USB-C Music Playback Issues Again.

[Biffco]

Hello all.

2022 GTi

I’m on my second USB C memory stick and have copied all
My music from the USB stick that I had in my previous car for 6 years.

All of my music is files converted to MP3 via ITunes except for about 8 songs that were downloaded over 20 years ago via file sharing.

These are the only 8 songs that are recognised in the car.

Is there any reason why VW wouldn’t recognise a legit file from ITunes that’s been converted to MP3? Do I need to convert it to something else?

Any help is much appreciated.

[funkyg]

Do you know the specifics of the mp3 encoding? Bit rate etc? Fixed / variable rate?
Are they definitely mp3, I know iTunes likes to covert to AAC by default. That said according to the owner’s manual the Polo media player accepts AAC as well.
I have MP3’s that were ripped from cd by iTunes and they do work in my Polo although I have them on an SD card rather than on a usb stick.

[Biffco]

They all show as MP3 when I view them on my laptop. I did consider the bitrate as all of the working tracks seemed to be 128 and the iTunes tracks were 192 but the I think I found one of the working tracks was also 192 so I discounted that.

I have no folder structure on the drive, just all the MP3’s dumped on there, would that matter?

The only other thing I noticed was the working tracks had only the filename, and the non-working tracks have full artist, album info etc. surely the system would be able to handle that.

I’m baffled as to why this is so difficult, had no issues in other cars for the last 10 years or so.

[funkyg]

They all show as MP3 when I view them on my laptop. I did consider the bitrate as all of the working tracks seemed to be 128 and the iTunes tracks were 192 but the I think I found one of the working tracks was also 192 so I discounted that.

I have no folder structure on the drive, just all the MP3’s dumped on there, would that matter?

The only other thing I noticed was the working tracks had only the filename, and the non-working tracks have full artist, album info etc. surely the system would be able to handle that.

I’m baffled as to why this is so difficult, had no issues in other cars for the last 10 years or so.

Have a look at https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/owners ... nuals.html for your specific manual. Mine is a 2020 GTI so will differ from yours but it does give some specifics on file/folder structure. How many files do you have on the usb? For my car it says the limit is 30000 files.

Also you mentioned the file name including artist/album etc, that could be an issue. I’ve seen some systems have issues with file name lengths over a certain number. When I use iTunes the file name format is ‘01 song name.mp3’ and put in the correct folder for the artist/album. Maybe rename one of your non working files to something shorter as a test.

Something else to consider is if the MP3’s have the ID3 tags formatted correctly. If not the stereo won’t recognise the song title/artist etc and might not play them. You can check this by right clicking on a file in Windows and selecting properties to see if the data is there. You should see stuff like artist, album, song name, even the album cover if you have that configured as well. If it is that there are tools to batch tag/rename your files.

[Biffco]

Hello

Many thanks for the reply and suggestions, I’ll look into them and adjust a few things over the next day two.

I have less than 500 songs on it now so shouldn’t be an issue with that.

Thanks again

Steve

[Discoboy]

When I moved from a 2019 Gti+ with SD card storage to a 2022 Gti with USB-C music file storage (mp3, flac aac). I had to format the USB-C drive to exFAT and then put the album track files into individual album folders before the files would play