Slickdvl

is there a way to play music through the usb port in the arm rest using the PCM?

deilenberger

Yes. I do it all the time. Put your music on a USB thumb drive and plug it into the USB port. The system will index the music on it and you can then select what you want to play. It can repeat tracks or shuffle (randomize) track order. I use MP3 format, but I believe it will also do Apple loss-less format. Press the Source button, then select USB to access it. It then works like a CD - with the same PCM menu structure.

I use the storage format of:

Artist
-- Album
>>>> Track 1
>>>> Track 2
etc..

BTW- more than 5,000 tracks takes a bit of time to index, and for some reason it doesn't store the index it creates it every time you select the USB port.

Slickdvl

What option should I be hitting to get it on? I only see aux, Bluetooth, xm, tuner - nothing about usb.

deilenberger

Is the thumb drive formatted and plugged in (Windows format works fine..) I believe it only shows the USB when there is a USB device connected.

Slickdvl

deilenberger

So you have music now?

Slickdvl

wkearney99

There's more than one way to format a USB drive on Windows. There's NTFS, ExFAT, FAT32 and FAT. I know it'll read FAT and FAT32 formatted drive partitions, I don't know about the others.

Also know there are track limits on the PCM. There was a good thread about this on another forum: https://www.macanforum.com/forum/ele...rd-limits.html

So while you can have very large removable media, the PCM itself will only recognize up to 10k tracks on it.

Eskimo1

I had issues with my Windows PC formatting some USB sticks of various sizes, and I was using FAT32 and ExFAT (required for sticks over ~4GB size). If you start the car, let everything in the PCM get settled in (Jukebox, XM, bluetooth, etc..) THEN, plug in the USB stick and watch the bottom of the display - is there an error? If it can't read the USB stick, you won't get it as an option.

I ended up formatting the stick on a Mac, and it's worked ever since. It's an option to try.

That said, I know we can "turn off" some inputs like AUX and AUX BT.. can that be done with USB? I don't think so, but worth skimming the manual.

wkearney99

The tricky part with USB sticks is not knowing how they've been set up previously, and untangling that. Some may have come already setup for some other purpose. You may have to eliminate all of that in order to start fresh for use in the PCM (or anywhere else for that matter).

Bare-bones, FAT or FAT32 with a single partition taking up the whole stick is your best starting point. When setting it up for partitions it's best to use MBR and not GPT.

There's a very good free tool called 'Rufus' that's great for formatting drives. https://rufus.ie/

Just be aware that when using tools to format drives that you're formatting the CORRECT ONE. Don't format your data or operating systems drives out from under you!

Slickdvl

Thanks - that was going to be my next step - format with using FAT32 or NTFS depending on what it was (wifey likes the music and took the flash drive, so I'm gonna try again on a different drive).
Appreciate the heads up on formatting the right drive - I build my own gaming computers and am a software developer, won't be an issue lol.

wkearney99

To save you exhaustive efforts (I know, I'm also an IT guy) there's no reasonable way to get more than 10k tracks on a drive.

You can jump through some silly hoops to put multiple partitions on a single drive and the PCM will see them, but doing so will keep a windows PC from seeing them, so you'd have to be using a linux/unix box to talk to set it up, and remember it's set up that way in the future.... etc.

The end result is while you can buy incredibly large storage drives, the PCM won't ever be able to use them to browse "all" your music. If you have more than the track limits the PCM imposes it's just wasted space. The only upside to that is you can use higher quality tracks, but then you're down a whole other rabbit hole obsessing over media quality.

I've long been a fan of J.River's "Media Center" program for managing media. And apparently their upcoming release (version 25) is going to have some better renaming options for doing device sync transfers. It's a swiss-army-knife of a program. Tons of features, but you REALLY have to understand what you're trying to do. It's not as simple as I'd like, but managing tons of tracks in lots of different formats isn't easy. It's worth the commercial price if you've got years worth of media that needs re-organizing.

Slickdvl

Thanks for the heads up - I'm using a small 4gb HD to test with only about 200 tracks.

deilenberger

And having 5,000+ tracks on the USB drive makes the indexing by the PCM take what seems forever (about 3-5 minutes.. that's forever in computer time right?)

Slickdvl