USB drive misbehaving?

[msintros]

I'm trying to get my car to read this USB flash drive, but it keeps saying there are "no music files" on it. I know that it's the right format (FAT32) and that there are .mp3 files on it of the correct bitrate, etc. specified as being supported in the manual...

So I started looking a little closer at why the drive might not be doing what it's supposed to be doing. When getting info on it, I first noticed that even though there were files on it, it just said "Used: ---" with no size. Additionally, when looking at info in Disk Utility, it showed a negative size for the used portion.

I poked around and found a thread (https://superuser.com/questions/103...lity-show-negative-disk-usage-for-a-usb-drive) that seemed to match up pretty well with what I'm experiencing. The original poster described a negative size and then a user further down shows an info screen that looks just like mine with the blank "Used" field. He said that to get it to go away, he basically added more files, I think. I did, and it did seem to go away.. sort of. The file size in Finder's get info screen does seem to show correctly, and the negative size has gone away in Disk Utility.. But if I click "Info" in Disk Utility, check the attached file. Note the "File count" is zero.

So something is definitely going on with this drive, but it's really new. Like I've only used it a couple of times before this. And I'm thinking the fact that the file count seems to think it's zero might be why the car is telling me there are no music files.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Fishrrman]

I've noticed that when copying mp3 files to a flashdrive for my car audio (2013 Toyota RAV4), the files won't be "seen" by the in-car audio player unless they have metadata attached to them.

Apparently the car player needs to read the metadata in order to assemble and present the proper "lists" to the user, such as
- artist
- album name
- song titles
etc.

Do your mp3 files have the required metadata?
You can check with a handy little app called "Tagger".
Here's a possible source for it:

Download The Tagger for Mac | MacUpdate

Download the latest version of The Tagger for Mac for free. Read 15 user reviews and compare with similar apps on MacUpdate.

www.macupdate.com

You can add or modify metadata using Tagger.

Also...
I've had problems in the past with some mp3 files that couldn't be seen until the "artwork" was removed from the metadata.
I recall that happening on an older audio player, but the Toyota player doesn't seem to have any problems with artwork.

 

[msintros]

I've noticed that when copying mp3 files to a flashdrive for my car audio (2013 Toyota RAV4), the files won't be "seen" by the in-car audio player unless they have metadata attached to them.

Apparently the car player needs to read the metadata in order to assemble and present the proper "lists" to the user, such as
- artist
- album name
- song titles
etc.

Do your mp3 files have the required metadata?
You can check with a handy little app called "Tagger".
Here's a possible source for it:

Download The Tagger for Mac | MacUpdate

Download the latest version of The Tagger for Mac for free. Read 15 user reviews and compare with similar apps on MacUpdate.

www.macupdate.com

You can add or modify metadata using Tagger.

Also...
I've had problems in the past with some mp3 files that couldn't be seen until the "artwork" was removed from the metadata.
I recall that happening on an older audio player, but the Toyota player doesn't seem to have any problems with artwork.

Hmm, interesting. All my mp3s should have meta data, as I keep them all pretty well organized in iTunes. Most if not all of them have album artwork but I don't think my player has problems with that because it will read the artwork if I connect my iPod Classic. I would keep using the iPod except it just doesn't work that well (it's also not on the list of supported iPods in the manual) - it will get "stuck" on whatever album I'm playing and I can't change it, or it will start to have difficulty loading the artist list even after having already loaded it, will cause the iPod to freeze and need to be reset, etc.

Do you think I need more metadata than the artist, album, song titles? I have all that stuff but some of them are missing other fields like year, bpm, etc. that often aren't filled in anyway. Again, I wouldn't think this would be the issue since the same files work from the iPod, but I don't know if it is expecting different things from the flash drive.

Anyway, thanks for your reply.

 

[msintros]

OK, I literally just solved this…

It turned out I did have another drive lying around and it happened to already be FAT32 formatted so I threw some of the same files I had been trying to read with the other one onto that. Loaded just fine in the car and browsing/playing was nice and fast.

So I took it inside and examined both drives in Disk Utility to see how they were different. Well, it happens that the one that worked had a Master Boot Record partition map… the one that didn’t had a GUID partition map. So I tried reformatting the one that didn’t work with a Master Boot Record partition map and that one works in the car now too.

I had actually read about this because I was curious what the different partition maps were for and everything I read said that you should generally use GUID unless you are specifically making a boot drive. So it turns out all of that was rubbish and the car kind of requires a Master Boot Record partition map or it won’t read the files, even though they are correct files and in the correct disk format.

Hopefully this will help someone down the line with the same problem.