[Lanny]

Just bought a 2018 GT hatch, Bose audio. The radio works fine, streaming music via Bluetooth from my iPad works fine, but trying to play music from an 8GB USB thumb drive is almost hopeless. I say "almost" because, if I wait long enough, the album list will appear, then a few minutes later the album's song list, then eventually one song will play. It's always the same song, no matter what was selected, and no, it's not the first song on the list. Forward/back controls don't do anything except display a blank screen with no music. A couple of hours spent searching various forusm (and Google) reveals nothing recent. Is there any solution?

Thanks.

 

[sc489]

See my post a few lines below http://mazda3revolution.com/forums/2014-2017-mazda-3-skyactiv-audio-electronics/218498-how-recognise-artist-usb-playback.html

I suspect like me you might have problems with the mp3 file structure. I'm making progress thanks to the help on that thread.

 

[CerealKiller]

I have a 2018, like you. I use AAC files and they load just fine on my iPod, which is connected via USB. I have also used USB thumb drives and I had no problems. The file indexing/loading takes 30 seconds, at the most, and it will resume playing from where it left off.

What type of music files are you trying to play and how were they made? Did you format the USB thumb drive before loading the music on there?
CK

 

[Lanny]

The thumb drive was formatted on my Mac as FAT32, master boot record. All the files are m4a (Apple lossless) dragged over from my iTunes library. FWIW, plugging my iPad into the same USB port works perfectly, displaying the lists almost instantly and playing anything as instructed without incident. One difference: the iPad files are AAC.

 

[CerealKiller]

The iPad's faster hard drive is most likely the reason for that, not so much the file types.

I would still try to put the AAC files on your thumb drive and delete the ALAC files though. The smaller file sizes should make reading and indexing the files easier for your car. Also, you will not notice any drop in sound quality.

I've done ABX testing on AAC files and even at 128 kbps, I cannot tell the difference from the original lossless file.
CK

 

[Lanny]

Thanks. I grabbed Media-Human Audio Converter, and am trying converting iTunes files directly onto the USB stick as mp3. So far, it's working mostly, if WAY slowly, but while 5 albums from the same group were discrete on the thumb drive, they got lumped into "Unknown Album" by Mazda Connect. I have no idea why. Initial read time with about 20 albums was an acceptable 20 seconds or so, and subsequent operations were snappy. Still experimenting...

 

[Lanny]

I think it's fixed. Converting to either mp3/340 or AAC/128 seems to work properly. The unknown album issue was apparently caused by 5 albums having identical names except for ending in a Roman numeral (I-V). I changed the titles to Arabic numbers, and now they're presented separately. Finally, I downloaded a little app to strip the Mac-specific invisible housekeeping files off the USB stick. Thanks to all for the help.