[De Clarke]

A small gripe, I suppose, considering what a nice useful car it is. But hey, gotta find something to complain about!

If I put a 32GB usb stick full of mp3s into one of the ports and tell the music player to "shuffle" (randomise) play, I've just noticed that it only generates a very limited shuffled list ... I dunno, I didn't count, but I think less than 100 tracks? ... and then plays that same list over and over. So I'm now hearing the same songs in the same "random" order, and it hasn't even scratched the surface of the stick content which must be several hundred tracks.

I thought it would at least re-randomise every time I turned the car on.

If I remove and replug the stick, presumably that might trigger a new random shuffle list. But is there no way to overcome the length limit? and why can't it just generate a random number between 1 and number of tracks on stick, and play that Nth track? instead of pre-generating a fixed-length list and then sticking to it across many power-ups?

Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe most mp3 players work this way and I've never noticed? Love the sound system in the car, but I wanted to use it as a sort of personal radio station -- to hear random and sometimes obscure bits of my music collection -- so to find it recycling the same N<100 songs in the same order, like some kind of B-grade commercial station, is kind of disappointing.

 

[GregBrew]

The USB music interface is limited to 5000 files. That's the maximum that it can index. It's buried somewhere in the Owner's Manual. I tried several things to get around it, including having several large sub-directories in the root for my 14,000 MP3 music files. Nothing worked. I finally got three low-profile USB memory devices and split up my music (by alpha) into three chunks of less than 5000 files each. I just switch them out occasionally when music sounds repetitive. I understand that you can get around this by using CarPlay or Android auto with your entire collection on your smart phone, and letting the smart phone manage music playback. I didn't want to do it that way, as it entails hooking up the phone every time I drive. I'd rater not deal with the hassle. Do note that I will occasionally need to turn "shuffle" back on, as the infotainment system occasionally gets amnesia, and plays by alpha. I have a 2017.

I chose my USB sticks based on what was the cheapest at the time, that could at least hold 5000 files worth of MP3s. IIRC, they can be as large as 64GB.

 

[De Clarke]

Aha, that's useful info. Thanks! Maybe when I switch sticks, Shuffle will be re-initialised. I'll get some smaller sticks to experiment with; currently throwing 32GB at it, which may be more than it can handle.

 

[GregBrew]

Aha, that's useful info. Thanks! Maybe when I switch sticks, Shuffle will be re-initialised. I'll get some smaller sticks to experiment with; currently throwing 32GB at it, which may be more than it can handle.

Mine are 32G, which were at the best price point at the time. They work perfectly fine.

 

[twriter]

While software such as this should not have built-in limitations, such as 5K files that can be managed, and such limitations are usually due to lazy or incompetent programmers, "shuffle" is technically not "random," and is usually implemented differently. "Shuffle" typically takes an album or playlist, rearranges the order, and then plays the track start-to-finish in that order, then repeats the same order. "Random" selects a random track from the defined set each and every time a new track is played. The former means no repeats. The latter can potentially have the same track played multiple times within a short span of time or a track that does not get selected for play for a very, very long time. Many people think shuffle is random. But in many systems, there is no true random play.

 

[De Clarke]

What I find in practise is that if I pull the USB stick and plug it in again, then re-enable Shuffle Play, I at least get a new shuffled list of tunes. So when I detect that list repeating, I'll just pull the stick again. It's not that hard a workaround.