Head unit not showing/seeing all folders on USB drive

SuicideRabbit · Jun 1, 2020

Has anyone had the issue where the HU doesnt list all of the folders in the root of a connected USB drive?

My root folder count is only 94, so I'm way under the 255 limit.

I have reformatted the drive a couple of times now, and moved the music back to it, but to no avail. There are always a few folders which the HU will simply not read/show.

Any ideas?

SmilinSteve · Jun 1, 2020

Is it one album per folder? What is the total size of the data?

SuicideRabbit · Jun 1, 2020

SmilinSteve said:
Is it one album per folder?

Some folders have one sub-folder, others have multiple.

What is the total size of the data?

Only around 30GB.

SmilinSteve · Jun 1, 2020

My music is organized as a folder for each album, with 33 gb total. It is on a 64 gb stick formatted in FAT 32. The music files are mostly MP3 at anywhere between 128 and 256 kbps. My truck is a 2019 RTL-T. I assumed it was all showing up in my car, but I never really checked to be sure. I'll check my folder count later as my daughter borrowed my truck. What year is your truck? How big is your memory stick and how is it formatted? What format are your music files?

larryr · Jun 1, 2020

It does not care - the radio can only hold 255 folders total and it is the first 255 total folders it sees - sub-folders are folders too. The root cannot contain more than 255 items - it ignores entries after 256 (one entry is the label of the drive).
It is a sorry design. It is not an android limit but the Honda Radio software limit. As for the format of the music.
With the car running and going down the road - any format over 96 kbps is wasted space as the sound and speakers are not much better than 64 kbps in quality to begin with.

SuicideRabbit · Jun 1, 2020

larryr said:
It does not care - the radio can only hold 255 folders total and it is the first 255 total folders it sees - sub-folders are folders too. The root cannot contain more than 255 items - it ignores entries after 256 (one entry is the label of the drive).

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, that can't be true, b/c that is not what is happening.

If it could only hold the first 255 "in total", then my list would be concatenated very early in the root tree. This isnt the case though. I'm missing directories randomly throughout the root directory. It's like it doesnt want to read certain directories. Of course, one of those directories is one of my favourites bands. Almost like it doesnt want me to listen to them! 😆

If the file system it uses actually used permissions and ACLs, I could maybe see it, but FAT32 is a wide-open file system, so its not a permission issue either.

It is a sorry design. It is not an android limit but the Honda Radio software limit. As for the format of the music.
With the car running and going down the road - any format over 96 kbps is wasted space as the sound and speakers are not much better than 64 kbps in quality to begin with.

I'm a bit of an audiophile, and all of my MP3's are 320kbps, but most of my files are FLAC. I can tell the difference b/t those on this system. 96 or 64 would be a disaster.

SmilinSteve said:
What year is your truck? How big is your memory stick and how is it formatted? What format are your music files?

2017 Touring (Canadian). I'm not using a memory stick but rather a 128GB SSD in a USB case, formatted FAT32. As mentioned just above, they are a mix of high-end MP3s and FLAC.

Carsmak · Jun 1, 2020

@SuicideRabbit there are several threads and I know this has been figured out and covered before, here are a few, try using the "Search Community" at the top of the page

USB Formatting

USB Max Size 64GB?

Sorting music on the USB

Thumb drive rather than CD

RL limits usb music to 255 songs

Music on USB Stick, organizing - ideas?

I'll probably spend some time merging these and untimately "PIN" one of them, but I believe the answer is here somewhere

SuicideRabbit · Jun 1, 2020

Carsmak said:
@SuicideRabbit there are several threads and I know this has been figured out and covered before, here are a few, try using the "Search Community" at the top of the page

USB Formatting

USB Max Size 64GB?

Sorting music on the USB

Thumb drive rather than CD

RL limits usb music to 255 songs

Music on USB Stick, organizing - ideas?

I'll probably spend some time merging these and untimately "PIN" one of them, but I believe the answer is here somewhere

I have actually read through those posts before I posted this, which is why I'm confused as to what is going on, and am also by no means a newb to internet fora.

I'm in IT to begin with, as well as a person who has an extensive multimedia library, so I keep things clean and structured in terms of my file tree layouts, and file names.

The folders which are missing are missing in a completely arbitrary fashion. I have also performed multiple scans of the drive from the head unit. I have cleaned any and all system files from the drive. Each artist has their own folder with albums underneath.

I'm at a loss as to how to try and fix this.

larryr · Jun 1, 2020

Android does not read FAT32 USB drives the same way Windows does. FAT32 is an 8.3 files system with long names taking up extra file entries. It read in sequence - Windows reads all the 8.3 first and the long file name second. Windows will write them in the 1st available empty directory entry - The Android 4.0 that is in the Honda Radio will stop after 4096 entries in the root file system. That is probably why you have random directories missing. Also any Android 4.0 non-displayable characters in the folder name will cause it to be "missing" as it cannot display it.
To see what cannot be displayed create folders with every special character and the name like "Dollar $" the ones that don't display have non-displayable characters.

I am also an IT guy - Developed disk and printer drivers for Unix and Linux and termcap and termdef stuff that is obsolete today. I also worked on pre-NTFS which was going to be a Unix file system with ACL but Unix said they did not like the idea of additional ACL's - I liked the DEC VAX file control and was hoping others in the Unix Community would go for it. Unix was working on clustering software at the time and I loved the VAX Cluster concept and security they didn't.

SuicideRabbit · Jun 1, 2020

larryr said:
Android does not read FAT32 USB drives the same way Windows does. FAT32 is an 8.3 files system with long names taking up extra file entries. It read in sequence - Windows reads all the 8.3 first and the long file name second. Windows will write them in the 1st available empty directory entry - The Android 4.0 that is in the Honda Radio will stop after 4096 entries in the root file system. That is probably why you have random directories missing. Also any Android 4.0 non-displayable characters in the folder name will cause it to be "missing" as it cannot display it.
To see what cannot be displayed create folders with every special character and the name like "Dollar $" the ones that don't display have non-displayable characters.

I am also an IT guy - Developed disk and printer drivers for Unix and Linux and termcap and termdef stuff that is obsolete today. I also worked on pre-NTFS which was going to be a Unix file system with ACL but Unix said they did not like the idea of additional ACL's - I liked the DEC VAX file control and was hoping others in the Unix Community would go for it. Unix was working on clustering software at the time and I loved the VAX Cluster concept and security they didn't.

Hey @larryr

All non-displayable characters have been removed due to my multimedia server (Plex). The root is certainly far from 4096 entries:

legend:RIDGELINE $ pwd
/Volumes/RIDGELINE

legend:RIDGELINE $ ls -al | wc -l
78

legend:RIDGELINE $ du -hs .
29G

I'll keep banging away at this to see what I can come up with...

SmilinSteve · Jun 2, 2020

larryr said:
It does not care - the radio can only hold 255 folders total and it is the first 255 total folders it sees - sub-folders are folders too. The root cannot contain more than 255 items - it ignores entries after 256 (one entry is the label of the drive).
It is a sorry design. It is not an android limit but the Honda Radio software limit. As for the format of the music.
With the car running and going down the road - any format over 96 kbps is wasted space as the sound and speakers are not much better than 64 kbps in quality to begin with.

255 folders max? I guess my truck didn't read the rule book.
498 folders shown here:

Boy my camera really picked up the dust! I live on a dirt road give me a break!

SmilinSteve · Jun 2, 2020

SuicideRabbit said:
Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, that can't be true, b/c that is not what is happening.

If it could only hold the first 255 "in total", then my list would be concatenated very early in the root tree. This isnt the case though. I'm missing directories randomly throughout the root directory. It's like it doesnt want to read certain directories. Of course, one of those directories is one of my favourites bands. Almost like it doesnt want me to listen to them! 😆

If the file system it uses actually used permissions and ACLs, I could maybe see it, but FAT32 is a wide-open file system, so its not a permission issue either.

I'm a bit of an audiophile, and all of my MP3's are 320kbps, but most of my files are FLAC. I can tell the difference b/t those on this system. 96 or 64 would be a disaster.

2017 Touring (Canadian). I'm not using a memory stick but rather a 128GB SSD in a USB case, formatted FAT32. As mentioned just above, they are a mix of high-end MP3s and FLAC.

I think I found your problem. Flac is not a supported file type. There are no lossless supported file types. You will need to convert them.

SuicideRabbit · Jun 2, 2020

SmilinSteve said:
I think I found your problem. Flac is not a supported file type. There are no lossless supported file types. You will need to convert them.

I figured that out too just as I was about to reply to the thread.

All folders that are completely missing contain nothing but .flac files. I guess that I need to use Android Auto to listen to those... :/

Too bad XenForo doesnt have a "Solution" flag.

SmilinSteve · Jun 2, 2020

larryr said:
It does not care - the radio can only hold 255 folders total and it is the first 255 total folders it sees - sub-folders are folders too. The root cannot contain more than 255 items - it ignores entries after 256 (one entry is the label of the drive).
It is a sorry design. It is not an android limit but the Honda Radio software limit. As for the format of the music.
With the car running and going down the road - any format over 96 kbps is wasted space as the sound and speakers are not much better than 64 kbps in quality to begin with.

I agree with Suicide Rabbit, 96 or 64 would be a disaster.
And "wasted space" is kind of an antiquated concept. Memory is very cheap and virtually unlimited. It's not like the old days where you would not have a computer big enough to hold all your music in high quality files.

SmilinSteve · Jun 2, 2020

SuicideRabbit said:
I figured that out too just as I was about to reply to the thread.

All folders that are completely missing contain nothing but .flac files. I guess that I need to use Android Auto to listen to those... :/

Too bad XenForo doesnt have a "Solution" flag.

Glad you got it figured out!

SmilinSteve · Jun 2, 2020

SuicideRabbit said:
I figured that out too just as I was about to reply to the thread.

All folders that are completely missing contain nothing but .flac files. I guess that I need to use Android Auto to listen to those... :/

Too bad XenForo doesnt have a "Solution" flag.

I'd be interested to hear if FLAC through android auto sounds better than a high quality MP3 through USB.
I have the same MP3 files on my phone as on my USB stick, but never did a sound comparison.
I will say that sometimes Android auto is a pain to use, so you might want to convert your FLAC files to MP3 just to have the option of playing them through the USB interface.

SuicideRabbit · Jun 2, 2020

SmilinSteve said:
I'd be interested to hear if FLAC through android auto sounds better than a high quality MP3 through USB.
I have the same MP3 files on my phone as on my USB stick, but never did a sound comparison.
I will say that sometimes Android auto is a pain to use, so you might want to convert your FLAC files to MP3 just to have the option of playing them through the USB interface.

I much prefer the HU's nav to anything AA provides.

I'm coming from more than a decade of using TomTom devices, which are, imnsho, the best navigation units out there. Their user interface aside (not great anymore), their navigation is the best. Garmin is a distant second.

Waze and GMaps are awful. Terrible UI's. Always giving 3 routes, and never picking the best one. Zero customisation. Terrible handling of custom POI's or saves. Plus, GMaps tracks everywhere you go. I'm a privacy nut, so that's a strike against for me. They're awful.

Otoh, I use PowerAmp (Pro) for listening to music on my phone, and the AA interface it comes up with it actually really good, so I'm kind torn.

All-in-all, I think the HU's nav and audio "just work", and AA is a really bad overlay and provides very, very little for me, since I dont use streaming services like Play Music or Spotify.

Either way, if I want to listen to something from the hard drive, its trivial to convert FLAC to MP3 if I really want something on there.

GJWS · Jun 13, 2020

2020 G2 - RTL-E

Near as I can tell:

I've got a 1Tb SSD drive formatted at FAT32 - It's readable
Root counts as one folder
Up to 254 Folders in the root
Up to 254 folders nested in a folder

BUT

A top limit of 999 folders total (plus root makes 1,000) regardless of how nested you have things.

System Volume Information (Windows system folder - hidden) counts against the folder count.

Folders in the Recycle Bin / Trash - Also count against the total - so empty Recycle/Trash and if you are showing hidden folders - you can also delete the Recycle Bin folder (though an empty one regenerates as soon as you perform any file operation - so it's the last thing you do before a FATSort to get everything in order).

EDIT - and although the system can see and play all 26,000+ tracks I have on the drive. When you try a Voice Command "Music Search" - it announces that it can't handle more than 20,000 tracks and to remove some if you want it to index the files for searching.

SmilinSteve · Jun 13, 2020

GJWS said:
2020 G2 - RTL-E

Near as I can tell:

I've got a 1Tb SSD drive formatted at FAT32 - It's readable
Root counts as one folder
Up to 254 Folders in the root
Up to 254 folders nested in a folder

BUT

A top limit of 999 folders total (plus root makes 1,000) regardless of how nested you have things.

System Volume Information (Windows system folder - hidden) counts against the folder count.

Folders in the Recycle Bin / Trash - Also count against the total - so empty Recycle/Trash and if you are showing hidden folders - you can also delete the Recycle Bin folder (though an empty one regenerates as soon as you perform any file operation - so it's the last thing you do before a FATSort to get everything in order).

EDIT - and although the system can see and play all 26,000+ tracks I have on the drive. When you try a Voice Command "Music Search" - it announces that it can't handle more than 20,000 tracks and to remove some if you want it to index the files for searching.

Thats good info. I'll have to check but I thought I had 498 folders (Artist-Album) in the root folder (music). Are you saying that is not possible? There are no sub folders under the Artist-Album folders.

Head unit not showing/seeing all folders on USB drive

SuicideRabbit

SmilinSteve

SuicideRabbit

SmilinSteve

larryr

SuicideRabbit

Carsmak

SuicideRabbit

larryr

SuicideRabbit

SmilinSteve

SmilinSteve

SuicideRabbit

SmilinSteve

SmilinSteve

SmilinSteve

SuicideRabbit

GJWS

SmilinSteve

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