USB flash drive problem

yep, it's a pretty funky system.

 

No issue here. Make sure your flash drive is FAT32.

 

Here's a couple of threads on the issue. I don't know if your having a Prius Three will make a difference.

Playlists on USB thumb drives | Page 2 | PriusChat

Organizing MP3s on a Flash Drive | PriusChat

 

Hello and welcome. You will find a Wikipedia Library in here regarding this issue. Try this; If you have a MP3 player, I would just format your USB drive in FAT32, then copy your MP3 players software into the USB drive and that should do it. The on board radio for the Prius doesn't seem to know how to recognize a USB drive that doesn't have its own built in MP3 software. By doing this, your radio will now obey the rules now set in the USB which is now using the MPG software as its navigation.

 

This has nothing to do with fat32 formatting.
The prius entume system ignores all directory structure.
It also ignores all file names.

It reads the id3 tags inside the mp3 files, and derives things like album, artist, and song name. If you don't have the correct id3 tags, it will confuse the entune software. I recommend mp3tag to edit the id3 tags inside the mp3 files.

Personally, I prefer mp3 players that know about directories and look at file names, but that is not the toyota entune system.

Sometimes the entune software gets confused by id3 tags. On one album it knows how many tracks it has, but thinks all of the tracks are fhe first track song. It works with the same files on a different usb flash drive.

If you have 2 files with the same id3 info, entunes also gets quite confused.

These are bugs that may get fixed one year...

 

I have to disagree with this statement. I have never heard of any car audio player that would run software off a USB drive to play MP3 files. That would be a huge security risk as that software could contain a virus or just misbehave and cause all sorts of issues. I don't know about the fancier Entune units, but the non-Entune unit I have plays MP3 just like some crappy MP3 player that doesn't read folder structures and just plays files in the order they are written on the disk. As discussed in the links provided by qdllc.

 

It only will find 498 songs in any one folder. You have to split the music up. Up to 498 folders also

 

Gen 3 came with several flavors of infotainment system; two in 2010 and 2011 (the basic LCD-display radio, and the 7-inch screen with navigation), and more in 2012+ (the basic radio, a 6.1-inch screen with Entune, and a 7-inch nav like the earlier one but different).

It might be tricky to generalize over how all of them handle MP3s. My 2010 7-inch does seem to respect folders; I can switch between folders with long presses on the steering wheel track buttons, or between tracks with short presses.

I have a 2012 7-inch (on a shelf, not in the car), and if I remember right from playing with it on the shelf, it also respected folders. (And it can play DVDs, which the 2010-11 one can't.)