Captain Crash
Member Since: 11 Aug 2013
Location: Hampshire
Posts: 15
  
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| USB stick - limit to number of folders |
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I have been adding to the music on my USB stick by digitising my old LP collection.
As a result the number of folders on the stick increased from about 150 to 168 (one for each artist - I'm only up to Carole King in the LPs). My MY14 then suddenly stopped being able to read the stick. I get the errors "USB - no data" or "USB - error reading device".
I am using a 32gb stick formatted as FAT 32.
I tried the workaround of turning off in radio mode, inserting the stick, turning on, and waiting about 10 minutes before switching to USB. Still doesn't work, same errors.
I then tried deleting a few folders so that there are only 150 folders on there again - hey presto the stick works again in the Disco.
So it seems there a undocumented limit of around 155 to 160 folders that you can have on a USB stick. Has anyone else encountered this?
Any tips on organising a large music collection into fewer folders? Do you run into a limit of how many song files can be in one folder?
Thanks in advance! 
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 10th Nov 2015 4:33 pm |
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beef
Member Since: 21 Sep 2015
Location: London
Posts: 26
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Funny you say this. I was messing about adding my music today to a 1TB USB Disk and found the same. I need to check it out a bit more but think it displays about 1000 folders even though there are 1500+ on the disk.
I'm finding the whole infotainment system a little annoying.
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| 10th Nov 2015 7:12 pm |
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Captain Crash
Member Since: 11 Aug 2013
Location: Hampshire
Posts: 15
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Well I've done a bit of googling and, unless a real IT expert comes along to tell me I'm talking b*ll*cks, my problem is down to a limitation of FAT32.
FAT 32 can only handle a max of 512 entries in the "root directory". This means you have a max of 512 folders or files at the top level. In reality it's less because each folder or file uses up more than one entry if you use "long" names (more than 8 letters). On top of this, some devices (and I bet the Disco is one) can recognise only 256 entries (not 512).
So my 160+ artist-name folders used up more than the 256 root directory entries that the Disco can handle, and the system keeled over.
The good news is that, below this level, you can have up to 65,534 files or sub-folders in each folder.
(EDITED) So the solution is easy: just have ONE folder (e.g. Music) at the top level and then put virtually as many artist or album sub-folders as you like under there. Just tried this and it works!
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| 10th Nov 2015 11:08 pm |
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