Problems with gen4 music via USB

Has anybody encountered problems playing music through USB on their gen4? I know it's a bit old school using USB but that's where I'm at currently. I know from reading the manual there's a limit on 10,000 songs, which I find an odd restriction, my previous Toyota never had such a problem nor does my partner's Ford, and I'm over this limit at around 16-17k songs, but what I'm finding is that if I take a USB stick and copy everything on fresh with the USB being a device new to the head unit, it seems to pick up all the songs fine. If I then remove it to add more songs, like I have done twice so far, and replace it, it comes back up part way through the last song it was playing but frozen. I can alter where the song thinks it is timewise, which moves the orange bar, but it still doesn't continue playing. If I skip to the next song using the steering controls, it then plays again, but has now seemingly limited me to the first four artists on the USB stick. I can see all the artists by browsing folders, but it's not detecting all the music by default and allowing me to play through them.

I'm not sure if it's using a playlist behind the scenes, which I believe may well be where the 10,000 song limit comes from as that seems common on other applications, i.e. Windows desktop programs, but I'm curious to know if others have experienced such an issue updating their USB sticks, if indeed I'm not alone in still using this old way of doing things, and if there's a cleaner way of updating/recovering from this strange situation that doesn't seemingly require me to wipe the stick completely and transfer all the music back on to it.

At least I have Planet Rock to listen to as an alternative through DAB and I don't do streaming through my phone as I'm on a pay as you go contract, which at around £20-30 a year for my usage I'm not going to start changing habits when USB should just work.

I'll have to experiment a bit more I think. I've been doing some research and I suspect the head unit is doing something behind the scenes, creating a pseudo playlist perhaps, which might be getting corrupted with me having so much music.

The only way I can get it to play nice, is to reformat the drive, using a bespoke tool as it's 128GB and Windows won't allow FAT32 formatting of that. Now, whenever I format the drive, it generates a new ID for it of the format nnnn:nnnn. The first time this is inserted the head unit seems to cope OK, but I don't know whether it's still limited to 10,000 files or not. Once I remove it and reinsert it, it's then that it all goes horribly wrong as I suspect it's trying to re-read data previously associated with it which may be bad due to number of files (assuming it's not just a rubbish system).

It's a bit of a pain having to reformat/regen a new ID every time I want to add to it, which I do frequently as we tend to buy music regularly and like the randomness of our whole collection on a long drive.

So, first test will be to truncate down to < 10,000 files and see if I can remove/insert at will without issue. Seems such a daft limitation but if it's using OSS playlist functionality (seems to be a lot of OSS software utilised on the head unit) then it may be an industry standard limitation, which is still rubbish. It's a real shame the unit doesn't give more flexibility on playing USB music, i.e. on the folder view, I've not found a way to play a folder, only tracks, so I can't play everything from a particular artist from folder view, only from what it's correctly scanned.

An option to rescan the USB would be good, and not uncommon on other systems...

Yeah I do thanks George, Europe English for me Next to useless for anyone at all familiar with either car headunits or computers

I've just found a small utility that will allow me to change the disk serial so at least I can just copy new music onto it, run that and hopefully it will consider it a new stick each time and read the music properly. My only concern with that now is that it might be storing information per stick so I could be building up a glut of hidden files as it tries to be clever with each one.

There's a long thread on the xda-developers site about the suzuki slda head unit but it's mostly concerned with sat nav updates rather than the rest of the unit, but I've not read the whole 100+ pages of content. It's a shame really, I'm finding the head unit otherwise fine for what I need and I've always found something equally disappointing with aftermarket products.

Don't get me started on how far behind car infotainment is with general computing and the incurred cost for new technology. Why oh why there seems to have been a trend for tying in firmware updates to map updates I'll never know, other than monetise it and fleece the end user. Nearly every other electronic device I have allows free firmware updates.

I've not removed my SD card at all so far, so I'd say leave it in, it should be ok to have in whilst the unit boots up. I originally purchased a larger SD card as I was going to transfer the maps onto it and sit my music alongside until I read that the CID is written to match that of a value in the head unit which stops people just migrating data from one card to another. I can understand that from a non-piracy point of view, but a pain for someone like me that wanted to do that and keep the USB socket free for phone charging.

SZ4 or SZ5? If SZ5, do you not have a smartphone to hold the music so that you can connect it via USB and use Android Auto or Apple Carplay? It gives a far nicer experience than USB storage with no requirement for streaming and enables support for lossless formats (FLAC etc).

I'm on SZ5 and do have a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact that could store the music, that was going to be my fallback as I've a 128GB card in there that can hold the lossy versions, my lossless masters are too large and the car is far from a decent acoustic environment for me to care that much to warrant a 1TB or so memory card (if such things are available/affordable these days).

I equally don't know if there's a file limit through the phone or whether it just treats it as an offboard DAC and streams the audio but using the phone. The downside for me would be plugging it in each time I get in and out whereas I currently just keep it in my pocket. I might still try that route anyway just to see how it fares once I bottom out the USB stick idiosyncrasies.

My other thing to attempt will be a playlist of all the files, but that's something else to maintain and keep adding to as we buy more music. We really shouldn't have bought, and continue to buy, so many CDs.