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Need Advice Organizing USB Flashdrive


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I finally got around to putting my music library on a flash drive for use in my car. The music is about 25 gigs, and about 6,000 songs. The drive was indexed and the songs all play, but navigating around is tedious! With all the artists and songs, the best way to find what I want is thru the "Explore USB" option, but that way the songs for each album and artist are in alphabetical order!!! (Can you Imagine listening to "Dark Side of the Moon" or "Sgt. Pepper" that way?) Scrolling thru hundreds of album titles works but the artists are not grouped together, again they scroll alphabetically by title. (It takes about 50 button pushes to get to Genesis Abacab! - Nice while trying to drive! - And I don't like voice commands - she can't pronounce or understand a third of my music!) My wife just got a 2016 Edge. Her system lists albums in track order when utilizing "Explore USB" so I thought maybe I should update my firmware. That was quite a task but I think I did it (version went from EJ5T-14D544-AA to GG1T-14D544-AB.) But, alas, no changes in the way you navigate thru the drive. I can think of a few ways to work-around (renaming EVERY album title or track name, utilizing the "Genre" category, or making LOTS of playlists -- all very time consuming!) And I am also frustrated that when you finally get to the album you wish to play, it repeats after the last track and doesn't continue to the next album ... AND... when you arrow back or hit "return" you are back to the first item in the drive and not the current location you are at!!! Looking for some advice that might help!

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  • 4 months later...

Get the freeware MP3Tag and clean up the tag file data embedded into the files. I just set myself some basics. Artist, album and track with leading number, ie 01, 02 etc. Make the filename and tag match, so you avoid Beatles and The Beatles, which would appear as different artists. I also keep genre simple, no blues/rock or southern rock, just general rock or blues.

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  • 1 year later...

I found some success using the Similar Music voice command, but found the most success with playlists.  Doesn't fix the repeating thing, but a CD would do the same.  I took my 16 GB flashdrive pretty full of music, loaded it in itunes and picked songs to make Genius playlists. Much faster than manual playlist creations and it mixes together my music like i never would, but works nicely.  Tough part was my mix of .mp3 and .wma files.  ITunes converted all the .wma file names to .m4a files and assigned a drive id preamble (c:\ and itunes folder info for .m4a and g:\ (thumbdrive assignment) for the .mp3 files) to the \artist\album\song lines of the .m3u playlists.  Sync said the playlist was bad.  I opened the playlists in Notepad text editor, ctrl-H replaced deleted the drive preambles with nothing and .m4a with .wma.  saved it to the thumb, pugged it in, pulled up each playlist in Sync, and it works. enjoying a lot of music the hasn't been played in a long time.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I organize all my music in folders.  One folder for the artist, and individual folders for each album.  File names use the format <artist> - <album> - <track> - <title>

 

Example:

 

Led Zeppelin

    --- Houses of the Holy

            Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy - 01 - The Song Remains The Same.mp3

            Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy - 02 - The Rain Song.mp3

            Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy - 02 - Over The Hills And Far Away.mp3
            etc...

    --- In Through the Out Door

             Led Zeppelin - In Through the Out Door - 01 - In the Evening.mp3

             Led Zeppelin - In Through the Out Door - 02 - South Bound Saurez.mp3

             Led Zeppelin - In Through the Out Door - 03 - Fool in the Rain.mp3

             etc...

 

 

For a compilation album i use this format  (<album> - <track> - <artist> - <title>)  This helps keep them in track order.

I also make sure my tag data is accurate.  I use MP3 tag and remove all meta/tag data and then write only mp3 v2.4 data.

 

Personally I find Sync's voice recognition works pretty well.  I have over 18,000 songs on my 128GB flash drive and have found only a few songs that I can't call up by voice.  I was even surprised that Sync knows Roman numerals.  So for example, I can ask for Led Zeppelin 4 even though it is tagged as Led Zeppelin IV.

 

 

 

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