Curious if anyone else has experienced this?

2022 A-Spec:

When I am playing music off my USB thumb drive, every now and then it just starts stuttering significantly. It's as if the music is having buffering issues, but I'm at a loss as to why. It will play a note or two, pause for a second, and repeat for 30 seconds or so before eventually stabilizing. Skipping to the next song often resolves it quicker. The drive itself is new and plenty fast, and it does it with a separeate drive as well. There is zero consistency in which songs or formats (both flac and mp3) it does it on. A song might skip, but I can select another song and go back to it, and it'll play fine. The randomness of it all has be hesitant to bring it in, because unless the tech can actually replicate it I'm sure they'll just going to hand the keys back to me. But, hopefully someone else has run into this and either found the issue or had success with it being fixed by the dealer.

 

your USB drive:
What size?
What format is this in? Fat 32 or NTFS? have you tried both?
Are the music files in a folder? does the drive have anything else in it? might confuse the drive as a boot drive for updates
What format are the music files? nevermind you mentioned it

I had trouble with flac as well, tried several tests. gave up.

 

To answer your other questions -

256 GB drive (maybe 15% utilized)
FAT32 (need to confirm, but pretty sure)
Folders to organize by artist and album
No other data on drive, unless you count the related album art files

 

What is most frustrating is that my 2010 RDX had no issues with the ALAC songs on my old iPod (which is not recognized by the 2022 RDX for...reasons), and of course I loved playing the few DVD-A discs I was able to obtain over the years (which of course cannot be played in....well just about any car made in the last 10 years). It has been my only real frustration with the new car so far, but it's a bit of a big one because I do love taking advantage of the ELS system.

 

Yeah i feel your pain

So far I am happy for apple car play audio.
But
Flac could have been better.

 

So heres what i am going to try:

I will connect my ipod to itunes and see what kind (quality) of music it will transfer over and then
connect that to my car and see if that makes a difference...
Will report back.

 

Unless you've done something special, a 256GB drive would not be formatted as FAT32. It would normally be formatted as exFAT. exFAT is what I run on a 2022 and I do so without any issues. I use a Sandisk UltraFit, about the size of a peanut.

 

Good call - I always forget about the size limit for FAT32. It is indeed exFAT, and mine is a Samsung about the same physical size as yours.

 

so did that help? exfat

I have yet to try my ipod, i tried connecting it this morning but it gave me a message that it prefers to use apple car play
gasp!
had to go to work

 

Ipod classic fails to connect not only that the interface it through USB dashboard which blows.
Apple carplay interface is better.
Alas if i want to hear quality audio it will never happen

 

if this helps, i have been using multiple sticks for years listening to flac and 5.1 audio files. My trick is to always let the 'starburst' finish loading before actually starting the car. i push the start button twice without my foot on the brake, wait, then push again with my foot on the brake. this fixes all the issues with the usb - thumb drive issues. good luck! (2019)

 

So, coming back to this, I tried a handful of other thumb drives and found one from Sandisk that hasn't skipped in the 6+ months I've been using it. It does ultimately seem to come down to the drive itself, and I guess Samsung isn't the gold standard it once used to be. Since the Acura link app has also been hot garbage for months now, and with the recent update to allow Android Auto to use the full screen, I've primarily been using AA and playing the music off my phone since you can't use a USB drive at the same time as AA (seriously though - why?). So yeah, either way there's a compromise to be had.