deadbeatles

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?

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.

Have you tried re-ripping the album? Or, try to change the type of ID3 tags using a program like mp3tag ( https://www.mp3tag.de/en/). It may have something to do with the version of ID3. Don't use ID3v1 ever.

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.

Ok, so I realize now that if I want lossless audio to be indexed on the Ford SYNC system, I need to use Windows Media Audio (Lossless) format. So now all I have to do is re-rip all the CDs I've already ripped. Sigh. At least it'll work though.

Well, I tried by deleting half the songs on the USB drive and I think it re-indexed, but it still didn't read the tags. I'm convinced that SYNC does not recognize tags on any format but mp3. This is a shame and a half. It's bad enough you can't search through things using the folder system and you have to do everything by voice command, which means you have to remember what you have on your drive. You also can really only search and "navigate" your files if you have mp3s. What is even the point of being able to read wav files if you can't index them properly? I thought SYNC sucked before, but I got used to it. Now, I realize just how badly it sucks. It has to be the worst car audio system out there. Seriously, is there one that's worse?

I tried adding a couple with the tags, but when I said "Play Album..." It didn't recognize it. Maybe it hadn't re-indexed it yet. I'll try your way.

Hello, I have ripped a bunch of CDs using Windows Media Player to wav format. They are on a USB drive that I plugged into Sync, which then promptly indexed them. That's when I realized that WMP doesn't apply ID3 tags to wav files. All the info is listed as "unknown". So I installed mp3tag and applied all the tags to all the files. Unfortunately, plugging the USB drive back in did nothing because Sync had already indexed everything. So, I don't know if it's not recognizing the tags or just not re-indexing the drive. Is there a hidden file or folder containing the index information on the drive and can I just delete that? Or, is there a way to tell Sync to re-index the drive? Or, will Sync never recognize ID3 tags for wav files no matter what? I'm not sure of my version of Sync, but I have a 2013 Focus SE. It has the latest firmware that I installed about 6 months ago. Thanks for any information.