# 16GB usb stick indexing forever problem



## bigluke (Aug 18, 2013)

yeah so I broke my 32GB stick and bought a faster 16GB instead...did some cleaning on the songs to keep only those I like. Now I drove the car for almost 4 hours and it's still indexing files? I am aware that not all my files are tagged as they should be..exemple lot of songs begining with "304.eminem-superman", read that 5 or 10 minuts are normal for 2600 songs but 4 hours of driving later it's still indexing. Anyone has a clue how to speed up that indexing and noticed that sometimes I have to remove the stick and put it back in because mylink don't connect to it. So when I put the stick back in the indexing starts over again. thanks for your inputs.


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## Jim Frye (Mar 16, 2011)

What is the brand and model of the new drive? I've only had good luck with SanDisk Cruzers in my car. Is everything an MP3 format or something else? Also, did you completely reformat the new drive? Some drives have software (root kits) installed in the root directory that can play havoc with the Audio/Navigation systems in cars. I always do a hard format with the operating system on my PC and usually follow that with a drive wipe using CCleaner to ensure that there is absolutely nothing on the drive prior to my loading tunes. Also, how is the tree structure set up on the new drive? The Cruze used to have a limit of 10,000 tracks for the USB interface. Check with GM Total Connect for additional help.


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## bigluke (Aug 18, 2013)

Well I didn't format the new drive because I was thinking since it's brand new there was no need but I will do it tomorrow, the new duve is a 16GB Lexar don't have the exact specs. Did a chat with CS for the mylink and they wrote that I have to format the new stick with ntfs and do a reset on the car...turn the car on for 1 minut than shut it down living the key on acc and leave the door open for 10 minuts, than go to config menu on mylink and set it to factory reset, than insert the stick and let it index. Tomorrow I'll try to tag the filed better than they are now with the format and factory reset see if it helps.


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## obermd (Mar 3, 2012)

bigluke said:


> Well I didn't format the new drive because I was thinking since it's brand new there was no need but I will do it tomorrow, the new duve is a 16GB Lexar don't have the exact specs. Did a chat with CS for the mylink and they wrote that I have to format the new stick with ntfs and do a reset on the car...turn the car on for 1 minut than shut it down living the key on acc and leave the door open for 10 minuts, than go to config menu on mylink and set it to factory reset, than insert the stick and let it index. Tomorrow I'll try to tag the filed better than they are now with the format and factory reset see if it helps.


NTFS - the normal format for USB drives this size is FAT32. Besides, unless you're running Windows you may not be able to format to NTFS, but everyone can format FAT/FAT32. Definitely reformat the drive though. I put a brand new Lexar drive in my system once and it wanted to install software on my computer, so I know that at least some of their drives assume you can't read larger USB drives.


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## Jim Frye (Mar 16, 2011)

I have never gotten a Lexor drive to work in my car. The last one I bought had some sort of programming on it that Norton puked all over. Some of the cheaper made drives have an internal architecture that car audio systems just can't handle, regardless of how the're formatted. I've come to belive that Lexor is one of those.

Update: The OM and NM for my car specifies formatting the USB flash drives as FAT32. I know NTFS doesn't work with these systems.


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## bigluke (Aug 18, 2013)

Today I formated the stick, cleaned up the tagging and leaved 2400 songs in the stick. Did all the possible resets on the mylink and the open door 10 minuts ajar. When I put the usb stick in in starts playing no trouble and all the folders/songs/artist and so on is ok, but still indexing forever. Tried friend usb stick with 400 well tagged files and same thing...indexing. Is it possible that onstar has to do something with the indexing since I did't renew my services with them? It's very frustrating not be able to use the voice commands since it's indexing all the time. Maybe someone has a clue how to fix that.


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## jblackburn (Apr 14, 2012)

Btw, moved this to the Audio section since the gas owners have the same system and could maybe bring some insight to you.

OnStar has nothing to do with the indexing service.

I don't have the MyLink system - I have the crappy, slow radio before that that's much slower than MyLink - and I dumped some music on a very slow, 4 GB flash drive I had no other use for (about 800 songs). It indexed for the good part of 20 minutes, then did it again when I started the car again.

Did the same thing with a cheap SanDisk drive, and it took it all of 2 mins. I don't know if the car is USB 1.1 or 2.0, but that was a 2.0 drive.


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## bigluke (Aug 18, 2013)

ok thanks, I think I'll just buy another usb stick and you're the third to say that sandisk works better. Saw a 100/mbs sandisk 32GB usb 3.0 at a good price I'll give it a try.


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## Jim Frye (Mar 16, 2011)

I took my most heavily loaded drive out and plugged it in. 25 seconds to index and show 97 albums, with 1,263 tracks, totaling 6.7GB of tunes. The first track on the drive started playing at 10 seconds. This was an 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Edge drive. Write speed of 4.70 MB/sec. Read speed of 20.4 MB/sec. 3 for $25 at Costco.


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## jblackburn (Apr 14, 2012)

Jim Frye said:


> I took my most heavily loaded drive out and plugged it in. 25 seconds to index and show 97 albums, with 1,263 tracks, totaling 6.7GB of tunes. The first track on the drive started playing at 10 seconds. This was an 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Edge drive. 3 for $25 at Costco.


Now you got me curious. Selected a whole bunch of random folders from my music library and dumped them onto the 12 gigs of free space on my 16 gig Cruzer. 2500 files - so 2000-2200 songs I think. 

Took the computer about 30 mins to write them all and the car just over 4 minutes to index it. This is the old monochrome display stereo unit - not the much faster MyLink system. Not too bad. In the meantime, it plays the first song on the drive immediately and just shows "USB Indexing" at the bottom. Probably be better with a faster jump drive - this one's fairly slow (6 MB/sec write speed).


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## bigluke (Aug 18, 2013)

Bought a sandisk ultra 3.0 32GB fast write/read stick...was told that it's the cadillac of usb sticks, loading my library on it at this moment and I'll try it tomorrow see how the indexing is...


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## bigluke (Aug 18, 2013)

****, 3 words come to my head since I'm playing around with the usb in my audio system...in my cruze the audio is "the weakest link" lol. Again, formated, done all the resets and nothing to do with this indexing crap, 22GB of songs on my sandisk ultra, drove for 1 hour and still indexing. Tried my usb in my friends car and no indexing at all, everything worked like it should be. One thing I can't understand is if the mylink has trouble reading some files why it just not showing a popup saying to skip those files and continue to index...because I think it's hanging over in something and just freezes there on indexing forever. Even my other friends crappy audio system read the card no problem and it's a low budget system. At this point I just chose the song I want to play in the menu and leave the stupid indexing going since there's no other choices. IMO mylink is not 100% ready for usb media to work as it should be 100$ later spent on usb sticks and many hours on taging and sorting files same trouble so I don't know I'm just tired of working on that. Hope GM is working on an update soon to fix this problem.


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## Jim Frye (Mar 16, 2011)

Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but I build my music drives on my PC in the sequence I want them to be on the flash drive. I rip CDs to the computer with RealPlayer and it converts all tracks to MP3 format and tags them in album order. I then drag and drop each artist/album to a flash drive image on the computer's hard drive. Then I drag each album to the flash drive one at a time to ensure things stay in the same physical & sequenial order on the flash drive with all files contiguous (not fragmented). I end up with a traditional tree structure of Artist/Albums, Artist/Albums, etc. Of course, performance could well be due to the audio system & firmware it's using too. FWIW, the factory installed nav/audio system in my car was originally designed for Porsche and had an option MSRP from the factory that was almost twice what the Cruze nav system listed for in 2013.


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## jblackburn (Apr 14, 2012)

bigluke said:


> ****, 3 words come to my head since I'm playing around with the usb in my audio system...in my cruze the audio is "the weakest link" lol. Again, formated, done all the resets and nothing to do with this indexing crap, 22GB of songs on my sandisk ultra, drove for 1 hour and still indexing. Tried my usb in my friends car and no indexing at all, everything worked like it should be. One thing I can't understand is if the mylink has trouble reading some files why it just not showing a popup saying to skip those files and continue to index...because I think it's hanging over in something and just freezes there on indexing forever. Even my other friends crappy audio system read the card no problem and it's a low budget system. At this point I just chose the song I want to play in the menu and leave the stupid indexing going since there's no other choices. IMO mylink is not 100% ready for usb media to work as it should be 100$ later spent on usb sticks and many hours on taging and sorting files same trouble so I don't know I'm just tired of working on that. Hope GM is working on an update soon to fix this problem.


Hmm...weird. Maybe a certain directory or corrupt file is tripping it up. I do try to keep my music a bit organized on my computer...artist, album title, song name. Then it's sorted into folders by album. I don't know if that makes a difference or not - I just dragged over a whole bunch of folders to the jump drive.

I don't know if there were .m4a (iTunes) files in those directories or not...I do manage my music with iTunes and a lot of the newer stuff probably is that format, along with all the older mp3 files.


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## bigluke (Aug 18, 2013)

The tree structure of the folders is ok just as you mentioned but I have maybe 5 folders with 200 songs each as my playlists, but again when I look in the menu everything is there artists and songs are splited well fron those folders. That's really weird because all my files and the exact number of songs is listed as on the pc...4400 songs so I don't know anyway Thanks for your inputs.


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

I'm having the same indexing issue. It never gets done. I created a new disk and have around 7 gb of music (around 800 songs). Put it in the drive before I left for work. 50 minutes later it was still indexing when I got to work. It will start all over again the next time I start it up. It never finishes though. Also when it starts playing it will play the first song fine. Everything after that stutters and skips constantly. I ripped the MP3's at 320kbps so maybe that is too high of a rate for the Cruze. Any ideas about how to solve either or both issues?


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## Eddy Cruze (Jan 10, 2014)

Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 said:


> I'm having the same indexing issue. It never gets done. I created a new disk and have around 7 gb of music (around 800 songs). Put it in the drive before I left for work. 50 minutes later it was still indexing when I got to work. It will start all over again the next time I start it up. It never finishes though. Also when it starts playing it will play the first song fine. Everything after that stutters and skips constantly. I ripped the MP3's at 320kbps so maybe that is too high of a rate for the Cruze. Any ideas about how to solve either or both issues?


I have the same problem as well and nothing seems to work. I do have it set for Shuffle (X) and I'm positive there was an option to start from where the stick left off last and I selected that. Now I can't find where that option even is?


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## Snipesy (Dec 7, 2015)

If NTFS works I'd just use that.

Just be careful. Unlike FAT32 if you just yank the USB out you will corrupt the entire drive rather than just one file.


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## Merc6 (Jun 8, 2013)

Also are you renaming the drive when you delete/add music? On my MyLink I had to rename the stick each edit or forever index. Also not spoken of yet, any playlist that exceeded 20 or so songs also screwed with indexing.


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

No I have not been renaming the drive. The name of the drive stays as what was used when it was formatted. Today though on the new USB stick I created it was the first time it was ever in the car.


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## anthonysmith93 (Jul 15, 2015)

Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 said:


> I'm having the same indexing issue. It never gets done. I created a new disk and have around 7 gb of music (around 800 songs). Put it in the drive before I left for work. 50 minutes later it was still indexing when I got to work. It will start all over again the next time I start it up. It never finishes though. Also when it starts playing it will play the first song fine. Everything after that stutters and skips constantly. I ripped the MP3's at 320kbps so maybe that is too high of a rate for the Cruze. Any ideas about how to solve either or both issues?


320kbps is fine, it's the highest supported bitrate the Cruze can play.


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

Snipesy said:


> If NTFS works I'd just use that.
> 
> Just be careful. Unlike FAT32 if you just yank the USB out you will corrupt the entire drive rather than just one file.


NTFS does not work. The car doesn't even recognize the USB device is plugged in when it is formatted as NTFS.


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

anthonysmith93 said:


> 320kbps is fine, it's the highest supported bitrate the Cruze can play.


Hmmmm...in mine it was skipping and stuttering throughout every song after the first one. Put the stick in my PC and the songs play fine there.


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

OK, today I let the indexing run while listening to the songs stuttering and skipping and then the indexing finally finished about 20 minutes into my drive and then all songs began playing without stuttering and skipping so that would mean the indexing was what was causing that problem. Does anyone know if it still indexes the USB drive when it is in the drive but you are listening to another source like FM? I don't want to have to listen to 20 minutes of stuttering and skipping music every time I go somewhere.

Also the music that I have on this USB thumb drive was converted from Spotify playlists and the software automatically puts all songs into a folder with the artist name and then a subfolder with the album name instead of using the playlist title but I can manually do it so the folder name would be the name of the playlist with all songs from that playlist going into that folder. But the Cruze seems to just ignore folders and it lists all of the songs on the drive alphabetically. Or I can set it for random play but I would rather be able to just listen to songs from a single playlist (folder name) the way the Spotify player does on the phone. Is there a way to make the Cruze see the folder and just play songs from that folder?


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## Eddy Cruze (Jan 10, 2014)

I just had "Afternoon Delight" play at double speed on the stick. First of all its bad enough listening to the Starland Vocal Band at its regular speed and I had no idea a USB stick can do this. The 'Indexing' indicator was also doing its thing.


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## jblackburn (Apr 14, 2012)

Eddy Cruze said:


> I just had "Afternoon Delight" play at double speed on the stick. First of all its bad enough listening to the Starland Vocal Band at its regular speed and I had no idea a USB stick can do this. The 'Indexing' indicator was also doing its thing.


Mine does this occasionally with Spotify. It will work fine if I unplug the phone and plug it back in. Going to see if there's a software update when I take it in for an erl change. But my question would be why do you have that song in the first place?


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

jblackburn said:


> Mine does this occasionally with Spotify. It will work fine if I unplug the phone and plug it back in. Going to see if there's a software update when I take it in for an erl change. But my question would be why do you have that song in the first place?


How are you playing spotify? I assume Aux or bluetooth?


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## jblackburn (Apr 14, 2012)

joe-cruze-ltz-2012 said:


> how are you playing spotify? I assume aux or bluetooth?


usb


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

jblackburn said:


> usb


How are you doing that? Phone plugged in via USB playing spotify playlists?


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## Merc6 (Jun 8, 2013)

Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 said:


> How are you doing that? Phone plugged in via USB playing spotify playlists?


Yes, for me in my GEN 1 MyLink it showed up like when you used apple radio. Before MyLink went to crap, I had to unplug the usb from the console and then plug it back in a few times for it to work. Same for Pandora even tho the app is in the radio already. 

As for playlists on a USB, how many songs are in that playlist? after 20-25 songs you start having issues. That may be the indexing issue. Also if you have like 20 apps open that play media close the apps or it truies to index those too. You was watching a video on FaceBook before you licked the phone its trying to load that. You was using Pandora earlier while cleaning the house it's trying to index that same time. Same example for Youtube in the background. In my case MyLink would fight between iPod and Pandora if I used the USB so i just went back to USB stick. Turn car off and the USB would not work w/o removing it and plugging it back in again. Try renaming the USB stick as well and see if that also helps.


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

I do not have my link so I don't think I can play Spotify over USB. I think all that happens when I plug my phone into USB is the Cruze audio system is just treating the internal storage of it as a USB device. I even checked the MyLink website and it doesn't list the 2012 Cruze as an option for MyLink. Correct me if this is wrong.

Chevrolet MyLink: Take Control Of Your Vehicle’s Technology | Chevrolet

As far as the amount of songs there is around 800. It is a USB stick so there are not apps running on it. The only thing on the stick are MP3's.


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## jblackburn (Apr 14, 2012)

Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 said:


> I do not have my link so I don't think I can play Spotify over USB. I think all that happens when I plug my phone into USB is the Cruze audio system is just treating the internal storage of it as a USB device. I even checked the MyLink website and it doesn't list the 2012 Cruze as an option for MyLink. Correct me if this is wrong.
> 
> Chevrolet MyLink: Take Control Of Your Vehicle’s Technology | Chevrolet
> 
> As far as the amount of songs there is around 800. It is a USB stick so there are not apps running on it. The only thing on the stick are MP3's.


Probably a setting on the phone to change that. My iPhone didn't really care where the audio was coming from; it would play over USB.


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## Joe-Cruze-LTZ-2012 (Feb 17, 2017)

jblackburn said:


> Probably a setting on the phone to change that. My iPhone didn't really care where the audio was coming from; it would play over USB.


I think we are talking two different technologies here. Either your 2016 Cruze supports playback of phone apps via USB and my 2012 does not or else your iPhone allows it while my Android phone doesn't. When I plug my phone into the USB port it automatically starts playing music files from the internal storage of my phone just like it does a USB stick. Or if there are no music files on the internal storage it give the "No supported data on device" error and disconnects from it. I have searched my phone for some kind of setting to change this behavior but have found nothing.


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