Recently bought a late Mk3 Venture 2.0 with the Tom-Tom based infotainment system. This has a lead for a USB memory stick (amongst others) in the glove compartment. When I connect up a memory stick loaded with music files the LED on the stick lights up, but when I press the ‘source’ button on the head unit, the USB icon is greyed out on the touch-screen display. Have tried connecting stick before booting up infotainment unit - still no dice. Only thing I can think of is that possibly the music files on the stick are not MP3, though the stick works with several other car stereos, DVD players & audio microsystems (my computer runs a Windows media player in Windows 10). Any help gratefully received.
It might be that you are using a larger size (capacity) stick than the system can take. A lot of older type systems can only take a max of 16 or 32 gb cards/sticks. Or you have the stick formated in NTFS or something the unit does not support maybe?
Agree with the previous answer. The factory unit in our Nissan Juke will handle a 64Gb USB stick but it needs to be in FAT32 format. My PC won’t let me do this but I use an excellent free program that will do the job simply in seconds. Unusually there is no need to register to get the program and it doesn’t try to install other ‘useful’ programs that you didn’t want in the first place. Check it out here -
I have had a play with my usb stick and mp3 filename formats. This is what I have discovered:
First, if you want the albums to be played in track number sequence then when you rip the cd to mp3 you need to have the MP3 tag for the track name begin with the track number (zero filled if 10 or more tracks per album ie 01_Track1, 02_track2 etc) otherwise it plays the tracks in Alphabetical order.
Second, if you want to use Playlists (ie m3u files containing lists of tracks to be played) then you must have no spaces in the file name, if you don’t use playlists then spaces in the filename is OK. As to the structure of the files on the usb stick -
The head unit displays and the Album, Track title etc from the MP3 Tags in each file and not by the stored file / folder sequence on the stick, however, for my own preference I have individual folders per album, including multiple album folders per group
Group1 Album1 Track1 (MP3 track name 01_track1) Track2 (MP3 track name 02_track2) Track3 (MP3 track name 03_track3)… Album2 Track1 (MP3 track name 01_track1) Track2 (MP3 track name 02_track2) Track3 (MP3 track name 03_track3)… Group2 Album Track1 (MP3 track name 01_track1) Track2 (MP3 track name 02_track2) Track3 (MP3 track name 03_track3)… Group3 Album Track1 (MP3 track name 01_track1) Track2 (MP3 track name 02_track2) Track3 (MP3 track name 03_track3)… etc etc
If you already have lots of MP3’s without track number, you can use a freeware program called “mp3tag” to rename the track name to include track number - this is pretty easy.
To add the track number to the track title you run mp3tag.exe, open the folder containing the album, check it has track numbers in the details (if not you can add them manually) then select all the tracks and choose convert tag-tag from the convert menu option.- and select Field = TITLE Format String = $num(%track%,2)_%title%
I think there is a limit of 2000 to the number of tracks ber USB stick.
Thanks for the help everyone. Using the link supplied by Roadie I managed to format a stick in FAT32. Then I managed to re-rip some CDs straight to this stick in MP3. Had to delete the existing WMA rips from my C drive before WMP would let me do this. I will have to follow Captain Haddock’s advice; presently it will only play tracks in alphabetical order. Have used some free conversion software to convert existing rips from WMA to MP3, but after ~20 tracks the programme wanted money. What a pantomime. Note to Mazda: sack the genius who specced the infotainment system on the Mk3.75. If the OEM head unit had been a standard DIN format I would have solved the problem by fitting an aftermarket head unit.
Rather than ripping or converting directly to a USB stick I gather all the files together into a folder on the PC hard drive and then copy everything across to the USB when I’ve finished.
Lots of very cheap USB sticks available and many of then are not what they seem. What may appear to be a 64Gb stick may only actually have 2Gb or 4Gb of memory. Anything else copied to it will be lost. Always test with the h2testw program above. A 64Gb stick should have around 58-59Gb of actual capacity when formatted, this is normal and not a fault. After trying many cheap ones which turned out to be fake or having them fail after a short time I now only use decent quality sticks. Stick with Sandisk and you won’t go far wrong. I still check them first because there are fakes of branded products just as unbranded. I’ve never had a branded Sandisk product fail in use however many times I’ve formatted and rewritten them.