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| USB Port with almost hidden 32 GB drive |
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| Cruzer Fit 32GB drive holds all my music |
One problem though was that playlists I had created with WinAmp and Microsoft Media Player did not work; either the playlist did not show up when browsing for playlists in the car, or the playlist did not contain any entries. Jump to "What I did" below for a solution, or read on....
Doing a search in the Toyota forums yields lots of information with recommendations for solutions to this problem. But I had problems getting anything to work that well...either it was too complicated to set up, or it did not work all the time.
In my attempts to troubleshoot why playlists were not working; I learned a lot about their format and so was able to understand why they did not work. Basically the format of a playlist is a text file of statements that are pointers to the songs to be played. The actual statements in the playlist look like XML or HTML. You can use Notepad to open a playlist, to see what's there and even edit it to make corrections if needed.
For me, my MP3 files are kept on my media server that is "Drive T:" on my PC. So if a playlist contained a pointer to a music file on drive T, is was never going to work in the car...e.g. There is no drive T in the car!
<title>John David Souther</title>
</head>
<body>
<seq>
<media src="T:\John David Souther\01 The Fast One.mp3"/>
<media src="T:\John David Souther\02 Run like a Thief.mp3"/>
<media src="T:\John David Souther\03 Jesus in 3-4 Time.mp3"/>
....
So in order to build playlists that work in the car, the pointers or references to the music file must be correct. The problem was how could I do that easily.
Here is what I did:
- I loaded all my music files onto the Cruzer Fit drive and plugged it into my computer. The cruzer USB drive was assigned drive letter F:
- I ran WinAmp on my computer, and started with no files in the media library. You can clear the library from the settings.
- I added all the music files on the Cruzer Fit drive F: to the WinAmp library. e.g. File -> Add Media to Library.
- Next I created a playlist and SAVED the playlist to the root /main directory of the Cruzer Fit Drive F:
- Since only files from the Cruzer Fit Drive are used in the playlist, the pointers to the music file are correct, and the playlist works in the car.
What about my normal library of media on drive T:? I use Windows Media Player and it's library to reference all my media on drive T: and other places on my home network.
The WinAmp library for me, will only reference music files on the Cruzer Fit drive.
Of course, I have to bring in the Cruzer Fit drive from the car whenever I want to create a playlist or play music in WinAmp on my computer.
The Cruzer Fit drive is tiny! and is not visible when in the car. So it lives in the car and is always ready to play music whenever I am driving.
WimAmp playlists {.m3u} have a different format than Windows Media Player playlists {wpl}, but the idea, the references to music files work the same way, e.g. bad reference and the playlist will not work.
I also have a suspicion that some types of "tokens" used in Windows Media Player playlists cause the playlist not to work in the car, e.g. see the cid and tid tokens below...
<media src="Music\Rock\Thirty Eight Spec. - Rock&Roll Strategy\Rock & Roll Strategy - Thirty Eight Special - 03 - Little Sheba.mp3" cid="{A83EF887-27DA-4334-8628-D93DAFCA8469}" tid="{B3A73BCB-BDDD-4AA7-A114-F05CBF08F826}"/>
Does the Prius C Entertainment System read MP4?
ReplyDeleteNo it is for music only as far as I can tell. I tried a USB drive with .mp4 files and they were not found by the system.
ReplyDelete