Problems with USB

[Bluefan75]

Hi all, first post here, and unless I'm in the wrong forum, the search didn't turn up what I was looking for.

My wife and I have both a 2010 Journey S/E, and recently picked up a 2012 Crew(yes we're geeky...lol..). We have the myGig in the 2010, but the hard drive was not part of the 2012 as many of you know. The dealer showed us how he loaded up a USB powered hard drive with songs, and just plugs it into the USB port in the center console. We popped in the hard drive we bought after loading the songs on it, and got "USB Error" message on the screen. So I tried it on the 2010, and it does not even register. The hard drive shows up when I plug it into my laptop, but the journey seems to be an issue. I have a Western Digital Elements 500 GB hard drive. Is there something with the hard drive's software?

Thanks, and if this should be in another forum, please move.

[bramfrank]

There isn't a lot of power fed to the USB port and the radio has VERY limited MP3 capabilities - 255 songs and 1 Gig max. I just went through this with my dealer and tech support. And when using a USB-based media source the controls get REALLY laggy and MP3 processing seems to overload the device - the songs break up if they're high bit rate and the tempo of the music actually changes during playback . . . .

For some reason they seem to believe that no one has more media than that or cares how the music actually plays back - unless you use an iPod - THAT seems to work with lots of media.

Lodge your complaint (I did) and lets get Chrysler to get their media center up to snuff.

[generaltso]

There isn't a lot of power fed to the USB port and the radio has VERY limited MP3 capabilities - 255 songs and 1 Gig max. I just went through this with my dealer and tech support. And when using a USB-based media source the controls get REALLY laggy and MP3 processing seems to overload the device - the songs break up if they're high bit rate and the tempo of the music actually changes during playback . . . .

Does this problem exist with both USB flash drives and SD cards? If so, it sounds like an iPod is the only way to go for now?

[bramfrank]

I have the 4.3, so there's no SD slot - you'd need to check. But the USB is seriously crippled and I'm amazed that there is so little comment about the limitations on the forums. My solution is to dump an ipod in the armrest.

[Powdered Toast Man]

Just so you know, a USB flash drive and an external hard drive both have different file catalog systems and that is likely why it doesn't work. A flash drive uses FAT32 format, whereas a hard drive will be using NTFS. This is the same reason why an external HD will not be recognized by a Playstation 3, but a flash drive will.

There is nothing wrong with the Journey, and there is nothing you can do to make the system work with the external HD. I would suggest pick up yourself a large USB stick and just load up your music on there.

[bramfrank]

A USB stick won't work if you have more than a gig of music or 255 songs, whichever comes first. It'll only play whatever fits within the limtation.

[generaltso]

Just so you know, a USB flash drive and an external hard drive both have different file catalog systems and that is likely why it doesn't work. A flash drive uses FAT32 format, whereas a hard drive will be using NTFS. This is the same reason why an external HD will not be recognized by a Playstation 3, but a flash drive will.

There is nothing wrong with the Journey, and there is nothing you can do to make the system work with the external HD. I would suggest pick up yourself a large USB stick and just load up your music on there.

If the file system is the only issue, why not just format the hard drive in FAT32 format?

[bramfrank]

Assuming that worked, you'd still be subject to the 255 song/1 Gig limitation.

[generaltso]

Assuming that worked, you'd still be subject to the 255 song/1 Gig limitation.

Could be. I wonder if that's any different with the 8.4.

[bramfrank]

Fair question. I hope someone with an 8.4 checks and reports - you'd think that since these radios are deployed across the product oine that there would be lots of screaming about the issue - but I hear nothing from anyone.

Very strange.

[Bluefan75]

Thanks for the replies guys. Just for an FYI, my dealer brought out his hard drive that he has put music on, and plugged it into the console USB port in our vehicle, and it all came up. He was showing us the music he had on there and playing some. So it has played music off a hard drive. The formatting question is one that needs to be answered.

I do see more than 1 gb on the hard drive, so that may be part of our issue. I'll make some calls this week to the dealer to find out.

[generaltso]

The formatting question is one that needs to be answered.

Should be easy to test. Just reformat the hard drive to FAT32 and see if it works.

[ChrisPollard]

But make sure you back up that entire drive before reformatting!! Otherwise, you'll lose EVERYTHING on it.

[viberts]

Hi

I test a 500 Gig on my rt 2012 8.4N and i get media incompatible. I think it's fat32 formatted because before it's install on my Patriot box office media player which can't adress NTFS format. But i will check this tomorrow. With my ipod touch 64 Gig everything is ok. With the 500 Gig, i put near all my discography so it's better for me but the 64 Gig of the ipod have a lot of toune on anymway.

I come back soon with my test on format of HD

@+

[Psyke]

A USB stick won't work if you have more than a gig of music or 255 songs, whichever comes first. It'll only play whatever fits within the limtation.

4.3 inch screen, 2GB Thumb drive, 1.85GB in music files and 372 songs. Plays the music no problems, all tracks. Browsing is an issue however, in that the only reliable way of browsing all songs is browsing via folders, which I have it sorted by artist, then album, then song, so it keeps it pretty well organized. Browsing any other way is very limited by the software in that it's very buggy.

I then took another thumb drive, this time 16GB and loaded it up with the same music; while the system does see the tracks, it plays a few seconds of the first track, then starts cycling through each of the songs, returning an error, unable to read.

Now, there are a couple of differences between the drives. The 16GB Kingston is a very basic drive with low average read/write, and the lowest I could format it was FAT32 due to the size of the drive. The 2GB stick is a high performance (for the time) OCZ Rally2 drive I had purchase a number of years ago as a superfetch cache drive for Windows Vista. The other difference is that it's formatted in FAT. I'm going to try formatting the 2GB drive in both FAT32 and NTSF to see if the system can still recognize the files to see if that's the limiting factor, or is it the performance of the drive.

cheers!

Steph S.

Update - Fat32 worked flawlessly, while NTFS produced a "USB Error", the latter being expected. So I'm thinking more that it might very well be that perfomance of the drive is the limiting factor. I'll do some benchmarks on both drives and see what that produces.

Edited May 22, 2012 by Psyke

[Lebowski]

In the 4.3 (don't know about the 8.4) the limit of 255 songs is per folder, I currently have more than 1000 songs but they have to be put in various folders. Just like Psyke the only way of browsing is via folders, by artist and by song name I can only see a small amount of the artists/songs I have on the memory stick. Oh, and handful of them give an error and don't play, while some of them show 3/4 time the actual duration of the song.

And FIAT says there's no update in sight.....

[Psyke]

the 255 files per folder limit is definitely not just a dodge journey issue, but more a memory issue seen in most car audio systems.(do a google search, although I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule). The best reasoning I saw was this: 255 is a significant number in electronics. 2 raised to the 8th power is 256. So if the stereo reserved one byte (8 bits) to count songs 255 is a typical limit, found here: http://www.city-data.com/forum/computers/1423055-cars-their-usb-ports-sound-windows.html#ixzz1vhq9W6Y9. One thing to remember, these things are still just music players; they aren't full computers, yet, so they aren't usually equipped with very much memory, and that memory is more than likely shared by all systems (radio, hvac, system settings, etc).

In general, there is no software fix for this and audio manufactures would need to increase the amount of ram that their head units have to get around this limitation. However, because most programs like iTunes, Windows Media player, MediaMonkey and the like can sort and organize music files by artist/album/genre/etc at the folder level, the 255 limit shouldn't matter to most people because if you move the music from within the application to a portable harddrive, then it should keep the same structure.

If you want to get a general idea on how car audio system might interpret, take a look at this kenwood spec sheet. While our systems are not Kenwood, it's probably very similar as these types of things tend to be pretty standard when it it comes to audio files.

As for less problems with iIPods, the reason for this is that the head unit is really only providing the interface; the iPod itself is actually doing most of the work.

cheers!

Steph S.

[Lebowski]

I don't really care that the limit is 255 songs per folder as long as it is documented (which it isn't), but if they cannot make the browse function work, they should not advertise it.

True, it's not a full computer, so it shouldn't cost ten times as much.

Edit: the first time I prepared a memory stick for the car, I used streamripper to record from an Internet jazz radio, and just tossed everything under the same folder (thinking that I could then browse by artist or song name, not album since that part of the metadata isn't broadcast), now I know better, but knowing it before hand would have saved me a lot of time and trouble.

Edited May 23, 2012 by Lebowski

[Psyke]

don't get me wrong, the system is buggy as hell, and having good documentation on the limitations of the system would be fantastic (even the uconnect site is pretty sparse on info, and that goes for the documentation for the system) instead of having to do all this trial and error BS. However, Chrysler is definitely not alone in these types of complaints.

True, it's not a full computer, so it shouldn't cost ten times as much.

ah, but it's specialized, hence the cost

Edited May 23, 2012 by Psyke

[Psyke]

Alrighty, more tests done tonight. I unfortunately didn't have any different USB flash drives available, but I did have a number of SD cards available. Ah, but the 4.3 screen doesn't come with an SD Card reader you say? well, I happened to have a spare USB card reader at work that I brought home for the evening . The 3 cards I tested were a Class 2 4GB card, a Class 6 4GB card and a Class10 8GB card. the higher Class number, the better the performance. As I started taking more photographs with better camera's, it became apparent having a faster SD cards was essential when I was doing burst photography, as a toddler waits for no one, least of all Daddy trying to setup a shot...

I did do the same test as I did yesterday. I took the 1.85GB/372 music files and dumped them on all the cards after making sure they were all formatted to FAT32. Once the wife came home, I got to work. Plugged the reader into the USB and then plugged the Class6 SD card. The system came to life with the sounds of music. I hit shuffle and jumped around songs for a while, playing different songs at different points and it worked with no issues save the previously browsing issues. I then plugged in the Class 2 card, and as I was expecting, I started getting read errors right off the bat. this time however, I didn't even get a portion of the first song playing, suggesting that this SD card has even worse performance than my 16GB flash drive. I then moved on to the Class 10 card and it started playing almost immediately. I have also have a MicroSD card (8GB Class 2) that I'm going to try later, but I decided to scale up my test and went out and purchased a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive.

Now, I've come across an issue most people won't realize, and won't know how to fix once they do figure it out. Most external Hard Drives (HDD's going forward) will be formatted in NTFS as noted above. However, unless you own an Apple computer or are running Linux, Windows Xp/Vista/7 won't let you format the drive into anything other than NTFS (or exFat, but I won't get into that), at least not the way most people tend to do it. You can only format the drive via Command line. Despite the fact that I work with PC's, this threw me for a few minutes because I've never had to format a large HDD into anything other than NTFS for myself or my clients...never had a reason *shrug*

In any case, if you ever need to format a drive that is larger than 32GB into FAT 32, this is how: go to Start and select RUN (for Windows 7 just start typing in the search programs and files area after you press start). Type in CMD and then enter. From there, you can just type FORMAT /FS:FAT32 X: replacing X with whatever drive letter you're trying to format. Then sit back, have a beer, go for a drive (not both, one or the other...geez) and chill for a bit because it's gonna take a while, which is what I'm in the middle of doing right now. Will report back later on the results.

Edit: will need to find another way; The format crapped out at one point over the course of the night (well past 50% though was when I went to bed) with a message saying windows could format in fat because the drive is too large...would have been nice to have seen that before I had started . will try to find another app and report back here.

Cheers!

Steph S.

Edited May 24, 2012 by Psyke

[Lebowski]

ah, but it's specialized, hence the cost

A specialized P.O.S. is still a P.O.S.

Edit: will need to find another way; The format crapped out at one point over the course of the night (well past 50% though was when I went to bed) with a message saying windows could format in fat because the drive is too large...would have been nice to have seen that before I had started . will try to find another app and report back here.

Avoid the hassle and use a decent Linux distro. There's a livecd with Gparted, so you don't even need to install it. But then you'll probably run into another problem: not enough power from the usb port (or maybe not, with no specifications is difficult to say).

[Psyke]

Avoid the hassle and use a decent Linux distro. There's a livecd with Gparted, so you don't even need to install it. But then you'll probably run into another problem: not enough power from the usb port (or maybe not, with no specifications is difficult to say).

I've tried using Linux, but keep going back to Windows because of the apps I use and the compatibility it offer to my clients. I did end up finding a simple app called GUIFormat that seems to have done the job required. Now I just need to wait to be picked up tonight and try it out.

Power wise, there should be no issues unless the drive requires more than the 500mA minimum USB2.0 is supposed provide. Seeing as iPod's and iPhones are supported, and they require minimum 500mA, not to mention that it charges my Blackberry, which also requires a minimum of 500mA, I can't see this being an issue. The Drive I picked up last night does use 500mA and is a portable hard drive and not an external Hdd that would require an external power source to work properly.

And for me, this isn't a hassle; I'm trying to do this to make it easier for folks determine what will work vs what might work vs what won't work to try and cut down on frustration; it's what I do :D , although it would be nice if Chrysler did this themselves as they should already have this technical information on hand.

cheers!

Steph S.

[viberts]

Hi

I do the test with my 500 Gb hard drive fujitsu with a 5500 music files. My first test was with NTFS format so i don't able read the drive. I format the drive in Fat32 and copy the 5500 files on this. The first try was do with a cheap usb cable but it's not working and the drive have beep beep beep sound. I remember when i purchased the drive a cable with a doublehead usb connector was included.. I found the cable and retry and miracle the drive was found and the zik play.

The only thing, it's was take a five minutes for read and index the song for 5500 tunes. So i'm asking what's the time it's take when i put my 500 Gb (+-120,000 tunes) on the drive. I try this in the next weekend and come back sson with the result

@+

Edited May 25, 2012 by viberts

[Psyke]

it will take time to catalogue things the first time, and will depend on the speed of your drive. So did yours see the entire 5500 songs? (ie - start playing one song and check the info, it should show you 1 out of 5500). I just finished my own test, and it was interesting...loaded about 9100 songs@ about 52GB, took less than a minute, but one of the reasons is that it seems to only load up 2000 songs. If I browse the folders, all the files are there, but it will only let me play 1 to 2000. If I try to play any other song after the 2000th, it continues to play the current song. However, if I browse the albums/artists, I've been able to find songs that go past 2000 (although I still can't browse all albums/artist), and I I try to play it, it plays...If I hit next or back, it goes to song 1 or song 2000 respectively... Wow...pretty unbelievable...

Otherwise the 2000 songs seem to work well enough.....

[viberts]

Hi gang

i haved put 400 Gb on my 500Gb usb drive. but i get only +- 9500 piece of music so i think there are a limitation in memory but equally a bug in software. I think the memory must be a buffer for a reading device not a integral strorage of the tree of the hard drive, First i get +- 8000 pieces and change directory structure (deplace sub-directory in root) and a this moment i get the +- 9500 pieces.

I think maybe the limitation is 64 Gb or somethiing like that, my Ipod touch (64 Gb) work pretty.

So I'm desappointed for this but i think i'm survive ;-)

Ps) excuse my english, i'm a french people so my english isn't not veru good