I just test drove a 2011 Prius and I also took the opportunity to test out its ability to play music over its USB interface. I pulled the usb stick with mp3s on it that I currently use in my aftermarket stereo and plugged it in. It failed to recognize the media. Even the salesman with the manual could not get it to play. So prior to buying one of these, I would like to know if this is a common problem. Is the system picky about mp3s being in subfolders or filesystem types or formatting?
how was the data formatted? i tried plugging in my external hard drive and that didn't work. i can plug my 1st gen nano and it works fine. maybe if you have the data formatted to fat32 (or whatever the ipod uses) on the usb drive then maybe it would work.
The USB connection was driving me nuts. The car has an MP3 player, not a computer. The solution was to reformat the drive. Yeah, I know your computer reports that the drive is already formatted correctly. Do it anyway. After the reformat it works as expected and will skip over unsupported formats. I have days worth of music stored in lots of folders & subfolders. The car remembers where it left off & just goes through the drive sequentially. Adding or deleting files will cause a reset & you'll start over at the top next time. It could be a size problem but I doubt it. I'm using an 8GB Cruzer that I removed the software from & seem to remember reading that a 16GB also works.
