Quick follow up regarding "shuffle" .....I experimented with a USB and some music ..... there are 3 "shuffle" selections, Shuffle, Shuffle with Folder, and Shuffle with what looks like a CD. If I want to shuffle across all the music content, I presume that the plain Shuffle is the correct one.

Sometimes selecting plain Shuffle only shuffles across a folder. Selecting Shuffle multiple times sometimes corrects. On some albums the shuffle comes up as Shuffle CD

If I turn the car off, the system does not remember that Shuffle was selected....is this correct ?

Thanks ........

 

I was reading the owner's manual and it talks about all these questions.
Granted, it is not written with the user in mind trying to understand in plain language what we are doing or want to do.


The USB playback does not remember the shuffle and requires a re-index at every power up. The manual mentions how the files/folders are expected to be organized.

The voice controls talk about how the various voice commands work. Perhaps a quick read will help clarify for you any other questions you may have before you have to post and wait for an answer. The manual is right there and has no job other than to be there for you in your time of need.

 

I have one USB stick for music. For long trips, have another on which I plan to put books on cd, ripped to .WMV - one book per folder.

 

You can organize the directory structure any way you want, as long as you stay within the Subaru-imposed filesystem limits: volume format, file size, total number of files, files per folder/directory, number of folder/directory levels, etc.

When the head unit builds its music database (at each power-up), it ignores the directory structure and builds the database using the only tags in each music file. The extra overhead required to open/read/close each file at startup is probably the primary reason why indexing may take several minutes.

Audio quality playing from USB is generally excellent.

 

I tried thumb drivew in the USB port and found nothing but problems. Finally installed an iPod touch with all my music on it and it works beautifully. More expensive to do, but it was a referb Touch, will still be like new years from now and is available for emergency internet (no smart phone!).

 

I was surprised to see that the Subaru audio system will only accept "FAT" formatted USB drives. I hadn't noticed that some my drives are "NTK" and needed to be re-formatted.

 

Reindexing at every start up is a problem. I keep 20G or 4000 songs on an SD car with USB adapter. It's a fast card. But reindexing takes forever seems like about 30 min. Also either I missed it or there appears to be no method to play an album within artist. It seems to completely ignore the directory structure and simply indexes everything it can find.

Furthermore if you play by albums either it's me or it doesn't play an album in track order, it lists songs alphabetically. I can cheat and insert a track number in the title but then indexing takes even longer indexing probably because all the songs are starting with 01 then 02 so that have similar key values (titles). BTW my 2018 reads NTFS file structure just fine, it doesn't need to be FAT.

I would like to have 4000 of my favorite songs mixed in folders by artist (I can name the album tag XXX Mix) ready to go without worrying about whats on my phone.

 

If you want to be bored silly, search for my old posts on media playing issues in my 2015 Limited. You seem to have a 2018 Subaru, so my experience may not be relevant for you.

Reindexing at every start up is a problem. I keep 20G or 4000 songs on an SD car with USB adapter. It's a fast card. But reindexing takes forever seems like about 30 min. ...

“Reindexing” (as you call it) is indeed a problem on the 2015 Limited. I use fast flash drives with about 60GB of music and about 9,000 or so tracks; original indexing takes 15-25 minutes, but the “reindexing” on later car startups is more like 3-5 minutes. Possibly your SD card isn’t as fast as you think, or your file and folder structure is overly complicated. In general, I have one top-level folder for each album artist; within each of these folders, I have one folder per album. Track artist, album artist, album, title, and genre tags are completely populated in my music files.

...Also either I missed it or there appears to be no method to play an album within artist. ...

This doesn’t sound right. On my 2015 Limited, I can choose to browse music by “artist” and then within artist by album. I find this “artist” approach useless, because the media player uses the “track artist” tag rather than the “album artist” tag, but it does work (although when you turn the car off and back on again, it reverts to its default folder-and-file order). I’ve read somewhere that Android generally ignores the album artist tag, too, so my head unit is not alone in this lunacy.

Do you have the “album” tag filled on all of your tracks?

... Furthermore if you play by albums either it's me or it doesn't play an album in track order, it lists songs alphabetically. I can cheat and insert a track number in the title but then indexing takes even longer indexing probably because all the songs are starting with 01 then 02 so that have similar key values (titles)....

On my 2015 Limited, the default “order” in which songs will be played within a folder (which on my flash drives is more or less equivalent to by album) is the order in which they appear in the flash drive’s file system for that folder. This will typically be the order in which they were copied to the given folder, which will often be alphabetical order by file name (depending on how the copying was done). I often put track numbers at the beginning of file names (not the track titles). It never occurred to me that this might affect indexing times.

 

To me, nothing works better than a smart phone for this. For me an old iPhone 5 I had laying around. That and iTunes or 3rd party apps and no fussing around. I've tried the USB flash drive way and it was not for me. JMHO