Redd

Bob-
The problem is that car makers are cheap, and car audio makers are cheap. There are old and well-defined limits for file capacities, and different operating systems have limits as well. For instance, the old MS-DOS could not deal with a drive larger than 2GB in size, sue to memory limits and how high the hardware of the time could count, so to speak. But the hardware and the OSes kept being expanded and the new limits are somewhere in the range of "well beyond anything you can buy or we can build". At least, until next year.(G)

Meanwhile the cheapskates don't want to pay license fees, which would get them an operating system with modern limits. They write their own, cheaply and crudely, and someone says "eh, 10,000 is enough". Sony, Pioneer, Kenwood, all the car stereo makers have similar limits, often 1024 folders, in total, on the media. And/or 10,000 files no matter how they are stored. Sometimes less, only 512 folders on the media and not more than 1024 files in any one of them, again with the 10,000 file limit.

Then there are the media. While a USB interface can range into the terabytes, SD cards are a joke. The SD standards call for a 2GB media limit on SD cards, that's all. There's a higher limit for SDHC cards at 32GB. And beyond that is SDXC, with a limit of something like 4TB (terabytes!) when it is properly implemented. My first smartphone took SD cards, 2GB and that's all. The replacement took SDXC, but only up to 64GB, which was generous since nothing larger than 32GB was on the market at that time. The latest phone I have, takes 128GB cards, while the latest ones being sold now take 256GB.
SDXC obsoleted the old SDHC standard something like seven years ago, and there was advance warning before those were released. So if the cheapskates at Audi and whoever makes the music systems were doing their jobs?
Right, you'd be able to stick 128GB SDXC cards in the dash and play what you pleased.

And even on the USB interface, where you can do this? The Audi music player only sees files in alphabetical order, it can't see the track numbers or play an album in track sequence, unless you rename all the tracks with numbers up front. Another sign that someone wrote a quick and dirty OS for the player. There's no other excuse for it, Audi simply cheaped out on a feature that most users would never see until it is too late, and they've bought the car.
A $10 app on my smartphone, running the free Android OS, can do better. Inexcusable.

shtaka

What is the best way to organize music files? I copied music to an SD card and as Dr. Strangelove said they are listed in alpha order and not by artist or album. How do I get them from iTunes onto the SD card in album order?

thompsam

I have my music set up in a hierarchical structure on the card:

Artist folder --> Album name folder --> Songs

As someone early in the thread pointed out, the songs will be indexed/played in alphabetical order so if you want the songs to be played in the original album order, you need to modify the file name of the songs appropriately:

A - song 1
B - song 2
...
or

01 - song 1
02 - song 2
...

I've always used really long file names for all my music on my computer where I include the artist and album name, i.e, "Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run - 01 - Thunder Road.mp3" and thus the Audi plays things in the correct sequence.

Nelson Minar

So far I'm finding the 2017 A3 B&O MMI's SD card support mostly fine. It supports 128GB SDXC cards just fine, the manual even says so. It handles a lot more music formats than I expected. It does a pretty good job with indexing. The one stupid thing I've hit is the 10,000 file limit and that's because some lazy programmer had a static limit and didn't think to increase it over the years. I've written code like that too, I sympathize. It has nothing to do with some big topic like operating system licenses, it's just sloppy programming.

shtaka, I think the best way to organize a music library is proper metadata. Embedded in the file itself are fields like "Artist" and "Album" that the Audi player, and many other players like iTunes, Sonos, etc will use to identify the music. If you're buying music online they'll be tagged correctly already. If you're downloading unlicensed music from high quality services (RIP what.cd) they'll also be tagged. But if you have music from unusual sources they may not be tagged. The best thing you can do is spend some time editing your library with iTunes or MediaMonkey or the like adding the metadata.

On top of that, I think the MMI supports playlists created by various software. That'd be useful for making a set of albums in a particular order, etc. I don't use playlists myself so can't comment from experience.

Redd

I don't know about the MMI but the base system does not recognize metadata beyond the artist and track name.

There are free tools that will edit metadata, some manually, others in batch mode, with varying abilities and prices. I finally paid for the full version of dbpoweramp (30 day free trial) because it seems to do everything I might ever need, and is able to do it in batch mode as well. So I can point it at one folder or one drive, tell it "make copies of all these, rename them "[track#] - [tracktitle]" convert to MP3 at a specific quality level, whatever I need.

I also keep things in an organized hierarchy, folders by artist name, subfolders by album name, but that reflects how I tend to listen to things, either by album or by "whole media" random play. (Which definitely isn't as random as it should be, either.)

I don't bother embedding the album art (cover) in each track, especially in the car where the base music system wouldn't show it anyhow. And even if it did...my eyes belong elsewhere.(G)

Nelson Minar

My B&O system (2017 A3 Prestige) definitely is using Artist, Album, Genre. It'll show me a list of all songs tagged "Jazz", for instance, or let me browse a list of all my albums. It also shows album art when music is playing. At least, for the first 10,000 files >-(.

Redd

I'd bet that B&O already had the code written to read and display that metadata, and offered it in many products to many companies.

And no doubt someone at Audi said "Sure, but can't you put cheaper code in OUR product and shave a couple of cents off each unit?"

Having heard B&O systems in a number of cars...they beat all hell out of the old Delco or (haha) the original AudioVox brands. But they aren't quite the same as B&O home equipment, sold by B&O themselves.

I have a circa-1980 "metal" cassette recording of the classic Telearc "master" quality LP of the 1812 overture, recorded with genuine cannon fire. When played on the original Audiovox crap, the stereo would literally go dead during the canon fire. The amp simply had no power left for sustained *true* 20-200Hz bursts.

Subwoofer? That's for the tin-eared rubes. But the AM stuff, that makes the 4AM pork belly futures market information sound just fine, thank you.(G)