EVERY car seems to have its own mysterious restrictions and rules for music on removable media. And almost every car refuses to re-index removable media when you add/delete/change any of the tracks on that media.

I finally resolved the latter, at least in my cars, by putting all the music in a top-level folder called, say, "Music01", with artist/album folders below. After changing anything, I rename "Music01" to "Music02", and the car reindexes when the removable media device is reinserted. Hope that helps someone.

My dilemma is using a 256GB SD card with FLAC files with pristine "Album Artist", "Artist", "Album" and "Track" metadata. The folder structure indexes and displays perfectly in a 2020 Taycan (on a USB drive in this case), worked great in a 2018 Panamera, but is a mess on my 2020 E63S: random "unknowns" including unknown albums with one track, with the rest of the tracks in the correct album elsewhere. Using the folder browser it all works fine, but that's clunky.

Does anyone know what the hidden restrictions are please? Usually it's something like embedded album art dimensions, or filename length, Alternatively it could be Gracenote forcing its own opinions onto my metadata, but I can't find a way to disable that.

Thanks in advance for any help.

PS As for selecting "next track" easily......sigh

 

I feel your pain. Tried a bunch of different things with metadata in FLAC files and could never get the tracks to play in album order. Works fine with MP3, but no joy with FLAC.

Ivan MacKenzie.

 

Many thanks. I feared as much. The only car manufacturer I've found that actually understands audio/computer/phone/data technology well is Tesla: it's a bunch of software engineers making cars.

I converted all my files to ALAC and downsized all album art to 400x400. No joy there. It seems to be Gracenote ignoring all metadata, or maybe not seeing the metadata because it's not where it expects to be, and not recognizing most of the music.Most likely, COMAND isn't reading FLAC or ALAC metadata; FLAC uses Vorbis tags and ALAC does its own thing. Some rippers, especially EAC with its default options, will put ID3v2 metadata tags into FLACs and ALACs, and that may be why those files work for some.

I'm going to try two things:

1. I've got an Astell & Kern AK240 high-end MTP player that I haven't used for a while and am copying my FLAC files to that right now. It takes forever over its lame/old USB 2.0 interface. The E63S supports MTP players, but it might just see the FLAC files versus treat is as an intelligent player. We'll see,

2. I'll reluctantly convert all my files to MP3s to VBR quality 9 (or, if the car can't play that, CBR 320kbps) and see if that works better. I'll try AAC mode 5 to see if maybe that works, but it's an M4A container so I doubt it's any different than ALAC.

 

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