Do I have a bad USB stick or is it the car?

I think it is the car.

Microcenter keeps their branded USB sticks at the cash register.... I just picked up a 128 GB stick for $45 !!!!! WoW! Hey, I cut my teeth on 3270 tubes... punched cards in school. This is amazing.

So, I filled it with about 110 GB of 320 constant bit MP3s ripped from my bit-for-bit collection of WAVs using the LAME encoder (supposedly the best quality you will get from MP3s). I purchase all of my music by the way. Stuck it in the USB slot in my armrest and the following:

1- Slow to load, slow to allow me access to my folder structure etc.
2 - Worked fine for a few days
3 - Some folders show empty (They are there on my home PC)
4 - Next song is random (it loses its place)
5 - Startup - sometimes remembers where it was, others starts at the same folder/song

In short, it always was slow with a big drive... I had a 64 GB in there for a while and while it was slow, and would sometimes start at the top of the folder structure, it still behaved fine once loaded. This is really flaky now.

Anyone experiencing this odd behaviour with big drives?

Peace
Bruce in Philly

 

Yours is bigger than mine (!) but I experienced some of the same problems. I stopped using the USB and just bought an old 64 gb ipod touch off ebay and leave that permanently in the car. It's nice because it pairs with my network when I park in the garage and it updates itself with anything new I've downloaded or any new playlists I've made.

 

+1

After failing to get A2DP streaming to work, I re-purposed an old 32GB iPod Touch, which permanently resides in the center console.

 

My guess is the PCM has limitations on the complexity of the directory tree (levels, numbers of files) and cannot manage such larger data sets well.

 

I had similar issues with a 32 GB USB drive. My iPhone has no issue with music linked to the PCM.
I suppose the Porsche engineers don't care as long as it doesn't impact the drive characteristics of the car.

 

RTFM!!!

I blew the limits.... from the manual:

- Max tracks: 10,000
- Max folders: 2,000

What did I load on this drive:
- Tracks 13,215
- Folders 3,393

Ok, I got some work to do......

Peace
Bruce in Philly

 

Its USB 2.0 also, so the performance is going to suffer a bit.

 

Bruce,

We have an emoticon for that!



Seriously, nice find n the manual!

 

As a software developer, had I designed that PCM software, when I found the USB device exceeded the limits, I'd have presented a display error message to provide some actionable feedback to the user.