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USB input

11K views 13 replies 8 participants last post by  chevyorange 
#1 · (Edited)
I've found that using a USB stick, indeed, it will play .m4a files, not just mp3s.

The owners manual says one place max files are 1k max total in one place, 10k total in another. I have just over 10,000 total songs on my iPods & iPhone. They work fine - just the iPods with old physical moving hard drives are slow & constantly "indexing". It appears there is no memory in the Malibu and it starts indexing again every start. Storage devices & players with flash memory (USB & iPhone for instance) index faster and have less hiccups. Sometimes after start up my 80GB iPod classic and/or the stereo has gotten confused.

To befuddlements of the stereo:

1. It let my iPod battery run down over a day as it didn't stop the iPod from playing and the charge died, leaving the iPod in need of 10 minutes of charging before starting up again,
2. Turning the car off and leaving for five minutes and returning it would not pick up the USB input as if nothing was there.

I have not figured out how to create playlists yet, but I have iPods I use.

If I future out playlists on USB I my change that as no batteries in USB drives.

I hope my tech posts aren't too boring. Just wouldn't mind swapping "war stories"!

Adam
 
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#2 ·
Im with you on these discoveries. Often I find that the systems ability to find my old 30GB iPod with color screen is not that impressive. Sometimes it just stops, but I do give most flaws to the iPod itself and not the system.

As someone who uses the port a lot, you may be interested in knowing what cables I carry.

I have a 6" cable for the iPod, its great because it just goes directly from the USB port to the iPod and keeps the rest of the space free.

You can also use it as a built in charger for cell phones using the normal usb to micro-usb cable.
 
#3 ·
Cool. I have 2 80gb iPods but find myself using BT off my iPhone as its faster and no hiccups. I think the hard drive in the iPod classics are just too slow.

I carry one charger for my iPhone and one cable for my iPods. I prefer my own library over anything XM or radio.

I'm going to figure out how to make a playlist file on a USB drive.
 
#4 ·
I don't even try to used the port anymore. Every time I have tried it loads using a galaxy s2. the bluetooth is suprising good, I don't even notice in loss in sound quality. I love my pioneer speakers. So much better than the stock speakers I had with a kia sportage years ago.
 
#5 ·
The USB's only problem for me is when I shut the car down for five minutes and come back, it doesn't pick up again as an option. Usually toggling the power of the stereo will pick it back up.

The Bluetooth off my iPhone always works - but to can never get the address book to sync.
 
#6 ·
My address book always syncs up on my iphone.
I have problems sometimes with the correct song not showing on the screen when playing via bluetooth. I think I have it narrowed down to if I select repeat or shuffle on the phone it seems to do it then.
 
#7 ·
Re: USB Playlists

Has anyone successfully created a playlist on a USB stick and got it to play. I have been trying and so far no success.
I have an 8GB stick that is formatted FAT32. I use Itunes (on an Apple) and create the list then export it to the stick. It shows up there,(in the root directory) but does not show up as a playlist in the Malibu (2013). Any help would be appreciated.
 
#11 ·
Re: USB Playlists

Has anyone successfully created a playlist on a USB stick and got it to play. I have been trying and so far no success.
I have an 8GB stick that is formatted FAT32. I use Itunes (on an Apple) and create the list then export it to the stick. It shows up there,(in the root directory) but does not show up as a playlist in the Malibu (2013). Any help would be appreciated.
Easy... make a folder name, drag the songs into that folder, repeat. Thats what i did and it works fine.
 
#10 ·
I got my '13 2LT last week. I also have the 80GB ipod (5.5gen; the oooold Video) and I have issues with it as well.

When I plug it in, it indexes fairly quickly, however it only shows ONE artist, album and song (Etta James - At Last). However, all of my playlists show up with all songs in tact.

If I play an album, artist or 'shuffle all' before plugging in, I can continue doing just that, but when I navigate away within MyLink, I cannot go back to it, I only get my playlists, or a single Etta James tune.

My girlfriend has an 8gb nano (the square style, not long) and it works just fine, although not all the artists show up.

I like using bluetooth just fine, but I don't care for Pandora and I can only get so many songs on my Google Play account (although, now that I type that out, Google's 20,000 is more than the 12,000 I have on my ipod). Hmmm.
 
#12 ·
If we do that and have a song in multiple playlists it'd mean multiple copies of the song..

So, I'm trying to figure out where/how to export the playlist file from iTunes and where it should go/be named on my flash drive.
 

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#13 ·
So, I’ve been playing with this for a few days, have a 32 and 128GB flash drive.

Both play music wonderfully, quicker than the old HDD iPod classic so that’s going down the river.

I just cannot make the playlists work - despite the manual saying they do. But not how or where to put them.

So, I’ve put one playlist in a few places in the directory (.m3u) and am trying to figure out WHEN one works, WHERE it was.

I’m not even sure if they want you to make a folder called Playlists? Or does the system just find the .m3u files in the root directory?

No idea.

So, that’s as far as I’ve got.
 
#14 ·
I believe I'm onto something.

So our MyLink doesn't care whether you put the files & folders like most of us see a file system.

Artist>Album>Song

If you have your tags filled out in each song, then you can drag and drop the tunes folder straight into root directory. MyLink pulls that info from the tags.

I went ahead and made a Music folder.

My problems were with exporting playlists. I exported them separately from iTunes and found that the only problem is saving as supported m3u playlist files, you must save it in the folder at Artist level if you did folders as mentioned above. If you just dumped song files you put the playlist files in the root directory.

My problem was exporting the playlist wasn't enough.

I hod to open them in a simple text editor and correct then paths to each song.

So you make it simple as possible:

Each entry on me old not working playlists looked like:

Music>iTunes>iTunes Music

I changed it so on my USB drive I put the exported playlists in my artists folder and edited it a text editor to remove the Drive/Music/iTunes/iTunes/Artist/Album/Song to find & replace the directory pointer to Artist/Album/Song. The one playlist that finally worked after the long Indexing was in the Music folder so only needed pointer to

Artist/Album/Song

I've edited all my playlists and added 30 and will test tomorrow.
 
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