MP3 music syncing with WMP

Hi:

I am trying to transfer a playlist of MP3s music to a thumb drive for playback in my Honda 2013 sound system via an USB receptacle jack.

With the Play tab selected in WMP, I selected all songs and dragged to the Playlist righthand panel. Then selected the Sync tab. Clicked the Start Sync button. Observed that transfer had started and completed.

I thought I was doing a proper sync, but when I plugged the thumb drive into my car's audio system and attempted USB playback, an error message appeared that said ... no data on device...

When viewing the files on the thumb drive with File Manager, I see several subfolders with titles of song artists' names.

Obviously, my effort did not succeed. What should I have done?

I am now redoing my above steps with a different thumb drive. The syncing is 80% completed.

( BTW, just prior to all this I reformatted the two thumb drives that I am now using. )

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Edit:

The 2nd thumb drive content is the same as on the 1st thumb drive. That leads me to believe that the device format is incorrect. I used File Manager to reformat these devices, and I think it was to a FAT format.

Is there another requirement when formatting for MP3 files?

@skcusime: Thank you for taking the time to duplicate my procedure and for your comments/reply.

skcusime said:

This would seem to be a Honda compatibility issue.

No; I had success with using the thumb drive in my ACCORD, previously. However, I have performed this task of transferring MP3s to USB drive only a couple of times, and that was a while ago; I cannot recall my previously successful workflow .

skcusime said:

The process you did using WMP is correct, and doing exactly what you described produced the same result for me. The songs are in a folder called "Music" which contains "Artist Name" which in turn contains "Album Name" and lastly the songs. The thumb drive plays in my 2019 Hyundai.

Yes, I should reexamine the folder tree structure on the thumb drive. It has the four layers as you described above; however, there is a limit on the number of subfolders (I think 8, Ref: Don’t Put All Your Songs in One Folder on Your USB Drive . I have many more sub-sub folders than that).

When formatting a CD/DVD, there is an option to make the disc a music disc or a data disc. Is there the same option available/required for a thumb drive formatting procedure? Where/How?

skcusime said:

Can I suggest using File Manager to copy a dozen songs from your HDD onto the thumb drive without any folders and see if they play in your car.

Sure; and appreciated.
I did: Transfer the mp3 files from the thumb drive into WMP's righthand panel, make it a playlist and then did a sync on a reformatted USB thumb drive; same folder structure resulted on the thumb drive. I am dealing with approximately 630 tracks, and, in some cases, the filenames on the HDD are very long, e.g., "Easy Listening Classics- Everything Is Beautiful [Disc 1] By The Time I Get To Phoenix Glen Campbell Easy Listening 06 320kbps.mp3".


OK; I will do a quick reformat of both thumb drives with FileManager. Then, I will try copy & paste directly from HDD Music to thumb drive (outside of WMP) and see if that works for me.

MP3's are treated as "data". If you burn a CD of MP3 files you use the data burning. WAV's are "music" and you create a music CD.
I recently did some testing of USB flash drives (thumb drives) for one of my recording studio clients who is considering adding USB drives to sell at concerts. I just used the file explorer and copied the wav files to the USB flash drive and did the same thing with MP3 files (copied the entire MP3 folders). Both played OK in my new (21) Nissan Rogue and on an audio amp that accepts USB drives.

skcusime said:

This would seem to be a Honda compatibility issue.

After some additional experimentation, I am agreeing with you.

Ref: Don’t Put All Your Songs in One Folder on Your USB Drive :
"... Many radios have a limit of 255 or 999 files or folders per directory and can only detect up to 999 files. ..."

I began with ~ 630 songs, as shown in the initial WMP Sync List, on the USB 32-GB thumb drive. The number of songs has now been reduced. The USB drive now plays okay with two child folders under that Music parent folder. One of the child folders has many sub-child folders, and I did a quick count while viewing in File Manager. I counted ~ 160 songs in total tally. So, maybe my radio's limit is 255.

I believe that the each child folder is shown as a Volume number in the car's display.

I do plan, when time permits me, to directly transfer just MP3 files, (i.e, no parent folder) as you have suggested, and observe the result.