I generally listen to SiriusXM or Spotify while driving in my vehicle, but I wanted to try listening to FLAC music to get the full 3D experience in my RDX. I downloaded a FLAC album via a torrent website and transferred the music files to a USB stick and stuck it in the USB slot next to the cup holders. But for whatever reason, the vehicle won't recognize the songs. Maybe there's something that I'm missing here, but I would've thought it would be as simple as just transferring the files to the usb stick and plugging it in. The music plays without issue on my computer...

 

Have you formatted USB correctly? I have also seen older USB drivers are not working properly so check on that as well. Another option is to try converting it to MP3 on newer USB 3.1.

 

i found several articles/forum posts that indicated USB must be formatted to ExFat or FAT32.. Originally I had a 128gb flash drive formatted to ExFAT, but when taht didn't work i tried FAT32 and it did the trick. Maybe someone else can confirm, but in my experience it will only play songs that are separate files. For example if i have folders in the root and in each folder are the individual .flac or .mp3 files, it will play. If there is a single file for the entire album accompanied w/the .cue file the system does not recognize it. Hope this helps.

 

You are a gentleman and a scholar. I reformatted to FAT32 from ExFAT, and that did the trick! Music plays in the vehicle now!

 

Awesome! Enjoy it..I find that actual high quality FLAC files sound so much better than streaming from a phone via bluetooth!...

 

Emerson Lake and Palmer (and many others) in glorious 5.1 surround.. awesome

 

I'll check those artist out. Big 70's/80's fan, so if you can recommend any albums that sound great in FLAC let me know; i.e police, genesis, fleetwood mac, eagles, etc etc

 

I haven't seen any Genesis in 5.1, The Eagles have a couple of live DVD's that sound really good in FLAC. Rush has several in their catalog that has been remixed into 5,1. They are getting harder to find now as more people opt for convenience over audio quality, sadly.

 

I believe all Genesis were remastered in surround in the late 2000's on SACD. I own this set, plus a few others of theirs: https://www.discogs.com/Genesis-1976...release/948801

I have converted all my SACD's to FLAC, which is quite simple now.

 

You would have to find the surround discs to extract the 5.1 to .flacs for the car but you can find:

Police - "Every Breath You Take" Greatest Hits (SACD or DTS-CD)
Genesis - 3 Box Sets of SACDs or DVD-Vs will have just about every album they released in 5.1
Fleetwood Mac - "Fleetwood Mac" (DVD-5.1), "Tusk" (DVD-5.1), "Say You Will" (DVD-A), "Mirage" (DVD-5.1), "Rumours" (DVD-A)
Eagles - "Hotel California" (DVD-A, SACD Japan), "Hell Freezes Over" (DTS-CD), "Farewell Tour 1" (DVD, BluRay, HD-DVD)

 

you mean, .flac files cannot be in the same folder as .mp3 files?

 

When I was testing audio systems a few months ago, I had a flash drive with a couple different formats. I had three folders on the root, which each contained an album. One was MP3 and the other two were FLAC. One of them was encoded at 96/24 and the other was 192/24. I discovered that some systems would only play the lower res FLAC, which is why I had both. When I tested it on the RDX Advance sound system, it saw all three albums and played them without issue.

 

My 2019 RDX (bought in December) plays flac files just fine. I have a USB stick with flac, mp3, and m4a music files. All play perfectly. The flac files were all ripped from CDs using dBpoweramp to flac files with level 5 compression (the recommended setting).

 

and, yes, the USB stick is formatted as Fat32.

 

I have one MP3 in particular that doesn't want to show up on the play list or even under the folders option. Might be something wrong with the file but it plays fine on my phone and all my other devices. I exported the original from an Audacity project to a FLAC file and it plays fine in my RDX.