Hi all,

I am the proud owner of a 2012 Infiniti G37S sedan. One of the features I was most looking forward to is the music box.

Much to my chagrin, I discovered what a limited ridiculous piece of **** it is. Can't copy MP3's to the music box?? Have to record from regular audio CDs and forced to be a maximum of like 130 kbps bitrate?? That is ****ing absurd.

Ok, i thought, thats ok - I'll just use the USB port. Now, i havent tried it yet, but doing a few google searches I find that, at least in older models, throught the USB port you can only have up to 500 songs???!!?!?! WHAT THE HELL?? What is going on here?? Is this still a limitation in the 2012 models????? I looked through the user's manual but can't find any mention of such a limitation. Can anyone spell out for me what the limitations are? I just want access to my MP3s!

 

I have a 2012 as well, and I don't believe there is a limitation from what I have read on this forum. I have a 4GB thumb-drive plugged in, although I currently have less than 500 songs on it, so I can't personally confirm for a fact that there isn't a limitation. I agree with you though about the fact that you can't burn MP3's onto the hardrive, seems a bit ridiculous that you can only burn music from the CD player.

 

Why are you ranting for something you haven't tried? I can understand Infiniti not allowing the internal hard drive to be used as a general repository for songs; probably doing their share to combat piracy.

Why don't you call up Infiniti directly and ask them?

 

As far as the ranting about something i havent tried - well, fair enough, but since the other ridiculousness i ran into combined with the fact that clearly earlier models have a problem with this, I felt justified in ranting. Admittedly, I need to try it on my 2012 though.

Regarding calling up Infiniti directly - well, in my admittedly limited wisdom, I figured the point of this site was to ask questions like the one I asked.

 

It is done to combat piracy. The shame is your sales person who did not explain that you can only burn from a cd (non mp3 cd) As far as I know there are no limitations, but again I generally use an ipod and not a usb flash. Older models had a compact flash too so a little bit of a difference.

 

In a few years, cd players in cars will probably be obsolete. Very few cars these days come with tape decks. Consider this 9.3gb drive a useless add on you'll never use. 16/32GB flash drives are dirt cheap now. So might as well dump what you want to listen to that and call it a day.

I haven't touched mine since installing it ~1 1/2 months ago. I'll probably pull it one of these days to add more songs, but really, 32GB is alot of music.

 

Totally agreed, i just wanted to check to make sure if i do buy a 32gb flash drive that it would actually read all the MP3s and not limit me to like 500 or some stupid **** like that. I guess they're inexpensive enough that I'll just try it out and report back here.

 

From the owner's manual (2012?) page 4-48



Says 5000 files across 512 folders. If you figure each mp3 is 5MB avg, thats 25GB. So perhaps not entirely 32GB. If your mp3's are of high quality (192, 256, 320 kb), then most tracks are closer to 8-10MB in length, so filling a 32GB stick is not so impossible.

 

I generally don't bother with usb or the music box. BT streaming works well in the 2012.

 

I currently have 738 mp3's on a usb, no folders.. just the mp3's and they work fine.

sharkman

 

JSolo - thanks for that, i totally had missed that in the manual. Not sure why they would impose such a limit, but i guess thats okay.

IcemanF22: I tried the Bluetooth, but all I found was a Play and Pause button on the g37's screen. I still have to control the music from my phone. I would much rather to be able to control the music from the g37 itself - is this possible with Bluetooth?

 

I suspect these units are engineered to do the bare minimum necessary. There is likely limited memory available to keep track of any more than so and so number of files, subject to whether or not the device has navigation or not. There was a posting on the 370z site about a guy who mounted an android tablet to the car using one of those gooseneck type mounts. The tablet serves as his media hub and provides gps w/live traffic (better than xmtraffic). It's a pretty neat setup.

 

I have over 2000 files in one folder any the USB system on my non-navi 2012 G37xS Coupe Sport only recognizes 255 files...then I read the specs...so now I have to split things up this way > Root folder: MUSIC >
SUBFOLDERS: Jazz > Rock > Albums > Classic Rock > New Wave > New Music> Misc > Electronica
255 songs per sub-folder....so that I can fit all my music. My previous attempts failed: 1st attempt...I copied all my folders which also contained sub folders that contained all my songs....Fail...to many folders. Then I used a utility that removed all the directories and subdirectories and I ended up with over 2000 songs in one directory...FAIL,,,and now I get it. One main directory with a maximum of 8 subdirectories. Each sub-directory has a limit of 255 songs...x 8 altogether give me 2040 MP3s....which in my case all fit on an 8 GB USB stick with close to 2 GB left over still! However the spec is contradictory it says you can have only a maximum of 999 files....weird for a maximum of 8 x 124...to be safe and include the 8 folders you are left 123 just to be safer yet....120 files per folder....strange.... So now I have to be very selective in the songs I want in the car....although almost a 1000 songs at 4 mins per song is still 66 hours of music....that means on any given week even if I were to drive 2 hours a day for a total of 14 hours per week it would take one month to play all my songs! I could end up going 2 months since I don't drive that much...I guess that's a lot of music......Since USB sticks are cheap...I could keep multiple sticks although this would require a monumental amount of time to organize. I think I will use one USB stick for now and see how that goes.

 

i tried maxing out the USB file count, and from my experience, ~5000 songs takes about 5000 seconds it feels before any music starts playing (obviously exaggerating). I've tried a 128GB drive, 64GB drive, 32GB drive, and 16GB drive (had to cut it down a few hundred).

..i've been sticking with pandora and songza.

i've actually contemplated looking behind the screen to see what type of filesystem the 'music box' uses or if it's even accessible, but even then, it's only 9gb.