Sync won't recognize or play certain mp3s

[deadbeatles 0]

I have a 2013 Ford Focus with plain SYNC, no touch and no navigation.

 

I simply cannot get SYNC to play certain albums of mp3s and I think it's not seeing a good chunk of the songs on my USB drive. I have about 3000 songs on a USB drive, which should not be a problem for SYNC.

 

All the files are either mp3 or wma (lossless). I've had problems with tags in the past so I used mp3tag to clean them all up and it seems that SYNC is ok with all the wma files. The wma tags are all wma tags and the mp3 tags are all ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1. Actually, I think it's not recognizing any mp3s at this point. I don't mean it gives me "Unknown X" as the info. I mean it doesn't see the files at all and won't play them. It could be that it would eventually play them, but I haven't seen it happen yet.

 

Can someone tell me the best configuration or format for mp3 tags that will be recognized by SYNC?

 

By the way, I also wanted to talk about another problem. When first inserting the USB drive, I cannot try to play anything from it until it's finished indexing. If I do, SYNC becomes completely fried and crashes entirely. At that point I have to take out the fuse to reset it and start over. I've learned to just put in the USB drive and not play it for at least 15-20 minutes, then I can use it without SYNC completely frying.

 

When it is in the process of losing its mind before it crashes entirely and dies, it starts babbling about navigation route commands among other things. I don't have navigation, so I wonder if I have the wrong firmware installed.

[deadbeatles 0]

Ok, so I just played around with it and told it to play various artists. It seems like the file type doesn't matter. It sees mp3s and wmas. It just doesn't see about half the files on the drive. It's like it only indexed half or 2/3 of the files and just ignored the rest.

 

Why would it do this?

 

Is it continuously indexing and it hasn't gotten to it yet? I wouldn't think indexing would take hours.

[deadbeatles 0]

I think what the deal is that it indexes while the car is on, but then stops indexing when the car turns off and doesn't resume indexing when the car turns back on later. In other words, it thinks it's finished indexing when the car starts the second time.

 

So, to fully index your USB drive you have to make sure that the car is on continuously until it's finished indexing. Otherwise it won't ever index the whole drive. I had the car on for about 25-30 minutes and I guess it hadn't finished indexing. This seems excessive to me. You would think it would take 25-30 seconds to index around 3000 tracks.

 

By the way, I used to have about twice that on this drive, but SYNC was screwing up so much, I thought it was because there were too many tracks for it to handle. Now, I realize it has more to do with the flawed and buggy indexing process.

 

So, this time, I've "reset" SYNC by removing the fuse and putting it back in. Then, I put the USB drive back in, but I'm not accessing it whatsoever for a few days. This will test the assumption that it thinks it's finished indexing because the car turned off in the middle of the process.

 

I'll try to play it in a few days and check to see if it has indexed the drive fully. If not, I'll simply try to keep the car on for a few hours, but that will waste battery and/or gas, but I need to figure out this annoying problem.

 

SYNC is just god-awful. I wish I could replace it with an entirely new program, preferably one that wasn't made by Microsoft. It would be great if there were a replacement somewhere out there. Does anyone know of anything like this?

[CosmikDebris 2]

You can find an older thread here when I was trying to solve this same problem. I even took it to Ford, waited three hours, was told that everything checked out, was charged $120. I gave up, went to using an old ipod, which worked great. I wanted more storage though so put 128gb microsd card in my Samsung phone. Sync won't do the voice commands but I find that bluetooth is good and I get lots of music choices.

If you happen to solve this please report back.

I tried working on the files that would not play (or even be seen) and could not determine why. I can't imagine it being a simple indexing thing, as I'd have one album of two by the same artist that just would never be seen, even if I put it on another drive with just a couple others.

[FordGuy 3]

On my 2014 Ford Taurus with Sync2 MFT v3.10 I have just over 3,000 mp3 songs on a 32 GB USB stick formatted as "exFat" which will index in about 15 minutes. I have the song files all at the root level with no folders on the drive and I use ".m3u" files for the playlists. When I use to have the song files in a folder setup by artist, album, song like iTunes uses it took forever for the USB to index. It also would tend to re-index a lot when the vehicle was restarted. With this flat file structure the re-index at the restart of vehicle take about 1 minute. I use iTuneExport set in the Flat mode to copy the playlist that I want on to the USB. With this flat method the only problem is that if you have 2 songs by different artist with the same song name, only the first song will be put on the USB, since it can't have 2 files with the same name.

[CosmikDebris 2]

If you have been watching the other thread about this same problem I've had, I found out today that if I just dump the mp3 files in, without any file folder structure I can play those albums that were not showing up.

I'm in the process of doing that with all 64gb of data. If that still works, then I may reorganize them all into album folders, but with artist name in the album title to aid in removing of adding more later. It would be extremely difficult to remove an album if they were all scattered among the rest of the tracks.

[ben senise 14]

8 hours ago, CosmikDebris said:

If you have been watching the other thread about this same problem I've had, I found out today that if I just dump the mp3 files in, without any file folder structure I can play those albums that were not showing up.

I'm in the process of doing that with all 64gb of data. If that still works, then I may reorganize them all into album folders, but with artist name in the album title to aid in removing of adding more later. It would be extremely difficult to remove an album if they were all scattered among the rest of the tracks.

 

i think it may have more to do with re-writing the files rather than how they are organized.