Quote:
Originally Posted by bjornand1
Hi guys,
Don't know if I'm the only one having these issues, but I am truly struggling to get the USB drive solution to work as a replacement for my randomly freezing iPod Classis. Any advice would be much appreciated!
The setup: WD 250 GB drive, about 15,000 songs in the music library, m3u playlists exported from iTunes and paths corrected, music copied from the iTunes media folder using the artist/album structure.
When connecting the drive in the 525, no tag information is visible under Search (all grayed out except for Search Folders), but iDrive starts indexing the drive. After a while, the search fields become available, but no matter which I choose, after some pause, the only entry that shows up is Various (Artist, Album, Genre, etc.). From previous tests with only a smaller portion of the library, I think I have understood that this means the drive is still being indexed. After 2-3 hours of driving over several days, the search options finally start showing lists of artists, albums, etc., but still only No Entries for playlists. I also notice that if I choose Titles under Search, a good number (perhaps 100+) tracks are listed at the beginning as "._Title", followed by the rest of the titles, but these in the format of the file name (01 Title, 02 Title, etc.). At the tests with fewer tracks, I came to a point where all titles were listed using the proper tag title, not the file name and no ._Title tracks. This seems to indicate that indexing is not complete, but I see no hope that it ever will be, after so long.
Looking at the tracks that are listed as ._Title, for some reason, poor old David Bowie seems to be singled out, along with some other artists. I see no common trait in these files, they are both mp3, aac, and purchased aac, and they all play perfectly well i iTunes.
Any insights that could help me?
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OK, first thing is have all the ID3 tags been edited correctly? I don't edit tags in itunes as not all tags map across and it appears to save - I would make sure using a 3rd party app that all the tags have worked. If the tags are all over the place for ID3's iDrive could be having issues trying to index consistently.
Second, with the ._Title it sounds like you have lots of hidden files it is trying to index - presuming you are doing this on a mac and that is where they have come from. The files starting with . are used by to store metadata and are hidden by unix OS's, but show on windows, and I presume idrive. If you are doing this on a mac, or the files have come from a mac then the files starting with . need stripping out.
Next issue could be the drive is not fast enough, I'm not sure what drive you are using but officially I don't think HDD's are supported. Older drives will have both a slow drive and slow interface, test with a known fast drive and see if that speeds things up.
I have a 1TB drive, with a USB3 interface, I think the car is USB2 only but the drive is quite fast so seems to have a reasonable USB2 interface too.
Final thing is do you have pro Media? All the features work with Pro Nav, and should also work with other systems with EBT to get artwork etc. However I only have ProMedia and can't test on all systems.
Start with a single album on a clean drive and 100% correct ID3 tags and make sure that works and can search on. Something is making the indexing fall over, so take the size variable out and start from there.
Just to add I did a complete new copy of my drive, new playlists etc. The car re-indexed everything again, and it took about 10 - 15 mins for the whole drive to index and it was all searchable, so not sure why your system is taking so long