Post
by MikeFish » Thu Oct 31, 2013 6:39 pm
Ok it was with AMI with USB drive but connected to MMI not RNS-E, not sure if this makes any difference as I don't know enough about how it works i.e. is the limit set by AMI or by the headunit. Anyway here is a copy of a post from the A5OC forum:
I can confirm the 4,000 song limit exists on the AMI USB. I recently bought the Audi Legends 500GB USB drive and was stuck in a small town, had some time to kill, took lots of notes while testing.
Summary:
- The AMI USB interface will only discover 1,000 MP3 files in a subfolder, it seems to be the first 1,000 in the order they were created, not sure if this is always true.
- The AMI USB interface will only discover 4,000 MP3 files total, but the order is unknown. Even if the folders and files are created in a specific order, the missing files are not always the first or last ones copied, not sure if there's a predictable order.
- The AMI USB interface will only discover 999 MP3 files in the root folder, and it's not always the first 999 created, not sure if there's an order. These files count against the 4,000 file limit.
- The number of subfolders does not count against the 4,000 file limit.
- The drive is detected in 4 seconds, and the first song starts playing in about 7 seconds (but these were really small 500KB test files on a warm day, larger files or cold weather may slow it down some).
- Browsing between folders is much faster than 32GB SD cards, but not quite as fast as the Jukebox internal drive.
- Even with 4,000 songs playable on the AMI USB, all the songs on the 32GB SD card were still playable. It seemed like all 4,000 were there, including the newest ones, but with \ARTIST\ALBUM\ subfolders it's hard to tell. All the songs on the Jukebox internal drive were still playable, not sure if there were any missing.
- Even though the 4,000 songs limit is a bummer, it's still worthwhile to me because I can have artists A-L on SD, artists M-Z on USB plus favorites on the Jukebox. It's much faster to switch the source than eject one SD card and insert another, wait for it to load.
- All my songs have tags, but the MMI doesn't show some of them. Deleting the album art has fixed this every time. This happens on USB, SD and Jukebox.
Details:
- Purchased off eBay, from genuine.audi.parts. Here's a link to the item, not sure how long that will be active. This has a white case with the Audi rings and a big black 1. The box title is: Externe 500 GB USB-Festplatte "Legends", below that in English: External 500 GB USB hard drive "Legends".
- This is just a USB drive with the Audi logo, nothing specific to AMI about it. The only reference to AMI is on the box: "Universal storage medium for Audi Music Interface, Notebooks or PCs in "Legends" edition". The user manual doesn't mention MMI, AMI, or anything about Audi or cars at all. The user manual says the recommended file system is NTFS for added security and all the instructions are for Windows.
- The drive came with one existing partition (a.k.a. Volume) named "AUDI drive" that filled the entire drive and formatted with NTFS. It had one file in the root, "Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Scherzo).wma".
- Came with a USB cable that appears to be a normal type B mini-USB on the drive end, but it's not, my cables have the same shape but won't fit. The computer end of the cable has dual connectors, in case your computer doesn’t provide enough power on a single port. Seems to work OK on my computer with only one attached, and works with only one cable connected to the AMI. A blue light shows power, and blinks when data is being read or written.
- Without making any changes to it I connected it to AMI, the blue power light came on, but didn't blink at all (like it does when data is being read), the source button showed no device connected. Left it connected for a few minutes, nothing.
- Connected it to the Windows 7 computer and shrank the original NTFS volume, created a new one that is 32GB, which is not large enough to hold all of my music but 32GB is the largest size that Windows 7 will allow you to format with FAT32. Anything larger and Win7 only offers NTFS and exFAT (freeware tools exist that will format larger volumes with FAT32). Months ago when I did some testing with SD cards, only FAT32 was recognized.
- Connected it to AMI and the blue light came on and blinked a few times, almost immediately the Source button showed the 32GB volume as available, but no music was on it yet.
- Connected it to Win7 and wrote a PowerShell script (included below) to copy 4,001 MP3 files to a single subfolder (no files in the root). I used the smallest file I could find (500KB) so they would copy quickly & fit on the 32GB volume. The script copies the same file 4,001 times with a unique name (0001.mp3 - 4001.mp3).
- Connected it to AMI and it showed the subfolder but only 1,000 songs. When I first checked it only showed 400 songs, but the blue light was still blinking, after a few seconds it showed 1,000 and stopped. I think the S5 owner's manual says you shouldn’t put more than 500 in a single folder, but all 1,000 seemed to play fine and were accessed quickly. The other 3,001 songs were missing. You can quickly see how many songs are in a folder by turning the scroll wheel really fast so the "jump" menu comes up which shows the total songs in the folder.
- Connected it to Win7 and deleted all the existing files & folders. Changed the PowerShell script to copy 4,001 MP3 files to multiple subfolders containing 1,000 files each (no files in the root). This created a folder structure like this, in numerical order:
\Test 1000\
0001.mp3 - 1000.mp3
\Test 2000\
1001.mp3 - 2000.mp3
\Test 3000\
2001.mp3 - 3000.mp3
\Test 4000\
3001.mp3 - 4000.mp3
\Test 5000\
4001.mp3
- Connected it to AMI and waited for it to finish loading, it showed all 5 subfolders but 1 song was missing from subfolder 4 (meaning there was 4,000 songs showing and 1 missing). The missing song wasn't the last one (\Test 5000\4001.mp3) like you would expect, but the second to last (\Test 4000\4000.mp3). I didn't play them all but I sampled a bunch from each folder and they all seemed to play fine.
- Disconnected it, waited a few seconds, reconnected it to AMI and waited for it to finish loading. This time it showed all subfolders but a different song was missing. The missing song was \Test 2000\2000.mp3. The other folders all had the correct songs, so again 4,000 songs showing and 1 missing, but not the same song. Tried that again, and this time all songs showed except for \Test 3000\3000.mp3
- Connected it to Win7 and copied 1,001 MP3 files in numerical order to the root, left the existing files in the subfolders. Connected it to AMI, only 999 files in the root showed up, but it wasn't the first 999, some in the middle were missing and the Test 3000 subfolder was missing entirely. I didn't do much testing with the root folder because my music is organized in \ARTIST\ALBUM\ subfolders.
- Connected it to Win7 and deleted the partition, created a new 60GB partition with the freeware tool Fat32Formatter.exe. Modified the script to copy 4,100 larger files into 100 files per subfolder, so it had 4,100 MP3 files in 41 subfolders. The AMI only showed 4,000 songs from the first 40 folders, this time it showed the last folder but said no playable tracks found. Earlier the folders themselves were missing, this time it was showing but empty.
- A few months ago I quickly tested a generic 120GB USB drive that behaved the same way, I copied 8,000 songs to it but I could only see some of them.
- I didn't do any testing with non-MP3 files (like .WMA). I didn't do any testing with non-music files (like .TXT) to see if ignored files change the total count or the way it enumerates.
- I didn't do any testing with partitions/volumes larger than 60GB. Not sure what the maximum partition size is, but the average size of my MP3 files is 6.7MB, so I only need about 27GB (6.7 * 4000 / 1024).
