When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
We have a 2018 RX 350 on order that should be in this week and I need some advice about playing recorded music on our car sound system. All of our recorded music is in ITunes. Some has been downloaded (from Apple and other sites) and some has been ripped from our CD's. Our salesman told us that we could play our recorded music from a thumb drive, from our IPhones via a cable or via Bluetooth but the music has to be in MP3 format. From what I can tell, ITunes music is not in MP3 format and since the music on our phones was synced from ITunes that music will not be in MP3 format either. I have burned CD's of the music we want to play in the the new car. It was my intention to set up folders in a thumb drive and copy each CD to the thumb drive. Again, I assume the burned music is not in MP3 format, since the burn came from ITunes. My questions are:
Is our salesman correct about the 3 options (thumb drive, phone via cable and phone via Bluetooth) we have for playing our music?
Does our music have to be in MP3 format?
If the music must be in MP3 format, what would be my best route for converting the file format for our music.
Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.
Charlie
Hi Charlie, yes you can use the USB thumb drive, phone by cable or phone by bluetooth.
The system happily plays MP3, WMA and AAC.
I'm not an Apple person so don't know about their files, however instructions are in the manual regarding using an ipod or iphone for music playback.
Go to the US Lexus website and you can download the full manual for the car.
To be clear, the music only needs to be in MP3 format (or even WMA or AAC) if played from a FLASH DRIVE OR THUMB DRIVE. I believe if you have to play via BT or through your MP3 player or iPod or iPhone, it can be in aac or other formats. The reason for this is because using a "MP3" player, means the player does the reading of the files and the audio is only routed through the Lexus sound system. Here's the format requirements for the the USB and CD Disc:
Can anybody play WMA lossless?? i can play mp3 ripped at 320kbs which as far as i can tell is the best mp3. i can also play WMA that is compressed but not lossless. Interestingly the WMA lossless looks like it is detected and shows up in the menus, but when you try to play it, it simply skips to the next thing and in a few seconds, just skips through an entire album without playing it. "Unsupported" formats are completely ignored as if they are not even present on your drive. But the WMA lossless shows up as there but wont play. Same thing for ALAC, (Lossless AAC. Looks like its there but won't play). Any comments on this? Also any comments on just using mp3 320?? i have a 64gig fast flash-drive and it would hold all my music even at lossless that i care about. I thought i would go the lossless route but it doesn't look possible. Maybe mp3 at 320 is the best choice? and just don't be so fussy about something i probably wont notice anyway??
Can anybody play WMA lossless?? i can play mp3 ripped at 320kbs which as far as i can tell is the best mp3. i can also play WMA that is compressed but not lossless. Interestingly the WMA lossless looks like it is detected and shows up in the menus, but when you try to play it, it simply skips to the next thing and in a few seconds, just skips through an entire album without playing it. "Unsupported" formats are completely ignored as if they are not even present on your drive. But the WMA lossless shows up as there but wont play. Same thing for ALAC, (Lossless AAC. Looks like its there but won't play). Any comments on this? Also any comments on just using mp3 320?? i have a 64gig fast flash-drive and it would hold all my music even at lossless that i care about. I thought i would go the lossless route but it doesn't look possible. Maybe mp3 at 320 is the best choice? and just don't be so fussy about something i probably wont notice anyway??
Unfortunately both WMA Lossless and ALAC require different codecs to play compared to regular WMA and AAC files. They show up in the menu because the system just looks at the filenames with the *.wma and *.m4a extensions. When it actually tries to play them, it detects the non-supported format and just skips them.
I would love it if we could get any of the popular lossless formats supported (especially OGG/FLAC), but it's likely a licensing issue to get built-in support for them.
Interesting...that would explain it, and thanks for that info. Would you have a recommendation on the best we can do? I am thinking mp3 at 320kbs but i don't have a lot of experience with comparing the quality of the competitors. I definitely like the idea of using the tiny form factor 64gig flash instead of a butt-load of CDs but of course I don't want to sacrifice too much. Paid for the ML so I would like to abuse it as much as possible.
Interesting...that would explain it, and thanks for that info. Would you have a recommendation on the best we can do? I am thinking mp3 at 320kbs but i don't have a lot of experience with comparing the quality of the competitors. I definitely like the idea of using the tiny form factor 64gig flash instead of a butt-load of CDs but of course I don't want to sacrifice too much. Paid for the ML so I would like to abuse it as much as possible.
AAC is better than MP3 which is better than WMA at the same bit rates.
For reasonable CD quality, AAC with 256kbps. AAC at 320kbps will be very close to CD quality. You will need very good ears and speakers to hear the difference. In a car with road noise, I would argue that AAC at 256kbps or MP3 at 320kbps would be reasonably close to CD quality.
I have a 2018 RX450hl. When I try to play music from a usb device it will only random search files in a music folder that start with a number or files that start with the letters A, B or C. it ignores the rest of the files in the folder. Has anyone else had this problem and resolved it?
is it possible you have too many files for it to handle. im sure there is a limit but im not sure what it is. i use my usb exclusively. 64gig capacity usb, but with only about 11 gig used including about 50 albums and never had a problem. also it doesn't take every format and could ignore files in a format it doesn't recognize. i couldn't find a lossless format it would accept so i ripped everything in mp3 320 which appears to be about the best you can before being lossless and it does seem pretty good. but the fact its giving you the files in order and then stopping makes me think maybe you have too many. and possibly if you organize them in sub-folders you will get them. ie if you have 2k files and the limit is 1k per folder and then it stops reading, make 2 or more folders on the usb, and divide up the files among them.
