The Pioneer unit in my car apparently will only play the files on a USB in the order that they were copied to the USB. So far I've just dragged and dropped them in the order that I want to hear them in, although that can be a bit time consuming. There's an app called Drivesort that I've downloaded but not used yet, that supposedly orders the song files in a way that will make the head unit read them in the correct order without having to drag and drop them all. Anerty's Lair - DriveSort
your new rav4 has apple carplay or something, right? just play music from your phone. usb sticks are kinda 2010
I have used either a USB stick, iPod or memory card to play music on pretty much all of my last 5 cars. If your car supports playback from an iPod or iPhone, that is often the easiest option, as you don’t have to think about file or disc formats at all. CarPlay via a phone is also very easy to use. If you are using a USB stick / memory card, I agree that checking the user manual to confirm which file and disc formats are supported is essential. FAT32 is the most widely supported disc format, and MP3 probably the most widely supported file format. I would caution against WMA lossless; while many cars support WMA, WMA lossless is often not supported. I found that the easiest way of making sure things play in the right order is to rename songs so that they all start with the track number, as not all cars properly read metadata. I also sort my music anyway as follows: [artist] - [album]\[track number]. [title] Even the prehistoric Honda CRV stereo, which completely failed to read metadata, coped with that. If you have a library of music already stored in a lossless format, it’s easy enough to do a batch rename / convert using something like dBPoweramp to create a folder of music for the car. I kept a car MP3 folder of all my music for years until I got a car with CarPlay. My current car does play FLAC files, so I just use those now rather than pay the extra £299 to enable CarPlay on it.
Put 28 Deep Purple albums 320k MP3 on a USB stick and gave it a try.....Sounded pretty good and the drag and drop was no different than what I do loading my external hard drives for backup. I see I'll be able to load more on the stick later, just like a hard drive. I was concerned that I'd have to finalize like burning a CD and waste a lot of storage space. I'll be able to live with this.
I would definitely recommend the tiny Fit USB drive as linked above. I hate the idea of a long USB stick getting hit and damaging the connector. I have one I used in my previous car that now works fine in my 22 RAV4. One irritating thing about the RAV4 is the album art only shows while the car is in park.
Probably easier than you think but if you search / then ask your question on this site you will have more than enough ways to get the best most convenient sound. DiyMobileAudio.com Car Stereo Forum
Playing CD's or loading them to the vehicle's hard drive was SO much easier than this current load of crap.
Yes, a 2022 4Runner TRD. My biggest piece of advice is to go to your car and make sure your system works with just a few albums before loading a ton of stuff on and then realizing it isn't functioning the way you want.
I didn't even load artwork.... but that's probably metadata attached to the songs, that my rips don't have. I rip with EAC and there's no meta data. I add separate folders for liner notes and artwork to my album folder. May have to add it to my folders on the thumb drive and see what happens.
Cool, guess we both know what we like. That said, I may come around and change my mind on navigation and go for car play, but as of now it's a headache. I know my way around my town pretty well, tend not to venture out on the open road much. That and I've been on trips with my brother and find his reliance on navigation bothersome. I don't wanna hit a town and already know every place to eat because my phone told me. I wanna drive up and down the road and see what the place looks like, and choose. The singular focus takes the fun out of it. Work already sucks because of the endless efficiency, and I don't want to bring it into my living life. I'm sure to a tech guy true believer, what I just said is preposterous.
If your USB files play back in alpha order, you need to prefix your file names with track numbers, e.g. "01-Taxman.mp3", and after loading all files to the USB drive run FAT Sorter on the drive. Re-run FAT Sorter anytime you add files to the drive. FAT Sorter. Get the software safely and easily.
I got it from microsoft store...that where the links led me...Much better to work with. Is WMA lossless really lossless? I just converted and album from flac to WMV 9.2-----The flac album was like 280 MB, but the converted album is around 100MB......Is that right, I'm not sure what to think about this? From the quick just through computer speakers it sounded good.. Gonna have to do a sound shootout. Maybe with that other player I was making 9.2 lossless files.... I just assumed from file size they weren't.
A WMA lossless File should be roughly the same size as a FLAC file. A reduction of 290 to 100MB does suggest that lossy compression is in use. Are you sure your car stereo supports WMA lossless? I had three cars that supported WMA, but none of them supported WMA lossless. Given the road and engine noise of a car, I have never been convinced that it would be possible to tell the different between FLAC and MP3 in a car (and there are plenty of people who can’t distinguish them in a proper ABX comparison on decent equipment).
Yep I figured it out-- In the settings for the converter there was an option to select uncompressed WMA files, previously I had just selected WMA 9.2 without checking off uncompressed--now the file sizes are comparable.... Thanks for your replies and comments...
Doesn't sound right. I took a folder containing Neil Young's "Tonight's the Night" album, which was 255MB as FLAC and converted it to WMA 9.2 lossless and the folder containing the converted files was 259MB, so the WMA 9.2 lossless files should be approximately the same size as FLAC. Are you sure that you had "WMA 9.2 Lossless" selected and not "WMA 9.2"? When I converted it that way, the folder was only 61MB. Edit: Nevermind.. I see you already figured it out. Enjoy the new ride!
A couple of things - I have a 2018 RAV4 and I don't imagine much will have changed in the way their basic USB input works. Mine won't play FLAC but does use MP3 320kbps which is all you'll need for your car If you're thinking of using FAT32 then go a step further and format your USBs into EXFAT. The car will play these with ease and you can use them in a variety of other equipment for both Windows and OSX. FAT32 has a 4Gb file limit while EXFAT is limitless. Dragging and dropping files onto the USB works easily and they automatically organise themselves into alphabetical order. If you wish to change that order you can then move the folders around and they should stay that way. You can make the folders as big as you want. dBPoweramp will easily convert files from or into FLAC, WMA, MP3 depending on what you originally ripped it into.
This, I load an old phone with tracks, run them through iVolume, and play shuffle, and leave it, like the artwork too. I did try the USB method before but couldn’t get away with it.
