I'd like to put music on a little USB drive for my Fit, but I'd like to put it in separate folders - different music, different folders. Would that work with the Fit's radio?

 

Hi that's what I did and it works. You can even use the sterling wheel control to skip folder by holding back or fourth for few seconds.

 

Yes, It works very nicely. You have to use one of the three formats (MP3, AAC, or WMA, if I recall correctly), and it should find them. I did it for my LX from a Win7 operating system, and it was fine. I imagine one could format the thumb drive to a a format the Fit wouldn't recognize, so we have to be aware of that.
The filesystem on the drive I used is FAT32 which is likely the default that all of them are sold with.

I put each album/CD/collection as a seperate file per song into a folder named for the album. What I discovered was that the interface then shows the file folder name that contains the song. That was confusing

My home audio system is based on a computer server, so I have one folder for each artist/band/composer with multiple folders in each of those folders on a per-album basis. When I did that, I could only see the album names on those folder and a name like Live_27june1989 doesn't tell you much. The indexing on the Fit doesn't pick up the higher level artist/band/composer level folder names.

I then put the thumb drive back in the computer and added some obvious representation of the artist/band/composer to the album-level folder name.
Thus, Live_27June1989 was modded to be BookerT_Live_27June1989. That makes it easy to browse in the Fit.

I'm stating the obvious but its easy to put hundreds of CDs properly ripped to MP3 at high bitrate on an cheap thumb drive replacing many binders of physical disks. Can't be beat.

Skip

 

Thanks for that. I didn't want to waste a lot of time doing something that wouldn't work. Apparently, the car can recognize separate albums, so I'll go with that.

I dragged about a dozen songs onto a flash drive, and I was surprised to see them displayed in order, numbered, with detailed info about each. Great technology.

I got one of these because I'll be able to close the USB cover after inserting it.

 

Other than FAT32, does it recognize NTFS or portable hard drive?

 

Don't know the answer to your question but NTFS is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft. In order for companies to use it in their products I presume that they have to make the trek with a sack of cash and drop it on the collection plate at Redmond while they prostate themselves and kiss the Dark Lord's ring.

FAT32 on the other hand is essentially freeware and so companies much prefer using it and staying well away from NTFS.

 

Are you sure the Fit is reading (and allowing you to browse) the folder names? Or is it reading and displaying the ID3 tags (the metadata associated with each file)? That's normally how MP3 players work--they take all the metadata contained in the ID3 tags and sort it by artist, album, etc. I suppose it's not a big deal either way, so long as you have your music properly organized. Like tantridge, I have my music arranged in folders by artist, and then in subfolders by album. If the Fit only allows you to browse that way, it's certainly fine.

 

It seems to scan the device for folders containing files in the permitted format and then list those folders as the initial access index. Much nicer than showing a list of 100's or 1000's of song files. On the filesystem question, I know that my FAT32 thumb drive worked fine. Beyond that I have no idea.

Maybe there's some documentation somewhere?

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No, that doesn't work. I tried it to have them make my computer stop crashing.