KevinB656

I'm curious whether it's possible to play music from an external drive plugged into the USB port. I put a bunch of MP3 files on an external drive and plugged the drive into the USB port. I was hoping that I could play the MP3 files, but was unable to find a way to do it. Has anybody else tried this?

Cadx6

You can play music from a USB flash drive (I do it all the time). But - if you're talking about using a large capacity external hard drive, that could be a problem. Flash drives are typically formatted FAT-32 while external hard drives are typically NTFS. I'm not sure if the Audi system will accept that. Maybe good for an afternoon experiment. You could obviously reformat your hard drive to FAT, ExFAT, or FAT-32 but if I'm not mistaken you'll lose a lot of capacity (I know just enough about the intricacies of computers to be dangerous )

KevinB656

Thank you, Cad. What do you select for media source in the MMI when you have your flash drive connected?

Cadx6

As I recall you select the "Media" button on the console & then use the center **** to select what you want to be your source. One of the choices is a USB symbol with either a #1 or #2 under it to determine which one you want to access - depending on which port your device is plugged into. Select one & push the center button. I'm going to be out in mine today - I'll try & verify.......

KevinB656

Ah, yes, I see that now. Thanks. It is showing up as unreadable for me even after I formatted the drive FAT32.

Cadx6

You probably already figured out I didn't know what I was talking about to select which source you want . Use the media button- not the center ****.
You've got my curiosity up now. Tomorrow I'll put some MP3 files on a couple of external drives & see if I can get them to work.

KevinB656

I found the thread linked below where a guy was able to hook a 500gb external drive to his AMI (not available on our cars) and get it to play all of his music. I would think we would be able to do the same thing through USB. No matter what I try, though, the MMI shows the drive as unreadable. (I have deleted the partition and reformatted as FAT32 using Mini-Tool Partition Wizard as the guy in that thread did.) I do not believe it's a power issue because the drive spins up when I plug it in to the USB port.

https://www.audiworld.com/forums/s4-...s-ami-2825821/

Dave W

I just copied my entire PC iTunes music library, about 3000 songs, onto an inexpensive SD card and slapped it into SD slot number one. Works perfectly, all album art present, can sort by artist or album, etc. Instill have a slot free, which i just used last week to do a complete MMI map update.

KevinB656

I have 65k songs. Hence the need for the external drive.

Dave W

How many gigs of data?