We're on the wife's 3rd Acura and each time she reloads her music CDs to the hard drive. There has to be a better alternative, but its not obvious to me.

She wants the convenience of being able to easily see and select individual albums, preferably though the car's display. I have no idea how that would be done with something like an iPod. She also has an iPhone 6 but it only has 16GB of storage (So far Siri Eyes Free is a winner).

I'm guessing she usually has about 1,200 songs (75 albums) on the Acura hard drive.

Any advice would be welcome!

TIA

BTW - this forum is great! I wish I'd discovered it earlier.

 

Been using a thumb drive in the usb port for my music. My favorite feature...

 

Speed187,
Great idea I tried with a few albums last night and I think that it will work fine for her.

The only possible issue is that it uses up the one USB port. I'm guessing that if you used a USB splitter, to provide an additional port to charge a device, that the car would "get confused" and not be properly handle the thumb drive. Any thoughts on this?

 

I still use a car charger to charge my phones and other devices so I can utilize the quick charging capabilities.

 

Has Acura corrected the file issue when using USB stick? On my 11 MDX, I copy/paste my iTunes library on a 64GB USB stick and leave it plugged in 24/7. I'm not sure if it is an issue with iTunes or Acura; but, it sorts everything by folder date first and then album name second. All my music looks scattered when I'm trying to look for a particular song on an album.

I ended up spending a few days remaking one folder the artist's name and then dumping every song into that folder. It is a little more organized but some folders are still out of order because of the date thing. I mostly set it for random play for the whole USB stick and skip the song I don't want to hear.

 

Not sure about folder ordering because I cram everything into a single one. But the '15 and '16 RDX seems to sort by file name only in alphanumeric order, at least within that single folder I have. Doesn't care about album name or date or anything. I just order them with a three digit number preceding everything else in each file name ("001. Song1.mp3", "002. Song2.mp3" etc). If even that doesn't work, try a different USB stick brand--I did run into one brand that doesn't work well, it was one of those "super tiny drives".

If I later want to insert a new song between two existing ones, I rename and add an alpha character at the end ("054A. OldSong54.mp3", "054B. NewSong.mp3", "055. OldSong55.mp3"). HOWEVER, in order for the car to get the order right, the entire folder has to be reloaded onto the drive; otherwise, it will just tack on the newer songs at the end. So I end up making whatever changes I need to make on the copy of the folder on my computer, delete the older version existing on the USB, and then copy&paste the updated folder into the USB.

This whole thing would probably be completely simplified with an ipod, but I use my nano for workouts only and I don't feel like buying a second one just to stick in the car.

 

I've been using drivesort to fix that date issue. There's a thread on the civic forums that discusses this...

Organization of USB Music is Horrible! I must be doing something wrong here... - Page 2