I am a new owner of a pre-owned 2013 G37x sedan. I am enjoying the car, so far, but have a question concerning the USB port. I bought a new flash drive and moved over 700 mp3 songs onto it. When I plug it into the USB port inside the console, only 255 are available to play. Also, they are not in any discernible order. On the drive, they are sorted by artist name. Any help or insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

I just use my phone for music so I can't chime in on just using a usb. My phone has around 400 songs on it and they all show up and play with no problems. The usb isn't formatted to depict your songs like a music library, you would basically need an iOS designed for a flash drive to do that. Have you tried a different usb? There could be limitations on your current one. Some cheap usbs don't actually hold what they say they do. It could be something like only 250 of those songs are on there and the rest is just the data for the file without the actual mp3/flac/whatever.

 

It's a SanDisk flash drive. It plays everywhere else I use it (laptop & desktop).

 

Make sure the files are compatible with the cars USB "reader"
I can't remember all the file type that the radio can read but I'm pretty sure wav files did not work when I was using the USB reader.

 

It's because of the way the folder structure is read by the car. It only allows a 16 bit folder structure. it just reads each song in as a folder/file that uses a spot in this 16 bit structure. 2^16 = 256. In binary, you are essentially using 0-255 allotted terms for this 16 bit register.

Thus, you actually have 256 songs and one of them is '0', or they took one slot for the lowest level folder of audio and used it for the 0, can't remember.

Bassically, you can thank the dumb folder structure within the cars usb logic. There is not way to have more then 256 songs read from the cars usb port using a flash device.

Thia is also in the owners manual

 

That makes sense. Thank you.

 

I'd like to point out that jomama22 is partially correct. There is a 255 song limitation "per folder", do to the 16-bit structure. However... can get more than 255 songs to read from the USB stick as long as they're not all in the root folder. Per the manual:

With navigation system:
Folder levels: 8, Folders: 512 (including root folder), Files: 5,000
Without navigation system:
Folder levels: 8, Folders and files: 999

(Max. 255 files for one folder)

My folder structure was Artist/Album then the songs... If you dumped all 700 songs at the root of the drive, then yeah, you'll only see 255 of them. If you organize them into folders, however you'd like, you can get access more of them, up to 999 or 5000, depending on whether you have nav or not.

 

Thank you! I can easily do that.

 

The USB music stick I use with my non-Nav has 961 songs in the root folder. I haven't tried to navigate the list, though, and I seem to get a lot of repeats. I'll have to investigate the owner's manual further.

I connected a USB hard drive and the system would even recognize it. I also can't get my iPad 2 Air to synch with Bluetooth. For that matter, my fairly new phone won't synch, either, though the salesman had the older one connected in fifteen seconds. I'm sad, I have 5000+ songs on my phone.

 

I set up folders and organized the music. Now, I have access to all of the songs. The next thing I'm wondering is how to sort them. On the flash drive, the songs are sorted alphabetically by artist. The display and order in the car is random. Is there a way to have the car sort the music files by artist so hey are all together in each folder?

 

The flash drive does not sort, that's a Windows or MAC file manager function. The songs on the drive are probably copied by oldest to newest by your file manager.

My first USB had all my songs in folders for each artist. I probably had 200 folders.

 

Reorganized my USB drive. Four folders, 254 songs in each. I'm now seeing track numbers in the 200's Should be 249 per folder, but oh well.