Playing MP3 files directly off of a thumb drive

On my older Liftback, there are little icons on the screen for Random and Repeat. Your infotainment system is different, but likely has controls with similar function, and the Repeat function is somehow turned on.

 

We listen to music from a flashdrive almost exclusively in our 15 V. There are buttons at the bottom of the screen for Search/Random/Select and Pause. Select Search and choices for Artists/Albums/Songs will appear.

If you choose Artist then you will be presented a list of artists alphabetically. Select an album from a particular artist, you can then choose a song. If you choose Repeat, it will play that song over and over. If you just choose the album and select Repeat, it will play the album over and over. If while your are on the Album menu, you choose Random, it will Randomly select albums and songs.

 

I know it'd be the Repeat button on my 2012MY Prius V two - no Nav. On mine there's one button with three states, no Repeat, Song Repeat, & Folder Repeat (I believe), but yours may be a little different. Good luck.

 

Never got the usb port to be recognized by the head unit. Wound up just doing the google play thing. I tried re-formatting the usb drive, downloading mpg software, you name it I tried it. Head unit just would not see it. Funny thing though, if I connected my laptop to the usb port.............it sees that!!

 

When you format a memory stick, Windows gives you the option of different data structures. I believe that your USB stick has to be formatted as FAT32 rather than the more common and possibly default NTFS. Once that is done and then the music is reloaded onto the stick, it should be recognized by the Prius.

Hope this helps.

 

Thank you Ronald, I did do that. FAT32, NTFS, Mpeg Wav, I went through the whole thing. In one of the modes (I forget now) the head unit actually saw the stick, but that was it! couldn't do anything else. Its all good though. I have google play and play my files on my unlimited cellular plan.

 

I'm using a Mac. I formatted mine with a DOS format. I think that's actually a 16 bit FAT.

 

Try a different stick...................

 

My 2012 Gen3 will only recognize cards or usb sticks up to 32GB in size. There was a change in the format from SDHC to SDXC at that point, where 32 GB is the biggest card that can be made under the SDHC protocol. the SDXC protocol supports drives up to 2 TB. As soon as I started using a FAT32 formatted SDHC 32GB card, everything works fine. It DOES take quite a while for the system to analyze the drive, but once it has created an index, most of the time it plays fine. I do have random stoppages maybe every 10 or 20 hours of play that can only be fixed by turning the car off, and restarting it. I also noted the system does not like album art of over 1000x1000 pixels. There may be a filesize limit for the album art, but resizing my art down to something like 500 x 500 or 800 x 800 I never hit the filesize limit.