Max amount of songs on usb flash drive

On the Gen3, there is also a maximum of about 250 songs per folder. Break up the collection into more folders.

For reasons I've never taken the time to figure out, a few hundred tracks on my much older thumb drive are not visible to the car, but it is still seeing about 1500.

 

There definitely is a limit. 496 isn't a number I would have expected - I thought it's 256 files per folder, but you could probably use multiple folders and levels.

(I'm not sure, but there could be a limitation of folders of either 8 or 255 and of 8 levels).

It could be dependent on the USB drive specification, or of the Car Audio specification.

 

I've been burning cds onto external hds for as long as I can remember. So I have several hds full of wmas and mp3s. This Pri 2016 3 is my first car with a usb port so I was pretty excited and bought a 128 gb flash drive. Been moving songs over to the flash drive for the past week, and of course using it when I drive, and it's been working great.

I think I've hit the limit. Yesterday morning it seemed to have updated fine with recent files. I dug out another old hd and spent last night copying more songs over. This morning the car player only shows files that I moved earlier last week even though it's all there on the flash drive.

I've got about 14k files and the manual says:

Items related to standards and limitations are as follows:
• Maximum directory hierarchy: 8 levels
• Maximum number of folders in a device: 3000 (including the root)
• Maximum number of files in a device: 9999
• Maximum number of files per folder: 255

I guess I'll have to get another flash drive.

I still have over 20 gb free on this 128 gb stick so I guess I should get some 64 gbs instead. I'll use this one for podcasts since it seems like the file number is the limit and not the total size of the files.

 

The Prius has a lower limit than standard USB drive rules. Put thousands on, and the Prius ignores them.

It's in the manual. Personally, I found it better to buy a bundle of multi-coloured small ones, much easier to put a manageable number of songs/podcasts on each one.

The annoying thing is that it plays them in random order. Well, not strictly random, but not in the order I would expect. There are laborious way to change that, but not worth the effort.

 

Ya i reduced it to just under the 9,999 files that the manual indicates. No way I'll remember what's on it to verify how it does.

Mine lists by Artist, Album, and Genre (and maybe song, but those are the three categories I find useful to get a list of songs to play for the duration of a trip).

 

I decided to spring for a new iPod to hold all of my music and podcasts. I tried using thumb drives but couldn't browse my collection adequately. Now I have my playlists back.

 

I have an ipod but it lives in my gym bag and only has 16 gb of workout music.

64 gb drives are only about $15. I think I will buy several and just use each drive as one big playlist since you can just have the car play songs at random.

 

That works for many people. And it works for me when I play pop or rock. But jazz and classical have movements that are best listened to in order. Randomizing doesn't work either when you mix Mozart with Sarah Bereilles. And besides... who doesn't listen to The Dark Side of the Moon in order? I thought that folder navigation might work but I have just too much stuff to manage that way while I'm driving.

 

I paired down my flash drive to 9,816 files over 957 folders. I took screenshots of the folders and just visually ran through the artist and albums in the car, and everything seemed to be there. So the 9,999 limit seems accurate, but I'm not going to test it by going over.

It is misreading one Nick Cave song as an unknown artist/album, but giving the song title as "Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds" but I couldn't find any songs actually missing from his albums when I scroll through them.

The manual's line "Maximum number of files per folder: 255" must not count subfolders. I have a big folder of reggae albums segregated because those are getting their own flash drive soon. That one folder has thousands of files and they seem to read fine.

 

I fixed the Nick Cave song issue by redoing the mp3 tags in MediaMonkey. So as far as I can tell all 9,816 files are reading fine now. Bring on the heavy traffic!

Have you tried very long (like 12 hours+) single files? I loaded one and it's reading as only 41 minutes. I listened to 2 hours of it last night so wasn't interested in listening to it this morning to see what happens at 41 minutes. I'll save it for a day off drive around the island.

 

Well when I said I wasn't going to see what happens when you get closer to the 9,999 file limit, I meant that of course I would test the limit.

I have it at 9,931 right now and it's ability to read all of it has broken down by not reading the Artist/Album tags on 8 files added in the increase from 9,816 to 9,931. These files show up under Unknown Artist and Unknown Album, but the Title tag works so I could identify them. I know it's the Pri because 6 of the files are tagged with the same Artist/Album tags as other files that are being read fine, and all the tags read fine on both my work and home computers.

It's also not reading the Genre tag on about 20 files. I checked entire Artist lists on MediaMonkey and spot checked file tags on individual files in windows, and can't find missing tags, so I think this is also a breakdown in the Pri's reading ability.

 

I reduced my first flash drive to a little over 9,000 files, and the same 8 files are still not reading correctly, which is strange since everything was reading ok at 9,816 files and there's now 800 fewer files. I'm retagging those 8 files and will see how it reads tomorrow. Otherwise I'll delete and recopy.

I started working on a 2nd flash drive, and this one only has about 3,500 files right now but there are about 12 files that are also not being read correctly. This drive has more mixes so there are a lot more individual artist names, and I didn't bother to standardize the genre tags, so I'm wondering if it's having problems because there's just more variation in the tags to read even though there are much fewer files.

 

I've not much experience with them - but I did play around with them for a while when I got my PRIUS. My problem was that I wanted the USB to play back in a particular order, and it was very inconsistent. I haven't had much time since - basically gave up for the moment, and went back to re-writeable CDs.

Just a thought - you mentioned .WMA files earlier - are they compatible? I remember I couldn't put them successfully into a compilation on a CD-RW, but maybe USB is different. If they will save on the USB but not play, the USB system might be allocating a "raw file name" for them, messing up your attempts to play adjacent files.

My understanding from making MP3 CD-RWs a few years ago, the software doesn't use the file-name of the file, but allocates a sequential and, as far as I could tell, hidden, raw filename of it's own. From memory ('twas a few yrs back) it seemed to be in order of when they are added to the CD, which made it a bit painful to make one which would play in sequence. If the same occurs with a USB stick, I'd suspect that if you've deleted files (reduced I assume means deleted), it could leave random gaps in the raw file names on the USB stick.

So, maybe instead of adding or particularly deleting files to/from your USB stick, if you were to copy it back to a directory in your computer, reformat the USB then back to a USB stick you might get a different outcome??

Good luck - I'll be interested to hear your outcome, particularly if you crack what order they'll play in.

 

It plays mp3 and wmp files fine. It won't recognize FLAC or wav. I haven't tried anything else but I believe I read in the manual that it only recognizes mp3 and wmp. I've done searches for stray incompatible file extensions so I'm fairly confident the files are all either mp3 or wmp.

As for order, it only sorts by Artist, Album, Song Title, Genre, and Composer tags. You can play random or select "All" for any category. I have been adjusting (grossly simplifying) the Genre tag to make defacto playlists for similar artists but you can't order the songs in a specific way (I suppose you could rename them and put a number to each title but you may as well just make cds).

 

Thanks - I tried renaming a bundle of files (prefixed them 1,2,3,...up to 64), but they still played in random order. I thought it might be related to "TITLE" (in properties), and that seemed to be the case sometimes, but other times, particularly when there wasn't a TITLE ... I was left wondering. There seems to be some hidden code somewhere hidden in the MP3 file configuration.

I'll have a bit of a dig again - and report if I find anything.

Meanwhile, Microsoft did an update of WINDOWS 10 a couple of days ago, and it now won't format a USB drive. Fortunately, I've still got a Vista machine as a printer & scanner server, which is formatting still. Life wasn't meant to be easy.

 

Oh! It recognizes the Track # tags even though it doesn't show them. I use MediaMonkey; it's free and is designed to be used to conform media tags, so you can retag entire folders very easily. With Track # tags I haven't found an automatic way to do it, but unlike changing the individual file properties in Windows or itunes, you can just quickly run through the list of songs and click the Track # cell next to each and type in the new number.

For example, I've put together a bunch of small EPs into one longer album by changing the Album name to a single name and then changing the Track #s, so all the EPs of that artist play consecutively and i don't have to change to a new album after 15 minutes. I also plan to recreate old mix CD track lists this way.

 

If you have multiple albums by a single artist and you select that artist then go into All Songs, it will start playing the first Track # on the first album name by alphabet. So if you wanted to listen to an artists entire collection in chronological order, you could add the year of release to the beginning of the album name tags. I may do this for some of my favorite artists. I never search by the album name list for the whole drive anyway.

Also the mis-reading of those 8 files were fixed, either because I retagged then recopied the files from my computer back onto the flash, or because I deleted some weird characters that were in other tag boxes. Unfortunately I recopied first and then noticed there was weird stuff in another tag box (I think in the Comments box), and figured I should delete it. But now I don't know which action solved the problem.

 

Ha! Changed more than one variable did you? I do it all the time too. It makes it harder in the long run to diagnose the problem But in the short term, hopefully, you've cleaned up your database.