I am new to the forum with a new XF.

I can't seem to get the car to recognize any folders on my USB stick. The stick is formatted in FAT32. Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

I have a 2010 Premium with the B & W sound system and had the same problem. I had intended to use a USB memory stick inplace of an old iPod I used, but the system supports only mp3 and not aac music compression (which all my computer stored music uses because I prefer the quality of aac over mp3) and you do not seem to be able to put music into folders.

I went back to my iPod where the Jag recognizes folders and aac compression. I was not impressed.

 

so, let me get this straight: it WILL play music from a USB thumb drive, but ONLY if it's in MP3 format?

 

according to the manual it says it plays mp3, aac, wav, and wma files.

 

That was the problem. It said it played aac, mp3 and wma but all I could get to work was mp3 from the choice of aac and mp3 (I did not try wma since I do not use it on any music compression scheme). aacs would not work whatever sample rate I used. Also even placing mp3s in anything other than the root could not be found by the system in the Jag. I had to put music in the root and in mp3 format to work. Note the usb stick was fat32 format.

So, if I converted all my aacs to mp3, it would work (btw the sample rate appears to be limited as well, not sure what the limit is but mp3s sampled at 384 kbits would not work). I think 256 is the max.

As an aside I tried CDs ripped to aac using iTunes as well as purchased, but protection free, aacs from my iTunes library.

Sounds like I need a software update but enquiries have not revealed anything that shows any sign of making it work and my iPod works well enough to make the whole thing moot at this point, for me at least. However I am still disappointed.

 

I know this post is old, but i am having the same a similar problem. I put a bunch of music files in various formats including wma, wav, mp3, mpeg-2 and some I can't recall on a flash drive. The jag didn't recognize any of them. When i plug my ipod in everything works fine.

Any ideas why it won't recognize the usb stick and keeps saying folder empty?

 

The only way I could get it to work, for my car, was by encoding mp3s at 128 kbits and putting them in the root directory on the stick. All other encoding schemes would not work (despite the Jag handbook indicating to the contrary) and I cannot remember exactly but I think that that bit rates higher than 256 kbits would not work either.

It may be related to whatever software version you have in your system on the car since some people seem to have had success making it work with music in separate folders and at higher bit rates. I cannot duplicate their experience.

I gave up and use an iPod/Nano for music. That works with AAC and WAV files without any issue complete with playlists etc.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks whitbyxf that helped. The XF is quite fussy with formatting. It only accepts Fat32.

 

The USB device has to be formatted as a "mass storage device" like a standard USB memory stick without any frills.

 

Most usb sticks are supplied formatted to the FAT32 standard (that way it can be read and written to by most OS). In my case I carried out a series of tests to determine just what would work and what would not.

1. As stated, the stick had to be in FAT32 format.
2. Only music encoded/compressed using a MP3 codec would work. AAC, WMA would not work. The car manual claims otherwise.
3. Uncompressed music in the WAV format would not work.
4. Music had to be in the root of the drive (i.e. you could not put music into any folders).
5. Encoded bit rate had to be below 256 kb/s, but I could only get reliable playback at 128 kb/s on some tracks.
6. I could not get variable bit rate encoding to work. Fixed bit rate was required.
7. I tried several different music encoders (OS X, LINUX and Windows 7 based) with no difference in results.
8. I tried this with several manufacturers and sizes of USB drives (2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB) and all behaved in the same way.

Since my iPod works flawlessly (encoded with either MP3, AAC, ALAC or uncompressed WAV) I have not bothered to pursue a software update for the car. As some other contributors to this forum have pointed out, they have had more success, so I suspect that it is a software revision issue. I have an early build 2010 MY car (May 2009) and the dealers have, rather surprisingly given the other issues I have heard about in the entertainment system and operation of the paddle controls, yet to do any software updates for anything on the vehicle.

 

I tried with FLAC first since my entire music collection is ripped in that format, but of course no luck. I then converted some of it to MP3 320 kbps with a nice folder structure, and that worked right away.

The only thing (apart from not being able to use a lossless format) that left me mildly annoyed was the random play mode. Say I have 60-70 albums on a 8 gig memory stick, with one folder per album. When I enable random play, it will chose randomly from the tracks in the folder it was already playing in, not from all albums. So to get proper random play, I would have to put all files in the root, but that'd make it impossible to browse for songs manually with almost a thousand tracks on one stick. With only the first 20 or so characters of the file name visible on the display, I'd only see the band name on most songs then.

 

My USB stick worked with music in folders. 2011 XFR.

 

I saw that some of you mentioned using the Ipod. Have you had issues using the Iphone as a music device? My wife tried to plug it in using the Ipod dock and had no luck.

 

I know it was a little while back, but a quick reply to Hodepine - there are two ways of selecting Mix, one where you press to select and it plays randomly in the current folder, or you press and hold and it select Mix All to randomly play everything.

 

You just changed my music experience when driving. :-)

 

I have no problem up to a 16GB stick. anything above that is ignored

For what that is worth

 

I'm using a 64GB stick now, about 500 albums and it's around 70% full. Only drawback is it takes about 3-4 minutes to mount, so for very short drives there's no music...

 

From day one I've used a Sandisk 32gb stick with zero issues. Fat32, mp3 formatted. Loads up right away. I put each artist in a seperate folder and I have sub-folders if the artist has various albums. All of my folders are visible and the stick holds more music than I believe one would ever need.

 

Bit of an update on my experience...
I initially had about 11Gb of music on a 16Gb drive at 320kbps - and it was slow to load like yours Hodepine. However I also found music by some artists wasn't playing and also that that track names (or album or artist etc if selected to display) weren't being displayed for some tracks.

Using a free PC tool called MP3 Tag, I found my MP3s had a mixture of character encoding. Using that tool I changed the options to only write ID3v2.3 tags with the UTF-16 character encoding (just select all songs in MP3 Tag and then click on save and it re-saves all songs). Now I do get all track names etc display. Had no further problems with that. Anyone had similar or want to find out more check Wikipedia and do a search for ID3 Tag, scroll down to heading "ID3v2".

But I still found some songs weren't playing - even after I converted all the music to 128kbps as advised by Whitbyxf and all the music is in the root folder. I used dbPoweramp by the way to convert.

Initially it looked like something strange was happening - that no music played if the artist name started with S onwards! Anything up to R was fine, but then I found someone whose name started with W came up. But odd that out of songs by 65 or so artists, skipping forward to the next song about 120 times, only one song from the 9 artists that start with S onwards played.

I will have to run a little experiment - will try saving to the USB stick only 4 or 5 albums by a mix of artists starting with letter before and after S. If all play, the issue might be related to the amount of music. If those from S onward don't play, maybe it's filename related (as Artist is first part of filename in my case) and I will try renaming filenames to numbers and if that works, will try renaming all my 1,300 tracks to numbers (somehow - not sure how to do that yet).

Will report back what I find...

 

What bitrate did you use? What MY is your XF?