Biggest USB Thumb Drive that works on Honda Infotainment Unit

styxrogan said:

256GB thumb drive....2120 hi rez flac files

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SCOPESYS said:

700 Folder limit confirmed

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mathdydx said:

Since there's a 700 folder limit, all you really need to do to get past this is instead of creating album folder, create one folder per artist/band. Then you can throw in all the songs in one folder. As an example, let's say you've got three Pink Floyd albums (dark side (DS), animals (ANI), the wall (TW)), I would rename the tracks as follows into a single folder called "Pink Floyd":

ANI-Track 1
ANI-Track 2
ANI-Track 3
DS-Track 1
DS-Track 2
DS-Track 3
TW-Track 1
TW-Track 2
TW-Track 3

That way you're still sorting by album, but you're only using one folder. The only problem is if you listen to more than 700 bands, which I think would be a very small minority of people.

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SCOPESYS said:

OR, just get a few smaller size USB drives, and swap them out occasionally.

If you use just ONE BIG drive, you have these potential problems.

(1) Takes for ever to load
(2) If it gets corrupted, it a major task, to fix it, or make a new BIG one.
(3) Just managing such a big drive, and doing any updates or changes on such a big drive, take much longer -- ie a SORT
(4) 700 albums is a LOT.. not a big deal to swap the drive after listening to 700 albums, or when you want a complete change ...

I guess what I am really saying is rather than Fight it , embrace it ..

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mathdydx said:

I currently use a 64 GB flash drive and plan on getting a 128 GB drive when I run out of space. So far I don't suffer from the issue of songs taking too long to load. But I'll have to see if that's a problem when I get a bigger flash drive.

I also like to leave the drive plugged in all the time except when I'm adding new music to it. It seems like frequently taking out one drive and swapping it for another would lead to more wear and tear on the USB port.

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Type Rocket said:

Just ran across this thread and wanted to consolidate and add a little for the next person. I purchased a 256GB USB 3.0 generic flash drive from MicroCenter that was already formatted FAT32 with 32K clusters. I copied a couple of albums onto it and tried it out. For about 3 seconds the display read No Data Found, and then the first song started playing. I would imagine that larger catalogs will result in longer delays for the initial load. So the head unit is not super picky about USB branding, but I would definitely steer away from slower USB 2.0 drives. Also, the RUFUS (google it) utility can be used to format FAT32 if needed.

To minimize your total number of folders due to the 700 folder limit, you'll want to eliminate unnecessary organizational folders like Sudio/Live or CD1/CD2 and just stick to Artist\Album.

I noticed that no album art displayed, even though there was a "folder.jpg" in each album folder that most MP3 players will use as album art. So I used MP3tag to store the art in the ID3 tag info for each song and voila, album art! I also noticed a few albums where the art was not appearing and thanks to this thread https://www.civicx.com/threads/usb-music-drive-missing-artwork-on-1-track.28102/ I was able to compress the size of the art and the artwork appeared. Also, wanted to re-mention the sorting utility that the OP provided, since it is kind of buried in his long post:

And finally, from the manual only MP3, WMA, and AAC (and apparently MP4 video, see above) song files are supported. Having the .jpg files on the drive does not seem to cause problems, but if you are copying folders from a windows PC from which MediaPlayer has run, there are likely several files that it may have downloaded that could, so you may need to do some cleanup as described in the OP.

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SCOPESYS said:

USB Music Player FAQ ( maintained by Scopesys)
Note: This 1st Post will be updated to reflect new information as it becomes available.

​

(9/18/2018)

What is the biggest size USB drive that you have managed to get to work reliably on the 2018 Honda head Units.


So far I have tried:-
1 Gig USB 2.0 "ebay - cheap- china drives" -- either unrecognized, or audio skips

16 GB USB 3.0 Cruzer Glide - works very well - no issues -- fast

64 GB USB 3.0 Cruzer Glide - Forced to FAT32 format (= Bigger cluster size than standard) - Not recognized
9/19/2018
Formatted 64GB drive to FAText. Put into Car. The used head Unit to reformat the USB drive. Now correctly formatted to FAT32 by Android OS.
Drive can be read.written to by PC (Xp & W10), and the audio file are now visable in the Car, and play !!
Next step: Try same method with 128Gb & 256Gb drives

32 GB USB 3.0 Cruzer Glide (Standard Fat32 format) --- works well - no issues - fast

32 GB USB 3.0 Micro Center (generic) $4-$5 (Standard Fat32 format) --- works well - no issues - fast



=============================================================
(9/18/2018)
SORTING FOLDERS and FILES on USB drive for cleaner display on Honda HU

WARNING: Be carefull... using CMD prompt with care.

Make 100% sure you are executing these command on your USB Flash Drive, and not on any other drive on your computer !!
Be particularly careful using the "del" command (Delete command)

YOU DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK - if in doubt DO NOT do it !!!


So you have put 1000's of songs onto your USB drive, but when you come to play them, TWO Problems

(1) Some don't Play
(2) The Folders and files are a total mess.. no specific order .. can't find anything.

Solutions: (1) Some don't Play
You need to remove (delete) any non playable files from your USB drive

The only files that will play are mp3, mp4a and wav ( may be others ?)
So, how do you FIND , and then delete any non playing files ?

(a) Find any files that are not mp3
Under dos cmd, go to root of your USB drive, and use the command

dir /s /b /a-d | findstr /v /r ".*\.mp3" > found.txt​

This will give you a file called "found.txt" which will list all the non mp3 files.

(b) Then look at found.txt in Notepad, and make a note of any non-playing file types .. ie .avi .wma etc

Should not be many as you have removed any .mp3 files from this listing
Then type

del /s *.avi ​

to delete all .avi files on the current Dos selected drive (Your USB Drive)

Do for all found non paying file types.

Finally delete the found.txt file ie del /s *.txt

NOW all you should have on your USB drive just playable files.

Solution (2) Folders and files are in Random order
To sort Folders and files into Alphabetical order on the Flash drive (so that Honda USB Player will display them in Alphabetical order) , you can use the windows Program "DriveSort"

https://techmadeplain.com/2014/how-to-sort-music-flash-drive-car-stereo/
(Full pictorial instruction on above web page)

Now, when you put your USB Flash drive back into your car, at least everything will be sorted Alphabetically, - Both the Folders, and the files within those folders

(9/20/2018)
Confirmed: There is a 700 Folder max limit on the 9" Head Units USB player.

If each ALBUM is in its own folder, and each album has approx 10 mp3 songs, then 700 albums is about 32GB.
32GB is also the max size that Windows allows a fat32 format, although other formatter can format Fat32 onto bigger drives, and windows can then still be able to read and write to that drive.. just that windows cannot format a drive to Fat32 on a drive bigger than 32Gb, without using some non microsoft formatting program.

The point being, with the 700 Folder limit, and using a folder per album, there is NO POINT in trying to use a drive greater than 32GB, as only about 32Gb would hold accessible music.

CONCLUSION: If you want more than 700 albums, use multiple 32GB drives.

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