My wife has a 2017 Honda CRV with a bog standard radio/player. The player has a USB port on a little cable in the center console. I can easily connect a USB “thumb drive” and play tracks. Everything’s great, right?
Nope. I cannot figure out how the folders (artist and album) or the tracks themselves are organized once the player reads the USB drive. The top level folders (e.g., ABBA, Beatles, Cheap Trick, Dire Straits, etc.) are not in alphabetical order. They do not appear to be in the date/time order in which they were copied to the drive, either. They look pretty much random, which is a problem because there are over 300 of them.
Once I get into a folder, the subfolders (album) are not in any particular order. This is not as bad simply because there’s usually only a few albums under each artist.
Once I get into an album, the tracks are sometimes in order of play and sometimes they are not.
Allow an example: I create a folder called “1980s Favorites” and put 10 songs in it from various artists. I then use a program to change the track info for each song to be the same “album” title (“1980s Favorites”) and make each file to be track “00”. On most players, the tracks will be in alphabetical order. I haven’t tried changing the track numbers to reflect their actual alphabetical order yet because this means a lot of work renumbering them if I add another track to the folder. Guess I ought to give that a shot, though.
In short, finding a folder, subfolder, and specific track is virtually impossible while I’m driving. I literally, for example, have to scroll through a randomized list of 300+ folders on a tiny center dash display. It seems like a top-level folder could be ANYWHERE in the list.
Does anybody have any insight on exactly how this player sorts folders, subfolders, and tracks? I’ll do whatever it takes to satisfy the its demands…as long as I can figure out what it wants.
Note: The back-up camera is part of this player and the screen is not in the player itself. It’s in the dash. Replacing the entire player with another one is probably not in the cards. Also, we’re talking 7000+ tracks in over 300+ folders, so it’s not a minor impediment to find tracks or to modify them to meet some mysterious requirement.