# USB Flash Drive and Playlists



## mihanson (Mar 3, 2012)

I'm now also noticing that it does not like to play VBR (variable bit rate) mp3 files on the USB port, only CBR (constant bit rate). Most of my mp3's are encoded at 320 kbps, so they are CBR. I do have a hand full that are VBR 256 kbps and the stereo sees them, but will not play them when selected.


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## NickD (Dec 10, 2011)

Standard is 192 kbps, in using a spectrum analyzer on a whole bunch of prerecorded commercial media, was extremely rare to find anything below 160 Hz or above 7,000 Hz, but don't tell this to an audiophile. Learned this the hard way by designing an 18Db cross over for an 18" woofer centered at 100Hz, but did work great with an audio generator. 

Lowest note on a piano is 32.7 Hz, but consists of a burst of 160Hz frequency at a 32.7 Hz, but can get that with a 32 foot high organ pipe, much more sinusoidal. Don't find much of that in rap class music.

Still playing with our MP3's and noting the same characteristic with the directory structure. Seems to ignore that with all those sub folders has opposed to just piling a bunch of MP3's all in the root directory.

Did slap in a 16GB USB practically loaded to capacity, can take a half a day to index, if selecting say albums, the player will eventually find all those tunes in that album and play them through the list over and over again.

Thinking it would be better to use a 512 MB USB flashdrive, and sorting your music genres with about a hundred songs each very similar to selecting a CD, but with about 12 times the capacity and taking up a lot less vehicle space.

I didn't find any space to store CD's in my Cruze, but yet it has a CD player, maybe only intended for one CD. Also, didn't find anything on the steering wheel to do a search, but maybe I didn't play with it long enough. Don't want to drive into a tree either. Easy to do with all that electronic stuff to play with.


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## GoldenCruze (Dec 18, 2011)

The car actually writes files to the USB drive for search and such. Once done, it works "instantly" each time the car is started.


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## Kruise (Sep 28, 2011)

sorry about all the dumb questions. I got playlists to work.


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## NickD (Dec 10, 2011)

Just opened Windows Explorer and highlighted the drive my USB was at. Typed in a bunch of folder names of my own choosing and dragged in MP3's to those Folders.

Then I plugged that USB stick into its port on the Cruze, said don't bug me, I am indexing or something to that effect. After it was done, hit the menu button, scrolled down to search, the scrolled down to Folders. All of my made up names were in there. Hit the Menu button on a name, opened up that folder and started playing all the songs in that folder. I guess they call that a playlist.

Surprised Cruze calls that a folder, use to be a directory, then a folder, and now a volume. That Apple guy, Steve or whatever came up with that word Menu, guess he eats out a lot, correct word should have been Index or Contents. Think I will rename my folders to entrées, appetizers, soups, seafood, etc. Maybe then a steak dinner will pop out of CD slot. 

Anyway, this works.


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## mihanson (Mar 3, 2012)

It's been a while and I've had more time to play with it, so I thought I'd update my observations. I have since purchased a







16GB San Disk Cruzer Fit. It's nice and small so there is zero danger of me breaking the drive off in that vertical slot. 



mihanson said:


> 1) If I have "Random" set to "on," the stereo will play ALL files randomly, not just those in the playlist. Is there a way to make the stereo play the files randomly within a playlist?


#1 does not seem to happen anymore or maybe it never did and I was just mistaken.



mihanson said:


> 2) No matter if I have the "Random" set to "on" or "off," there always seems to be one file that the stereo _thinks_ is in the playlist, but is not...and it plays that file, sometimes several times in a row. Has anyone experienced this? I searched the forums for this and could not find anything like it.


#2 still happens. There always seems to be a song the stereo falls in love with and it enjoys playing it. :icon_scratch:



mihanson said:


> 3) When I select SEARCH > PLAYLIST > myplaylist, if I turn the menu/select knob counter-clockwise so it skips to the bottom of the playlist, there is computer code-like garbage at the bottom. Anyone seen that?


Have not seen #3 for a while. Could have been related to my original flash drive.

Something new to add:

4) Playlist size. I have a playlist with 900 songs in it and I simply cannot navigate it with the MENU > SEARCH > PLAYLIST. I only seem to be able to scroll through only about 1/3 of it (not a scientific calculation), so after about 300-ish songs, the stereo can't read it and skips back to the top. This is my "everything" playlist, so I like it because it's not specific to one artist, music style, etc. VLC sees, loads and plays this playlist fine. I can break the playlist up as a work around, but I wish it would "just work."


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## NickD (Dec 10, 2011)

Ha, I don't get playlists, have to ask my wife about that, just created folders and subfolders with Windows Explorer, then drag whatever songs into that subfolder. Select the Folder option on my radio, pick the folder I want, then under that, the subfolder with my own unique names, then I can choose the song under that subfolder or listen to all of them.


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## NickD (Dec 10, 2011)

thanks for the tip on that Sandisk 16GB Cruzer FIT USB 2.0 Flash Mini Pen Drive makes a lot of sense, just ordered one off of ebay for $14.18 with free shipping. 
[h=1][/h]


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## mihanson (Mar 3, 2012)

NickD said:


> thanks for the tip on that Sandisk 16GB Cruzer FIT USB 2.0 Flash Mini Pen Drive makes a lot of sense, just ordered one off of ebay for $14.18 with free shipping.


Cool! I the first thing I said to myself when I plugged a flash drive into the car was, "I'm going to break this thing while reaching in here and be REALLY mad about it."


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## NYCruze2012 (Jan 16, 2012)

After reading this post I dug out my old Dell 512 flashdrive and loaded my entire music library onto it. Woohoo am I happy now!
Sent from my DROID3 using AutoGuide.Com Free App


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## mihanson (Mar 3, 2012)

mihanson said:


> 4) Playlist size. I have a playlist with 900 songs in it and I simply cannot navigate it with the MENU > SEARCH > PLAYLIST. I only seem to be able to scroll through only about 1/3 of it (not a scientific calculation), so after about 300-ish songs, the stereo can't read it and skips back to the top. This is my "everything" playlist, so I like it because it's not specific to one artist, music style, etc. VLC sees, loads and plays this playlist fine. I can break the playlist up as a work around, but I wish it would "just work."


 Looking into this more, the stereo seems to limit m3u playlists to 166 items. Item 167 and up in an m3u playlist are not read/seen by the stereo. So... I broke my large playlist (which I edited down to 770 songs) into 5 parts. Not ideal in my opinion, but it allows the stereo to see each item in the playlist.

Can anyone else confirm my findings? Are there anyother type of playlists supported?


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## Matt Z (Feb 20, 2012)

mihanson said:


> Looking into this more, the stereo seems to limit m3u playlists to 166 items. Item 167 and up in an m3u playlist are not read/seen by the stereo. So... I broke my large playlist (which I edited down to 770 songs) into 5 parts. Not ideal in my opinion, but it allows the stereo to see each item in the playlist.
> 
> Can anyone else confirm my findings? Are there anyother type of playlists supported?


Do you have the navigation option or just the regular stereo system?


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## mihanson (Mar 3, 2012)

Matt Z said:


> Do you have the navigation option or just the regular stereo system?


Regular without the nav system.


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## lil_hwe (Jun 6, 2012)

How big of a USB drive has everyone had success plugging in? Just wondered if one could plug a large format like a 64GB or higher. Maybe even a portable 200 gig hard drive?


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## Turbo852 (Mar 1, 2013)

I have successfully used a 64 GB flash drive in my 2012 Cruze LT1. I have about 20 GB of music on the flash drive so far.

However, I am having an issue where the drive indexes for about a minute, but then says it is unrecognizable. I changed some of the songs around and then it started working again. But then I added a few new albums and it is doing it again. I'm not sure if it is bad file names or too many files or too many folders or what. I looked through the stuff I just added and verified none of the names have weird characters. I even updated some of the ID3 tags so they wouldn't have any symbols.

Is there a limit to the number of songs or is it more likely one song is messing things up?


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## Jim Frye (Mar 16, 2011)

Turbo852 said:


> Is there a limit to the number of songs or is it more likely one song is messing things up?


According to the OM there is a limit of 10,000 songs. It seems there a lot more limits in the system than the OM talks about.


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## Chevy Customer Care (Oct 29, 2011)

Keep us updated on any issues people is having with USB and other such functions. Do consult your dealerships if they aren't able to be resolved individually. Feel free to contact privately but please include your VIN#, name + contact information, situation, dealership, and vehicle mileage. Thank you. 

Matt,

GM Customer Service (Assisting Stacy)


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## Back2Chevy (May 22, 2012)

You can use Windows Media Player to move playlists to a flash drive. Use the sync feature. It creates a folder on the flash drive with your custom playlist. Downside is if you have the same song in 2 lists, it is loaded on the drive twice.


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## grossi5150 (Dec 16, 2013)

Hi folks!

I´m new to this forum and I´m having some of these same issues when using my Cruze USB port. My car has the 2014 'my link' standard stereo version and the problems seem to be the same.

I purchased a 32gb San Disk Cruzer Fit and filled it with mp3 music. I created some playlists to ease the operation. Here are my comments about my experience using the Cruze USB port:



mihanson said:


> I#1 does not seem to happen anymore or maybe it never did and I was just mistaken.


#1 never happened to me. My stereo always use the playlist songs in random mode.



mihanson said:


> #2 still happens. There always seems to be a song the stereo falls in love with and it enjoys playing it. :icon_scratch:


#2 This happens to me too. It´s curious that the song selected by the stereo system happened to be _the same_ when I used two different flash drives with different folder structures. Fortunately, the song selected by the system was "5150" by Van Halen. 



mihanson said:


> Have not seen #3 for a while. Could have been related to my original flash drive.


#3 happened to me too. I noticed that this problem happened when I tried to use a playlist with a huge number of songs. For instance, my playlist had the entire Rush discography... 



mihanson said:


> 4) Playlist size. I have a playlist with 900 songs in it and I simply cannot navigate it with the MENU > SEARCH > PLAYLIST. I only seem to be able to scroll through only about 1/3 of it (not a scientific calculation), so after about 300-ish songs, the stereo can't read it and skips back to the top. This is my "everything" playlist, so I like it because it's not specific to one artist, music style, etc. VLC sees, loads and plays this playlist fine. I can break the playlist up as a work around, but I wish it would "just work."


#4 - regarding this issue, my car user´s manual says that the playlist size shouldn´t exceed 255 songs. Maybe this can help you avoid this problem.

I also get the system stuck with a "...Loading USB..." message for about five minutes every time a select the USB source. Does anyone know some way around this problem?

Best regards,

Marcio


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