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USB Stick and formatting question

9K views 10 replies 6 participants last post by  SmilinSteve 
#1 ·
Apologies for the noob question. Mac user here. What do I need to do to format either my music files or my usb stick correctly to be able to search for and play music from a USB stick?

i previously downloaded a bunch of music from my iTunes onto a USB Stick by dragging and dropping. Took the usb and plugged it into my other car and it worked perfectly. Everything searchable by artist, album, song, etc.

When I plug the same stick into the G2 Ridgeline, I see none of that. Do I need to save the source files in a different format, or is it the stick?
 
#2 ·
In my manual for G2 2019 Ridgeline, page 274
"Your audio system reads and plays audio files on a USB flash drive in either MP3, WMA, or AAC *1 format."
The *1 footnote says "Only AAC format files recorded with iTunes are playable on this unit."

Also, elsewhere in the forum is discussion about limits of numbers of files/directories. The root directory can have a maximum of 255 files or subdirectories, Each of these directories may have a maximum of 255 items, etc.
 
#3 ·
Also I believe the format for the USB stick needs to be FAT32. I'm not sure if it understands any other formats, but when I set my USB stick up I made it FAT32 and after I moved all my files over I also ran the dot_clean command from the terminal to remove all the mac specific dot files. I've had no issues playing the files in my RTL.
 
#4 ·
Yes it has to be a stick formatted in Fat 32 AFAIK, which was a pain for me because windows won't do that for sticks over 32gb. I had to download some free software that would do it for a 64gb stick.
It sounds like the AAC music files are not the problem if the book says AAC from Itunes will work, and yours came from ITunes.
I have something like 5500 songs from 350 different artists. Its not the greatest interface, but you can scroll through all the artist folders to find what you want. You also need to figure out how to use the voice command to find albums or songs.
 
#6 ·
OP is using a MAC.
 
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#8 · (Edited)
Update: found a different USB stick, formatted it to FAT32, and dumped 6 albums from 3 differ the artists onto the stick. The truck recognizes the stick and plays the music, and will even show the name of the songs. But it does not show the name of the artist or the album name. I see “root” and “folder” only.
Do I need to dump the music onto the usb a certain way? For my other car, it was literally a dump of 1000+ songs, and artist, album, and song name all showed up and made searching simple.

thanks for any insight.

Edit: the owners manual does not appear to have instructions for this.
 
#9 ·
I can't remember exactly how it works right now, but....
You can name each folder with the artist and album name. Then when you browse through folders you will see that name. The song name is probably shown because your file name is the song name?
You can add artist and album to the file name but it will be a long name that might not fit on the screen.
And you should make sure your music is tagged (ID3 tags). Google it if you don't know what that is. Lots of different software out there to tag your music. I'm not sure if the screen display uses the tags, but I think the voice commands need them. So If you command "play Let it Be by The Beatles" it will find it through the ID3 tags. (I think).
 
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