Music on USB drive

[joshh385]

Hi all - I'm a new member on the site. Just picked up a '11 Yukon Denali last week. LOVING it so far, but I have noticed a couple strange things regarding the playback of WMA/MP3 files on a USB drive.
First of all, if I organize my drive like this

Root of drive
--Artist Name
----Album Name
------Track
------Track
------Track

When I plug the drive in the system seems to flatten the directories, and only show those with music files directly in them, so I lose the artist, album structure, and just see the album directories. To get around that I've changed the folder structure to just be one level deep by artist name, and have all the tracks directly under there. It's a pain for comedy albums and things like that, but otherwise fine.

The next oddity is the sort order. I've been adding some additional music to the drive daily, and each time I add something and plug the drive back in to the Yukon it gets added at the end of the list when I navigate through the music on the touchscreen... like it isn't resorting the list alphabetically. Anyone know of a way to reset this? Or tell it to sort every time I plug the drive in?

Thanks!

 

[joshh385]

nobody has any ideas on how to sort music on a usb drive?

 

[04ctd]

nobody has any ideas on how to sort music on a usb drive?

um...my antique don't play USB....

you might try putting the MP3's on a CD (~120 on a CD)

or a DVD (~1200) and see how that works?

my 2007 6 disc will play MP3's, so that's ~600 songs with no fussing with cables or anything.


HTH <--sure it dont, though!

 

[joshh385]

So I did a little experiment. I burned a bunch of music to a DVD as you suggested, and popped that in. Amazingly enough, a button shows up at the bottom of the nav screen... "SORT"! So having music on a disc works fine. Now if I go back to the USB device the button on the screen where sort was for the DVD is replaced with eject, and there is no sign of a sort option anywhere. What's so weird is I can't see any logic behind how the music is showing up that's on the usb device. It isn't alphabetical, in order of when it was added, sorted by album, track, etc. It's just plain not sorted by anything, with no apparent option to sort it... could they really have left that out? It seems so simple!

 

[StevenFromTexas]

While I don't have a solution to your USB flash drive problem -- tried a USB flash drive once in my 2010 Tahoe and said "To hell with this!", I do have a solution to crappy AM radio, crappy FM radio, and crappy XM Satellite Radio. The solution is an iPod touch plugged into the USB connector. Great songs, all personally selected by me, and lots of podcasts with hardly a commercial to waste my time. One of the best things to have ever come into my life.

 

[domin8]

While I don't have a solution to your USB flash drive problem -- tried a USB flash drive once in my 2010 Tahoe and said "To hell with this!", I do have a solution to crappy AM radio, crappy FM radio, and crappy XM Satellite Radio. The solution is an iPod touch plugged into the USB connector. Great songs, all personally selected by me, and lots of podcasts with hardly a commercial to waste my time. One of the best things to have ever come into my life.

Although I don't have an ipod, I do have an Android that does this too. Additionally, if somebody calls me I can hear them through the car speakers and they can hear me talk too. Only downside is the echo the person on the other phone hears because they hear what they said being repeated.

 

[joshh385]

Well it took a lot of research and experimentation, but I have an answer.
The audio system in the Yukon, and most of the other GM vehicles, will only read a USB device formatted with a FAT file system. FAT organizes the files and folders on the device in the order in which they were added, which as it turns out was how they were displaying on my nav screen. The simple answer is to put them on the device in the order you want them displayed - but that's not practical at all for continually adding music to the device. Instead, there are a number of free utilities out there which will resort the actual FAT structure, and thus give the audio system the files and directories to read in alphabetical order.

See http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0010.html for more information.

I'm using FAT Sorter right now and it works great. I do have to say though, this is kinda stupid. For a 2011 vehicle, it should be able to sort the files on the fly. Plus, it reads the ID3 tags, so why not let me sort by artist, album, etc - it does if I hook up an IPOD or put in a disc with mp3 tracks... seems like they almost got this feature done but left out a couple finishing touches. Not a big deal, especially now that I have a workaround, but I hope they fix it in a firmware update.

Cheers

 

[nj462]

Interesting, thAnks for the updated solution

 

[StevenFromTexas]

Thanks for the update, joshh385. It's always nice to learn something new, and nice to see a topic with some kind of conclusion to it.