By audio formats I mean: mp3, wav, wma, ape, flac, etc.

Most of my music collection is in FLAC.

I would rather not convert the file format just to copy to USB stick for car. My USB stick is large enough for storing a lot of files in a "lossless" format. I looked through the electronic (online version) manuals but could not find a reference to audio file formats.

I have the navigation if that matters for this question.

 

MP3 & WMA are supported via USB (and on CD/DVD). USB needs to be formatted as either FAT16 or 32, and there is a max of 8 "folders within folder" levels that will still allow playback, as well as a broad, but specific set of frequencies and bit rates that are supported. Check your 2014 Owners Manual, p304, and then p306-9 for the very long list of bit rates and a few other more obscure options.

If I were you, I'd do a test conversion run with a couple of tracks, plug it in to your RX and ensure it plays and you can access everything in whatever sort of folder structure you plan to use, before doing a huge amount of work. I ran into problems with bit rates and other odd conversion parameters in whatever utility I was using, so learned to try a few first from that point forward for each of my cars. Happy listening!

 

Have you tried playing a FLAC formatted song on the USB stick, in your RX? It won't hurt the audio system If it doesn't work. The system will either read it or it won't. Give it a try, then let us know....

 

I know I can play mp3 files. I have a USB stick loaded with mp3s now. But to create a new USB stick with new audio mp3 files I have to convert my FLAC files to mp3 first, and that takes time. So I was wondering what formats the audio system is designed to play.

I know I could just test a few FLAC files to see if they work, but it is easier to just ask the question.

If no one knows or responds, I will test out a bunch of different formats and report back.

 

I guess the 2014 owner's manual references I provided in my previous post was insufficient to answer that part of your question. I look forward to your additional test results in case there are some other hidden formats that also work! (FWIW, my 2014 MBZ also only officially supports MP3, WMA and AAC similar to our Lexi.)

 

Sorry BertL, Somehow I read your post too quickly and missed the Link entirely. So it plays MP3 and WMA formats.
Thanks

 

http://www.bigasoft.com/articles/flac-car-stereo-solution.html

 

I have detected the cause of the problem with USB music on my 2015 RX350F. It seems the system will recognize the WMA files as music and show data like track name and album but not find a track length. This only happens if the WMA encoding length is 192 bits. If I take the same CD and rip it to WMA 128 bit it plays fine.

I would say this is a software bug for Lexus to fix. The system should support all WMA encoding lengths.

 

Bert(or anyone else who can answer this), maybe you can help me on this USB audio in a 2021 RX. I'm using wav files, that's not the problem(they play fine on the player), I can load in the iso wav files on the stick and they show up in the "folders" section on the browse screen in alpha order (artist\title) and they play fine. The problem I have is how do you get them to show up in the Artists or Album lists on the browse screen, I'd like to be able to do the siri thing and ask for an artist then album title. I can't figure out how it likes the wav files/artist name/album name setup in the root folder . I tried making "artist" folders with subfolders for different albums, but that doesn't seem to work as they still only show up under "folders" or the files show up under the "songs" folder when you tap browse. The iso files are tagged like this; "Al Stewart - Year of the Cat" or "Chris Rea- The road to Hell"(minus the parenthesis of course) etc. I can't find anything in the infotainment manual were it specifically talks about this, can you shed some light on this one for me, if you can. Thanks.