Composition Media SD Card and USB Stick Capacity

[Guy]

When I went for a test drive in a Polo GT, I took along a 16 GB SD Card and a 16 GB USB stick that I'd been using for playing music in my present car. I'd carefully pre-checked all the mp3 tagging and image sizing. It was only a brief test but both cards seemed to work flawlessly - Track, Artist, and Album Names appeared along with the Album Cover Art.

I've just heard from VW that my Polo GTI has landed in the UK and I'm starting to think about having my entire iTunes library available in the car - of course I'd never play it all but it would be nice just to have it there. And it would save the lengthy task of subsetting (a copy of) my whole library and in the process having to manually decide what to include and what to leave out.

I could accommodate all my music with the combination of a 128 GB SDXC card and a 64 GB USB stick. A single 256 GB SDXC card would be a more elegant solution but the cost of such a card is excessive at present - of course the price will likely reduce considerably at some future time.

I wondered if anyone else had tried this or a similar combination and had success.

Thanks

[Shark00n]

I don't know about the Polo's radio but some phones (even high end ones) have trouble reading 128GB cards or higher. Something to do with the card's architecture as some are SDC, others SDHC or other stuff.

[Guy]

I've seen a post on a Golf forum, and another on a Skoda forum which seem to say that 128 GB SDXC cards are OK. So hopefully the Polo would be similar. But it would be great to have confirmation from a Polo owner.

The SDHC standard stops at 32 GB and after that you have to go to SDXC which in theory can go to 2TB. But theory and practice are not always the same thing!

[Shark00n]

Where does the card go in? I didn't see any slot whan I was checking it out

[deltalimamike]

Where does the card go in? I didn't see any slot whan I was checking it out

The SD slot on my GT is in the glove box .

[perarduapropatria]

We've got 2 SD card inputs on our Audi MMI - using anything over 64Gb makes it take ages to open.

I've tried various different cards, but find that 32Gb SandDisk Extreme are the best.

[Guy]

Thanks for that. I found a very good deal on a SanDisk Extreme 128 GB SDXC UHS I card so I've ordered one in the interests of experimenting. Also a SanDisk Ultra Fit 64 GB USB3 stick - the very short stubby type that barely protrudes from the socket. Both from reliable retailers because there are fake cards on the market.

My car's not arriving for a couple of weeks so in the meantime I'm getting a copy of my music library ready to install on the new media.

If it isn't a success I can fall back on my 16 GB media and use the new for another purpose. Or maybe stick to 64 GB maximum usage on the 128 GB card.

I'll post again when I have some real world results!

[perarduapropatria]

Thanks for that. I found a very good deal on a SanDisk Extreme 128 GB SDXC UHS I card so I've ordered one in the interests of experimenting. Also a SanDisk Ultra Fit 64 GB USB3 stick - the very short stubby type that barely protrudes from the socket. Both from reliable retailers because there are fake cards on the market.

My car's not arriving for a couple of weeks so in the meantime I'm getting a copy of my music library ready to install on the new media.

If it isn't a success I can fall back on my 16 GB media and use the new for another purpose. Or maybe stick to 64 GB maximum usage on the 128 GB card.

I'll post again when I have some real world results!

I couldn't get any SanDisk cards, except for the blue/black Extreme cards to work in the RCD 510. Interestingly, it'll play .m4a files from a USB via the MDI - but not from an SD Card.

[Guy]

The card which seemed to work fine on my Test Drive was a Kingston 16 GB SDHC Class 10 UHS-I 30 MB/s.

The 128 GB Sandisk Extreme SDXC UHS-1 card I've ordered is the one with Black and Red labelling rather than the very latest Yellow labelling. That's probably why it was on offer. It says 45 MB/s.

Whether or not the Polo Composition Media Unit will actually read at these high speeds is another matter of course.

And not only is the Composition Media Unit different from the RCD510, there are different variants of it in the Polo and Golf.

[perarduapropatria]

And not only is the Composition Media Unit different from the RCD510, there are different variants of it in the Polo and Golf.

I'm only trying to be helpful. Seeing as how you know so much already, it seems you didn't need to ask.

[Guy]

You've taken that in a different way to what I intended. I'm sorry if I've caused any offence. And I'm very grateful for your input. Please keep it coming

Yes I have trawled the net trying to find out as much as I can before spending any cash and embarking on this little project. I always do this for anything similar, and in the process I usually manage to accumulate some knowledge which may save wasted time and money. But there's nothing like finding direct experience on exactly the same combination of Unit and Media. As you said, some SD Cards work with your RCD510 and some don't. And there may well be subtle differences between that unit and the Composition Media Units. In the Polo it's a 6.5" screen and in the Golf a 5.8" screen for example. But as to whether the SD Card or USB handling is any different, who knows? I can't find any details on an official VW site. So I shall have to try it out and when I have I'll post up the results in case it may help someone else in the future.

Once again, apologies for any misunderstanding.

[Shark00n]

How does the music library have to be organized in order to be correctly recognized in the Polo's Composition Media system?

Each folder a different artist with album subfolders? What about the album art? And playlists?

Is there any type of files it doesn't recognize? Particularly lossless FLAC files.

[Guy]

I've read that on the Golf Composition Media system no individual directory must have more than 1000 entries - entries after the first 1000 will be ignored. So if you have a large library, some sort of hierarchical organisation of directories and subdirectories is desirable. I've also read that it doesn't like non-media files (eg .txt) or empty directories.

With my iTunes I control the music directory/file organisation in a separate directory hierarchy to the iTunes Library itself and it is of the form Genre/Artist/Album/Tracks. I only have mp3 audio files but I do have some other non audio files which might cause a problem. So I don't know about FLAC. Playlists are held in the iTunes Library but I don't make much use of them.

What I've done so far is to make a complete copy of my library using the Windows (8.1) Robocopy command. This allows you to copy all the files in a directory hierarchy to an empty directory in which it recreates the same hierarchy of sub directories. You can specify that only certain files are to be copied - eg *.mp3 for all mp3 files and you can also specify that sub directories which are empty (or would become so because they contain no file types to be copied) are not created.

I also read that cover art embedded in mp3files should not exceed 400x400 pixels resolution in order to display correctly on the (Golf) Composition Media Screen and there is a free program Sanse MP3 Art Resizer which will recursively traverse a directory hierarchy reducing the resolution of any embedded artwork which is above a threshold figure you set.

It's all theory unfortunately until my car arrives and I can put it to the test!

[Guy]

My 128 GB Sandisk Extreme SDXC card arrived and a welcome bonus was that it was the latest up to 80 MB/s speed with the gold label rather than the 45 MB/s I thought I'd ordered.

Also I received my 64GB Sandisk UltraFIt stubby USB stick - speed up to 130 MB/s.

I loaded all my iTUnes mp3 files on to this media as previously mentioned. In total approximately 24,000 mp3s mostly VBR 256-320 mbps.

It all seemed to work perfectly. Initally the Composition Media unit will play the first track in the first album but almost immediately the "Database" function becomes available so I could access my music via Genre/Artist/Album. The Artist, Album and Track titles are shown as is the Cover Art. It takes a few seconds for each track to find this and display it.

Next time you select either SD Card or USB it resumes play from where it left off.