quite large...

 

The USB drive needs to be formatted in FAT32, which has a maximum partition size of 32GB.

 

That is just a Windows OS limitation. It is possible to format larger drives in FAT32 using third party tools.

 

Has Lexus gone backwards with this? My old 2013 ES worked fine with a 128GB drive formatted with NTFS.

 

True, but I think this is mostly moot anyway because Lexus has imposed its own limits well short of FAT32 limitations. 3000 files in root folder, 8 levels of folders, 255 files per folder, 9999 files total... These ARE NOT format limitations; these are internal Lexus HU limitations. I think I recall people saying they've been able to exceed some of these limits, but you have to think why Lexus states these limits. Unlike other music services provided thru BT or AA/Carplay connections in which case the phone app is doing all the hard work managing the music and merely using the HU to provide a user interface for the phone's music management systems, with a USB stick ALL management of the music must be done by the HU. That means it has to read the entire folder structure and catalog it. If one bit is out of place, BOOM, corrupted read and things don't work nicely, try again. Once a read is completed properly, all the catalog info must be managed internally by the HU's CPU and available memory. The more files, the more work and resources needed for the HU to manage. Spotify you can have 10 songs or 10000 and it makes little difference to the HU, but on a USB stick it makes a huge difference. I suspect if you manage to plug in a drive with a larger volume packed full of files, the read operation would just error out once the internal memory for managing the file catalog is exceeded and down she goes.

 

I get it, but this is 2023, 2024 almost. File operations and cataloging of audio files are simple tasks, especially given how powerful the hardware is nowadays. Wife's Q5 had similar limitations (two 32GB SD cards max), but that was 10 years ago on much weaker hardware. One would hope for some progress since then. I guess not?

 

Would be nice but....

A typical phone these days has 8+ cores and 128GB of memory because its designed to install and run many dozens of apps. Lexus HU, not so much. I suspect they cheaped out on the amount of memory installed and most if it probably reserved for nav or core operations. Then there is the ever present issue of users plugging in a $0.99 USB stick with a terrible transfer rate. Why is my Lexus taking 2 hours to load 30GB of my music!

 

Use a third party formatting tool. I was able to format a 256gb usb stick and copy my music to it. My RX was able to read it and play music. You will need to be patient, it takes a while to read all of the files. Once that is done, you should have access to all of your music. Check out the thread below.



https://www.clublexus.com/forums/rx-...-a-2023-a.html

 

Update: I bought a 256GB drive and formatted it to FAT32 and loaded up with music. It works fine in wife's 2024 NX.

Thanks, all.

 

Pete,
I am new to the Lexus software and don't have the vehicle (am on vacation), 1) how does the music present itself on the screen? 2) Can you page thru easily? is it sorted by genre ? 3) Did you go with the WAV files or FLAC or ? 4) Can you link any info on how to organize the music on the flash drive ?
Any info you can share regarding how you organized your music is greatly appreciated
Thanks much

 

When you click "Browse" it lets you view your music by:
- Artists
- Albums
- Songs
- Genres
- Folders
- Composers

I typically browse by Folder, and I have 800-900 folders, so paging through it requires a lot of swiping up and down. So far I wasn't able to find a way to quickly scroll through them. Also, some of the folders are not in alphabetical order, but probably the order in which they were saved to the USB drive, which is annoying.

Yes, you have an option to view by genre, assuming your media is tagged with this information.

Supported file formats are WMA/AAC/WAV/FLAC/ALAC/Ogg Vorbis.

Most of my music on this drive is either MP3, AAC, or FLAC.

Right now I have each album in a separate folder, because I just made an exact copy from my DAP's memory card, and that's what I used to do in previous vehicles. But here in the NX, given the issue with having to page/swipe through hundreds of folders, I might have to come up with a different system. I might create a folder for each alphabet letter (A, B, C, D, ...) to break it up some. Another way would be to have a folder for each Artist and then sub-folder for each album, but this would take a lot of work in my case as that is not how I typically store music on my home system.

I'm open to suggestions. Maybe I'll just start browsing by Artist or Album instead.

 

This has been the bane of my existence since I've gotten my car and partially due to how unorganized I was (and still am) with my music. In my previous CT200h, I could just dump a music into my USB sorted by folders that I named as genres and be done with it. The CT200h would then update the music list when replugged and the new music would then be at the bottom of the folder where it was dragged into. I believe also the older system bypassed the 255 files per folder rule as I'm pretty sure I had 255+ files in one folder at some point and it worked very well

With the new NX, I thought it would be the same and when I plugged in the CT200's USB that I had over, music started going missing in the folders and I was baffled until I read up on the issue and had to cut down on music files per folder which is completely BS in my opinion. I tried a new USB (formatted FAT32) to see if it was the original USB's problem but it wasn't.

What makes it worst is the fact that we DO NOT HAVE A "NOW PLAYING" list where you can advance down your folder list at the same time playing music so you don't interrupt your current song like what most cars have in the year 2023. Pair this with the fact that if your car is moving, the system won't let you effen scroll down your folder if you go past a threshold as it wants you to stop the vehicle before you keep scrolling with your finger and so I'm embarrassed to say that I've raged numerous times in the car by myself over this .

I get that with new technology comes some growing pains but the whole implementation of the touch screen multimedia is nonsense and I agree with everyone that the Japanese really need to step up their game vs the rest of the world. Yes, they've made leaps and bounds compared to the last gens system but it's probably single handedly the most disappointing part of this car period. Everything else is legit and I truly believe we should have gotten a much better media system rather than this half baked Android based system at this price point. Like serious, what use is a 14 inch screen if majority of the buttons and functions are all hidden under sub buttons and so forth making a mess of an experience to just play music?

2024 NX 450h+ F Sport

 

As much as I agree with you, let me console you by saying that my Subaru is even worse - someone had a brilliant idea to make the system sort tracks in folders alphabetically by track title tag (not by file name), so forget playing tracks in the order in which they were arranged on the album. The only way to get around it is to use tagging software to change each track title tag by adding a prefix before copying the files to the USB drive. I'd really love to meet the engineer who came up with this idea so I could punch him in the face.

 

And also the icons are small and what's with the stupid little dots, as stuff, instead of clear labels to let you know whether it's playing random inside folders, random folders, etc... No matter what we try my wife says hers always plays inside on one single folder. I finally just took all files and dumped them in to the root directory and gave up.

 

As with yours, my CT200 did a MUCH better job of this, and it was a disappointment to move forward and have worse function, but I have adjusted to being disappointed. If there's ever a solution, I'd be glad to hear it.