We have a 2013 v (lowercase v) Two, and keep a buncha songs on a 16 gig thumb drive plugged into the USB port. I choose random folders to play stuff -- I have maybe 30 folders with no more than 20, 30 tracks per folder. What it does is play a track from say, the Leon Russell folder, then two other tracks at random, then a track from the Leon Russell folder, then two other tracks from elsewhere, then a track from the Leon Russell folder ... Well, except when it was doing it from the Linda Ronstadt folder, and it was one from her and one at random, one from her and one at random. It must be a big Ronstadt fan. I've looked at the manual, and everything seems to be in order -- not too many files, not too many folders, none of the filenames too long. Has this happened to anyone else? I like Leon Russell, or he wouldn't be there, but enough is enough.
I wasn't aware that it was able to respect folders at all. You need to be sure your files are properly tagged, then let the system search by artist or by album. There's also a random playback function that can be enabled to randomly play from all albums. I'm not sure whether your v2 has the same functions as my v5, but its all discussed in the manual.
This has all been with random play. I've looked at the manual and I think I've done everything it says. The Two's radio is pretty basic.
I noticed that the other day using my Android phone and BT. Apparently my Prius is a U2 fan. It played songs from U2 in similar fashion to what the OP described. My phone is organized by Artist folders. I would guess that something is amiss with the random generator they used, but it is "possible" that both of our experiences were simply our brains finding a pattern over a small sample size. I'll be paying attention to see if this occurs again.
I seem to have solved the problem, I think. I renamed all my folders to one-word names -- "Joel" instead of "Billy Joel" -- and that seems to have done it. At least, I'm hearing stuff I've not heard before.
I have a like problem but when load folders to a CD-r. Currently only shows 2 folders out of 8. I will have to check if it has the same one word folder type limitation and burn another cd of MP3's.
Press RND twice or until the little folder icon appears next to "rnd". This tells the player to seek random files from all folders, not just the current one. I'm not sure whether this solves the above problems, but it solves my problem. I put in a 64 gig thumb drive with about 50 gigs of music, my entire CD collection, yet it would only play one folder at a time. Reading the manual solved the problem for me. Some of my folder names are very long, some have spaces in them, etc., but so far it seems to work. If it avoids choosing certain folders, which will take a lonnnnng time for me to discover probably, then I'll follow up here. I'm just relieved that I don't need to recopy those 50 gigs of music files all into one big flat folder!
I got an iPod nano. I'll see if it works better than a thumb drive, being as how it generates its own randomness. I hate to deal with iTunes, but there's a world of music on the thumb drive the radio isn't playing.
Sure wish I had seen your post earlier re: Random Folders capability! I wasted a lot of time renaming tracks and combining them onto a Large Master Folder Mix... I will now try your "Random X 2" and see if it works with my 2013 v with basic 2 package? Will be nice to have dozens of albums each separate but with random access if I desire! BTW My radio is always off now when I start the car.... I swear if I left radio on before, turned off car, then restarted car the radio would come on? Did I change something? Or is my memory continuing to fail me?
Well, I'm back to report that the random play feature doesn't work very well for me. I found that it bounces between 2-3 folders, and seems to ignore all the others. I guess we can't expect Toyota to hire a minimally competent programmer to do a random tunes player that any high school computer geek could do in his sleep? What's even more annoying is that it remembers those 3 folders even when I remove the thumb drive, turn off the car, etc. I'm going to give it one more try and if it's still doing this, I'm going to complain to the dealer and see if there's a firmware update for the audio system. And yes, my V2 definitely remembers that the radio was on. My wife is constantly leaving the radio on, loud, so when I start the car it comes on and I can't even turn it off for about 10 seconds while the system is booting.
I am also experiencing disappointment with the random track selector. I have all my MP3s organized into folders by artist. I haven't been able to discern a clear pattern other than it does tend to prefer the artist Acidman. I tend to choose an artist and then select random play within that folder. I was guessing that it's random number algorithm is somehow driven by the characters in the Folder/Artist name. If this is the case, I wonder if it exhibits the problem when all of your artists and track names are in Japanese characters.
I haven't tried this myself but will soon. However, I do know that illegal characters in file names tend to be ignored by most players - spaces, punctuation, symbols, etc. If you need to separate words, use an underscore_. Long files names tend to be an issue too, but i don't know what the limit is. I tend to stick to less than 32 characters. Will test subfolders when I get a chance.
Any news on the USB drive playing all the songs on random? I'll set up a USB stick OR CD, whatever seems to work. Thanks!
Ditched the thumb drive and got the iPod. Still hate dealing with iTunes, but the randomness works on the Prius now. I will occasionally turn off the random play thing, turn off the audio, turn it back on, go through songs and pick one to play, then start random play again. That gives me music I haven't heard in a while.
I never have been able to get a CD to recognise more than 2 folders. Even tried short one word, unscore between words etc. All that wasted space on a CD-r with only two albums/folder. I also tried to put it all in one folder. That just confused the radio... sigh'
You mentioned wasted space on CD. Can you put 200 songs in one directory, and 200 in the other directory? Is there a limit to the number of songs/files it can handle on CD or in one directory?
