Incompatible usb message for music

[Terryp]

Hi all
I have searched the site but cannot find any relevant info.

I have a Kingston 128gb usb stick and formatted it on my pc before adding music. When I insert the stick and press USB on the unit it advises the stick is incompatible although it shows a stick in the menu. It is a 3.2 usb stick.

Does anyone have any ideas at all please. Thanks.

[John Ratsey]

There are two possibilities:
1. You haven't formatted it as FAT32.
2. The vehicle doesn't like anything as big as 128GB. I think I'm using either 16 or 32GB.

See the discussion at https://www.fitfreak.net/forums/2nd-generation-ge-08-13/76169-correct-usb-drive-format.html.

[Guinness 2]

Yep I think you'll find 128Gb sticks won't format readily into FAT32.  You will need some  a smaller sized stick or get some software to get it into FAT32.  Some info here

https://www.diskpart.com/articles/fat32-option-not-available-1881.html

[Kremmen]

You need a smaller USB 3 stick formatted to FAT32 and going by the car update requirements format using 'default allocation units'.

My guess is your 128Gb is either exFAT or NTFS

[Terryp]

Yes the 128gb is no good, I found an old 16gb stick that could be formatted to fat32 and it worked. Shame as 128gb still would not be enough for my collection. Many thanks all.

[ADCO]

I use a 128Gb USB stick formatted as FAT32 by a portable utility in Windows "FAT32LargeDriveFormatter". Windows itself will not do a FAT32 format larger than 32Gb. Hope this helps, it worked for me.

[5thcivic]

I use a free program Fat32 Format, and have two 256GB sticks with all my music uncompressed and these work on legacy players even a good few years old.

[shufty]

...I used Aomei partition assistant std edition (free download) to format a 128gb stick as fat32. With 32kb clusters you'll get about 115gb useable on your 128gb stick. That's a lot of songs 

[Henryge]

Hi There, I got a 32gb stick formatted to fat32 then loaded up my songs, Average song 3 to 4min long then bitrate from lowest to highest 96 Kbps MP3,128 Kbps MP3,192 Kbps MP3,256 Kbps MP3. So with compression you can get between 600 and 1600 minutes of music on a 1 GB space, So on 32 GB 4800 songs to 12,800 songs that is alot of songs playing roughly. Henry

[Kremmen]

Using a third party formatting tool in Windows was the ploy we used on older dashcams to use larger SDCards.

It worked and as posted seems to work in the car.

As posted though, do you need music on a large stick that will last year's.

According to one online calculator you can fit 41,667 songs on 128Gb. That's maybe 125,000 minutes or 2,083 hours or 86 days continuous 24x7 !!!

If you drive 2 hours a day that's ~2 years, including weekends.

[Nicksey]

I use a Scandisk 32GB, with music loaded from a Brennan.. which were all loaded from my CDS. I have 1700 tracks currently on it, and that is more than enough for my journeys.
Incidentally, I always have it in shuffle mode and find it doesn't really shuffle that much! I can guarantee that it will play certain tracks repeatedly, and seems to play in 'blocks'. Some songs I never hear! This was the same in my previous cars, so there must be some glitch in the algorithm for selection. Anyone else noticed this?

[nowster]

The ancient version of Android used on the dashboard probably doesn't have support for anything other than FAT32 (and possibly Linux ext2). ExFAT filesystem drivers only became freely¹ available a few years ago.

This is why the Garmin map update instructions specify a USB stick of no more than 16GB. Anything 32GB or larger might be formatted ExFAT or NTFS.

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¹ Free as in Open Source "free".

[pebbles]

use my old small capacity sticks in the car , keep the newer 128 and 256GB for the PC and laptop.

Most of my music files are in the higher quality flac format and , surprisingly , play fine in the car without conversion to mp3.

[Kremmen]

I'd been using a USB2 stick in all my Civics without issue.

When I plugged it into the Jazz it didn't want to know. I formatted and reloaded it and still no joy.

Got the mini profile USB 3.1 stick and it's never failed.

[nowster]

use my old small capacity sticks in the car , keep the newer 128 and 256GB for the PC and laptop.

Most of my music files are in the higher quality flac format and , surprisingly , play fine in the car without conversion to mp3.

The manual has the supported formats for the touchscreen: MP3, WMA, AAC/M4A (in iTunes format¹), FLAC, PCM/WAV. Also video in MP4¹, AVI, MKV, ASF/WMV.

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¹ Stuff downloaded by get-iplayer works fine.