Want ALL your music with you?

[wailer]

If you want to carry all your digital music with you there is an easy way to do it! I have over 8000 songs on a 64GB Thumb Drive that is plugged into the USB port in my center console cubby! Here's how it works and some tips I have found . . .

 

1) Buy a good quality (brand name) USB flash drive large enough to support you library. In fact make it considerably larger to be able to add to it later AND to help with indexing (I'll explain more on this later). Buy one with a fast transfer rate.

 

2) DO NOT USE FOLDERS! It will not work. Simply load all the songs you want into the root drive of the USB thumb drive. Song titles, Artist, Album selections, Album Art will all be visible when viewed on your touch screen, as they would on your iPod. To play back just select the appropriate USB 1 or 2 on the touch screen, as determined by where you plugged the drive in.

 

3) My 64GB thumb drive with over 8000 songs (yes there was room for much more!) took about 2 hours for the onboard computer to index! You can start playing music from it in about 2-3 minutes though you will not be able to jump around. It will only play sequentially until it is fully indexed. You can move forward or backwards though. And each time you jump, you will be able to see how many songs have already been indexed so far. It will not need to re-index each time you start the car.

 

4) Removing or plugging in the thumb drive while the car is switched on will cause the thumb drive to need to be re-indexed the next time you plug it in! Make sure you leave it in until you turn the car off, and plug it back in before you switch the car on again.

 

5) I had occasional hiccups with the system that would cause it to start the re-indexing process. This annoyance is mostly avoided by following the above guidance, but not completely. It's a pain when it does this. To speed up indexing, you may want to consider putting less music on the thumb drive. When I reduced the number of songs to about 3500, indexing greatly sped up and was completed in about 10 minutes! Having extra room on the drive also speeds up indexing. You may want to consider smaller thumb drives. Just make sure you leave some space to add on and to allow for faster indexing.

 

ROCK ON! :rockon:

~Wailer

Edited March 31, 2013 by wailer

[gdn]

Very good information. Thanks for sharing. Wondering what happens if you put a few thousand songs on it and let it index, then remove and add another 1000. Does it know what is already indexed and just index the additional songs? or does it start from the beginning? Is the index stored on the USB drive ? or within MFT? Also with this - will it use the Gracenotes information and display album art when you play the music from the USB?

 

Thanks again.

[wailer]

Not sure about how indexing works after adding more songs. I believe the indexing takes place in the MFT as I can detect no changes to the content of the thumb drive. It does utilize the Gracenotes info to display song, artist, album, other songs on the album, and album art, all of which will display in the various modes on the car's info screen. It will display song, and artist in the driver's right info display if Entertainment is selected..

~Wailer

[JSKershaw]

This app looks like it will fix any indexing and playlist issues people have had. I don't play music from a USB drive, so I have no use for it. Anyways, maybe someone can give it a shot and report back?

 

http://www.openviewdesign.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13&Itemid=124

[wailer]

Hey Thanks! Maybe I will give it a try the next time it wants to start a 2 hour index! :hammer_self:

~Wailer

Edited April 9, 2013 by wailer

[dmt1971]

Mine seems to be wanting to play songs only in alphabetical order by title (even if there is a track number before the sing title), not in the order the songs come on an album. Any suggestions?

[corncobs]

Have you tried running the program you can download from syncmyride.com

It's a small program that apparently fixes / adds missing mp3 tag data in iTunes. The program scanned my entire music library and fixed everything that was missing or wrong. Then I copied the artist folders to a SD card and music is playing in order at least for single albums.

If you say play all it does play all your music alphabetically.

 

Not sure if that helps in your case but I think it could be an issue with the music file tag data.

Edited May 1, 2013 by corncobs

[neod192]

Mine seems to be wanting to play songs only in alphabetical order by title (even if there is a track number before the sing title), not in the order the songs come on an album. Any suggestions?

That's a bug in SYNC ... check out this thread on BOF: http://www.blueovalforums.com/forums/index.php?/topic/52773-mft-plays-albums-out-of-order/?hl=%2Bsync+%2Bplay+%2Border

[wmpwi]

The software is pretty sad. I do mostly audio books and nothing pisses me off more than listening to chapter (or track) 1 then 12 before chapter 2. I always have to rename everything to 001, 002, etc first. Another pain in the ass is the lack of a good fast forward / skip ahead option. with this system. It occasionally forgets where it left off so I have to start over and I can only skip ahead 15 seconds or so which is a big problem. Maybe not a big problem with small files, but a lot of audio books are split up into much bigger segments and the files could run about 30 minutes play time or more. I have to skip in 15 sec chunks to get to the 20 min mark because I can go backwards either. Imagine having to hold down the > for several minutes each time you need to resume a track, While I'm at ranting, I can have the audio paused (since there's no stop option) and I have to use the phone. After the call ends, it resumes playing even though it hadn't been and I can't select the 'Entertainment' selection on the touch screen because it's got some bug preventing it so I have to go to the 'Home' screen (or anywhere else) first then back to 'Entertainment' to pause it again. Sure it's buggy, but many of the problems are just bad design / execution issues. POS should have been developed in Android or anything else. Damn, I knew this would happen once I got started again. :banghead: What were we talking about again?

[46stang]

On my flash drive i created indvidual file names of each Artists name. Then I placed all the songs from that artist within that file from all the different albums they have out, then i selected (highlighted) all the songs in that file, right clicked them, then clicked on 'Details', then clicked on 'Remove personal Properties and Personal Info', then clicked on 'Remove the following properties from this file', then selected 'Album' and 'Apply'. This removes the album information so the My touch-sync cant try to index all your songs into individual albums.

 

The reason I did it this way was when using voice command or even selecting it through the main screen it would annoy me to pick an Artist, then have to select an Album. I like to listen to all that artists music and not have to select all their various albums to do so. The way I have it now, I simply Voice Command the car to the Artist i want to listen to and then it plays all the songs from that artist without having to pick an album. Also when selecting it on the main screen manually you just select Artist and under Album it says-Unknown, then select unknown and it plays all that artists music rather than only the ones on each particular album.

 

Not sure if it will help you all but it works for me, so I thought i would share.

[corncobs]

46stang I'm not sure how my files are set up in iTunes but MFT should play a single artist without removing the album.

I just say "play artist xyz" and it plays all songs by the this artist.

 

Which version of MFT are you using that requires you do it your way?

[46stang]

Not sure which version I have. We just got the car last week and it was annoying me that it would make me select the album after I had selected the artist. These are mp3 files from windows media player that i modified. I figured with it being windows based it would be more compatible with the car?

I haven't tried hooking my I phone up to it to see if it has this problem as well? Maybe I'll try that this weekend and see what it does. It sounds like I tunes works like mine does now, without the extra work of modifing the files.

[Ozone777]

2) DO NOT USE FOLDERS! It will not work. Simply load all the songs you want into the root drive of the USB thumb drive. Song titles, Artist, Album selections, Album Art will all be visible when viewed on your touch screen, as they would on your iPod. To play back just select the appropriate USB 1 or 2 on the touch screen, as determined by where you plugged the drive in.

 

 

I have actually had great success with putting my music into folders (Artist>Album>Title) and organizing wtih Media Monkey.

 

Takes a little work to get there but the results are more than satisfactory.

Cleaning up your tag info, and standardizing song names, doesn't hurt either and lessens the chance for MFT to not see some of your songs.

 

Media Monkey may be a little overkill for most users but, if you take the time to figure it out, it is very good software.

Find it here: http://www.mediamonkey.com/

[BradS7535]

I use folders too and it works just fine.

 

I did notice if you click "Play All" it will play in alphebetical order. Shuffle will just shuffle everything. Haven't tried playing an album to see if it will play in the correct order.

[musicmafia]

HELP! No matter what I try, playlists will not work properly or at all on MFT.

 

I use WMP in Windows 7. Library contains 4000 songs in 320kbs WMA format.

 

I started with my old mp3 player. All songs loaded fine but indexing is very slow. A couple incomplete playlists showed but that's all.

 

Ford support said try USB formatted as FAT32. Bought a PNY 128gb USB. Sync'd all the files via WMP, checked the drive and no playlists were there. Copied/pasted the playlists manually onto the USB drive (into root and into folder) and neither works. The first time I tried it, all my songs indexed and played fine BUT Playlist titles will show but car will say playlist is empty.

 

Saw other members comments on software called SyncPlaylist. Downloaded program but it now says I need to install Java, which I've been living happily without for some time. Is this program going to solve my problems and if so is it worth the risk with java?

[hermans]

HELP! No matter what I try, playlists will not work properly or at all on MFT.

 

I use WMP in Windows 7. Library contains 4000 songs in 320kbs WMA format.

 

I started with my old mp3 player. All songs loaded fine but indexing is very slow. A couple incomplete playlists showed but that's all.

 

Ford support said try USB formatted as FAT32. Bought a PNY 128gb USB. Sync'd all the files via WMP, checked the drive and no playlists were there. Copied/pasted the playlists manually onto the USB drive (into root and into folder) and neither works. The first time I tried it, all my songs indexed and played fine BUT Playlist titles will show but car will say playlist is empty.

 

Saw other members comments on software called SyncPlaylist. Downloaded program but it now says I need to install Java, which I've been living happily without for some time. Is this program going to solve my problems and if so is it worth the risk with java?

128 gig may be your problem. I remember reading in the owners manual that you should not exceed 64 gigs. I have two 64 gig thumb drives loaded and I have never had an issue.

[musicmafia]

guess I could try two 64 giggers but 4000 songs loads, indexes and plays beautifully on the 128. My only issue is playlists.

[musicmafia]

ps I have no idea how to sync two separate drives using WMP

[musicmafia]

will start a new thread on this...thanks