Nostromo

So I bought a 4GB SD card for the A4. Dragged a handful of tracks from itunes directly on to the card.

Some of the tracks are coming up grey and AMI reports "track is damaged and cannot be played"

They are all 256K AAC, DRM free, m4a. Some play and some don't. Can't determine a difference that would be causing it. Also the tracks are fine if I plug the SD into my laptop and play them back, so I don't think the files got corrupted.

TheRebbie

Did you properly eject the card from the computer prior to trying it in the car? It is possible that the directory entries or files were not fully written before it was removed. I suspect the computer may be covering up whatever issue in the files/filesystem that the car is complaining about.

I'd reformat the card and try the copy again, making sure to tell the operating system to eject/unmount the card (and to wait for it to complete doing so) prior to removing it.

Nostromo

Ah, good suggestion. I had simply put the computer to sleep last night with the card in and yanked it this AM without properly ejecting it.

Nostromo

OK, it's still not working.

I'm on a Mac, 10.7.4. Reformatted SD card to FAT32. It's a 4GB Sandisk SDHC card.

Bought two brand new songs from iTunes. One plays and one doesn't. I've recopied them, renamed them, tried giving them a mp4 extension, and consistently one will play and the other won't. I can't see anything particularly different in the "get info" panes of either track.

What I have noticed, when the car is reading the SD card, all the tracks are preceded by and number (02, 04, 07....). When you play them the first time, that number disappears. The songs that won't play grey out and retain that number.

The SD card is also populated by OSX's hidden thumbnail files, so you'll see "._04 Song Name" etc...

The only thing I can get to work is transcoding the AAC file into an mp3. Obviously this is a hack. The whole point was to be able to quickly put new songs on the SD card without the hassle of unplugging and syncing my iPod for a single track....

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EDIT: FWIW in case any of you have these tracks and have a spare moment when you're not grilling burgers or shining those Audi rims

Tracks not working: Otis - JayZ | Blue Jeans- Lana del Rey | Little bit of Allright - Big Sugar | The Cascades - Fleet Foxes | Walking on a Dream - Empire of the Sun

Tracks that do work: Mother - Danzig | Mykonos - Fleet Foxes | Wet Hair - Japandroids | Bohemian Like You - Dandy Warhols

adiraval

Hello, I've been experimenting with a SD card with my 2009 Audi A4 for the past few months. After much tweaking, I feel I've reached a point of contentment. Let me provide comments for each of your concerns.

1) I too had the hidden thumbnail issues. Easy fix was to download a program for the Mac called "Blue Harvest."

2) I have an older version of the SD card reader in my car than perhaps you do so I have to get by with MP3 tracks. I'm not an audiophile so I can't really notice a difference in sound quality between iTunes tracks that I've converted for the Audi vs. the standard Apple AAC format.

3) One annoying concern I had was that the SD card functionality lacked a menu to sort songs by artists. Again, this was an easy fix as I downloaded a program called "MMITunes."

4) None of this is as convenient, mind you. But it works and if you move all the songs you want at once, then you will be able to save some time later on.

Just my two cents.

srlbauer

Experiencing the same problem on 2013 A4 Premium. Some m4a songs (within an album) play fine and others report the error. Don't think the error has been reported on any mp3 files. I am guessing the root cause has not been identified. :-/

Nostromo

I gave up. There's no rhyme or reason - I can buy two songs from itunes right now and one might work and one might not.

At this point I just throw everything on my ipod or stream it from my phone over bluetooth.

TheTopBloke

I am having this problem in a 2014 A4 w/ Audi Concert. The manual says it will take up to 32GB and I am using a 16GB with level 10, which is supposed to be the highest speed sd card.

I picked up some new iTunes music, and I copied and pasted it exactly as I had with previous music, and about half of them come up as damaged.

So I went and removed the ._ files and tried again, still same problem. Then I removed the tracks, recopied the tracks, and took out the ._ before putting the sdcard in the car, and still same problem.

I think what is happening is there is some sort of cache that is being written and might need to be cleared in the Audi unit, then put the SD Card in.

But for me this is a brand new car, so I have no clue how to do that at the moment. If I make any progress on this I will repost. If anyone knows how I can fix it, please please please let me know!

anonymousmoose

Try converting the songs to MP3 files and test.

TheTopBloke

I found a program for Mac that works for me. Google Max-0.9.1.

If you rip cd's to iTunes be certain they are aiff format.

Then, when you encode them, send them directly to the SD card as mp4's, but be sure they are pure aac

Why use mp3 when you can use mp4? I do notice a quality difference. And thus far everything I have ripped has worked perfectly.

As for downloading from iTunes, I haven't tried anything new yet, but I understand the downloads are mp4 format, but with some turd packets included from Apple, which is why some songs play and some don't.

At this time I'm assuming if you just encode them through Max as described above the mp4s produced will work just fine.