Problems with gen4 music via USB

Well I think I've come to the conclusion that the number of files on USB is indeed limited to 10,000. From playing around I've observed the following.

• when the head unit first discovers the USB stick and indexes it, it appears to discover all the music without issue, although I'm not sure if that's truly the case as some of my music in the latter reaches of the alphabet was never played. Given the large number of files, it's hard to know if this is just a random number issue with a general median in the middle reaches and the outliers being less played
• if new files are added that takes the stick > 10k files, or was the first addition following the first read, things go odd and the list of artists becomes heavily truncated, in some instances for me, down to four artists
• reducing the number of files back under the 10k limit appears to bring things back to normality
• creating playlists of the files works to a degree, but again, I've not seen anything in that latter reaches of the alphabet. In fact, in the time I've been trying this with both a .m3u and .wpl playlist, I never had anything later than the letter J, which for me is less than 6k files. Again, skipping tracks can only entertain me for so long, but I certainly expected something later

So for the time being, I'll either have to truncate my music down to those tracks I know I'd want to listen to more regularly, or look at porting it all to my mobile phone and relying on the two devices to play our music collection. It is a disappointment, my recent vehicles have all coped without issue. Maybe a future firmware update will lift the restriction, although from what I can see I'd probably have to go with a maps update just to get it and I'm not sure I'm that bothered if it's going to get expensive.

If anyone's interested, and also so I don't lose it, the script I used for generating the playlists is below. It's windows batch, so not pretty, but may be useful for people in future. My music lives in a <root>:\Music folder, then artist, album, songs arrangement and I understand that the playlists can work with relative paths, so I remove the path prefix from the file listings. There's probably an easier/better way to do it, but I was trying to get something in place to (dis)prove theories so it's served it's purpose. I stuck it in the root of my USB and ran it from there, either from a DOS prompt or by launching through the GUI.

I see you can get hold of the source code for the OSS parts from Bosch online so I might have a gander and see if I can spot anything that truly would confirm the limitation. No doubt there's a hard coded ceiling magic number in there for no particular reason.

The downside is it won't allow me to update anything, just have a nosey around some elements of the head unit.

Hanslow wrote: So for the time being, I'll either have to truncate my music down to those tracks I know I'd want to listen to more regularly, or look at porting it all to my mobile phone and relying on the two devices to play our music collection. It is a disappointment, my recent vehicles have all coped without issue. Maybe a future firmware update will lift the restriction, although from what I can see I'd probably have to go with a maps update just to get it and I'm not sure I'm that bothered if it's going to get expensive.

If anyone's interested, and also so I don't lose it, the script I used for generating the playlists is below. It's windows batch, so not pretty, but may be useful for people in future. My music lives in a <root>:\Music folder, then artist, album, songs arrangement and I understand that the playlists can work with relative paths, so I remove the path prefix from the file listings. There's probably an easier/better way to do it, but I was trying to get something in place to (dis)prove theories so it's served it's purpose. I stuck it in the root of my USB and ran it from there, either from a DOS prompt or by launching through the GUI.

Might be of interest how I manage my music between PC and Android mobile. My music (about a 50/50 mp3/flac mix) lives in my OneDrive folder (so replicated to the cloud with version control), with a similar structure to yours (artist/album/track). I use MediaMonkey Gold on both devices which allows me to sync my library to my phone over WiFi, no need for any manual copying. You can apply criteria to the sync process, so I typically only sync tracks that I've given a 4 or 5 star rating, which lets me keep all of the more obscure stuff at home and have the tracks are currently flavour of the month on my phone.

For in-car playback I use Bluetooth for shorter journeys, keeping my phone in my pocket and via cable and Android Auto for longer trips.

Thanks Gadget. Mine is all stored on a NAS microserver (disks in raid mirror config) with all the music being original lossless rips from our CDs. I just keep the lossless versions as masters really so that I can convert them to any format, new or old, as required. That's all backed up with synctoy to a separate external hard drive as I really don't want to go through ripping all those CDs again!

For home use it's all converted down to AAC, hangover from us using ipods in the car, but now all held on a sony walkman connected to the home stereo. Other than that I have it replicated on three USB sticks, one for the missus, one for each of my cars and for my daily car I dump it on my secondary drive at work.

Like you, all mine is managed through media monkey, again, hangover days from when we had ipods (which we still have, just don't use them anymore).

The downside is we probably buy two or three new albums a month on average, so I end up building up another glut to rip, store and convert.

I probably have the dumbest smart phone in that I use it for calls, texts and photos, nothing else. We're both on pay as you go so keep data to a minimum as/when we need to and a battery charge will last me a good week through lack of use, but available if I need it.

I could put all the music on my phone and sync to that in both cars, well probably the missus' as well (but then I get control ). I've actually enough space on there too, in lossy format there's about 75GB of data, about 600GB or so in lossless I think. Both of us like the whole library with us, on random, just because it covers so many bases and we never know what's next. Even music that we don't particularly like, more me with some of the missus' taste, I'll at least give another go when it comes on randomly.

To give a minor update, I raised a query with Suzuki customer services and they agreed to pass on my issue to Bosch as a defect/feature enhancement request. They also fed back that we'll be entitled to free firmware updates, but only through the dealer when we take the car in. They'll allegedly check if we need an update and put one on, or do that on request, so it's not actually tied to the map update, but they also went let us do it ourselves.

Maybe it's time to start filling my phone with music...

Spooky that you use Mediamonkey too, must be a Jimny owner thing