I am facing issues getting music to play in a reliable way from my USB stick. The car is recognising the files, it shows the artists and albums and I can start playing. However, it doesn't play the tracks in the expected order. It doesn't follow the embedded metadata field for track number. I thought it might be following the file name or file modification date, but that is not it either. Also, it doesn't play all tracks from an album, only 3-5 of them, and then stops. It is not set to shuffle play.

 

When I have the list of albums on the screen, is there supposed to be a way to directly start playing all of the tracks on one of the listed albums? When I click on the album name, it opens the track list and I can then start playing one track by pressing it, but is this the only way?

 

Is there a list of recommended USB sticks that work well? I am using a SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe – it has a USB-C plug so plugs directly in to the car without any adapter.

Edited 3 February, 20251 yr by beneix

Have you tried using voice control? In mine I just ask Laura to “play album name” and it plays all tracks as expected.

 

I note you’re in France, I don’t know if voice control supports the French language as well as it does English; hopefully it does.

1 hour ago, beneix said:

I am facing issues getting music to play in a reliable way from my USB stick. The car is recognising the files, it shows the artists and albums and I can start playing. However, it doesn't play the tracks in the expected order. It doesn't follow the embedded metadata field for track number. I thought it might be following the file name or file modification date, but that is not it either. Also, it doesn't play all tracks from an album, only 3-5 of them, and then stops. It is not set to shuffle play.

 

When I have the list of albums on the screen, is there supposed to be a way to directly start playing all of the tracks on one of the listed albums? When I click on the album name, it opens the track list and I can then start playing one track by pressing it, but is this the only way?

 

Is there a list of recommended USB sticks that work well? I am using a SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe – it has a USB-C plug so plugs directly in to the car without any adapter.

I also use a USB stick but I do not have any problems, it comes up with the file of the tracks and then I click on the album/track I want then I tap on the play button in the first tract and it just plays the rest one at a time.

one thing come to mind have you got " Random" ticked ?

I don't think it has any thing to do with the type of stick, I have a cheep one off Ebay

9 hours ago, RADIOTWO said:

one thing come to mind have you got " Random" ticked ?

No, like I wrote, shuffle is not activated.

 

This is really weird - I have just spent some time in the car making notes of the playing order. It turns out that it plays one song, then skips three, then plays a song, skips three, etc. So on my Best of Blondie album, which contains:

01.Heart_of_Glass
02.Denis
03.The_Tide_Is_High
04.In_the_Flesh
05.Sunday_Girl
06.Dreaming
07.Hanging_On_the_Telephone
08.Rapture
09.Picture_This
10.Union_City_Blue
11.(Im_Always_Touched_by_Your)_Presence,_Dear
12.Call_Me
13.Atomic
14.Rip_Her_to_Shreds

 

...the Octavia plays Heart_of_Glass, then Sunday_Girl, then Picture_This, then Atomic - and then it goes to another album.

 

These files are FLAC, so I also tried with a Hall & Oates album that is MP3. Exact same behaviour, every fourth song is played.

 

When I play the same USB stick on anything else such as my PC, this does not happen. Any ideas, anyone?

 

My System Information:
Hardware H67

Software 1985

Display unit/control panel hardware H49

Display unit/control panel software 2103

Navigation database 25.1

Media Codec 3.1.4

I had to do the below before I could get mine working well.

 

1. Create folder using artist name

2. Create album folder under artist folder using album name

3. Name the files in order of tracks i.e. 01-heart of glass.mp3, 02-Denis.mp3

 

Plus you need to make sure all meta data matches and track numbering is right. I use MP3Tag on windows to do that. I think the info centre uses the id3 data to index the albums.

Metadata is required for FLAC files too.

 

Sounds like your example above does not have the full metadata required

 

Edited 3 February, 20251 yr by Novascape

2 minutes ago, Novascape said:

I had to do the below before I could get mine working well.

 

1. Create folder using artist name

2. Create album folder under artist folder using album name

3. Name the files in order of tracks i.e. 01-heart of glass.mp3, 02-Denis.mp3

 

Plus you need to make sure all meta data matches and track numbering is right. I use MP3Tag on windows to do that. I think the info centre uses the id3 data to index the albums.

Metadata is required for FLAC files too

 

That is exactly what I have done. The file structure on the stick is D:\Music\<aac, flac, mp3>\<artist>\<album>\<"01. Track1", "02. Track2", ...> and all files on the stick have been run through MP3Tag to make sure the metadata is correct.

I don't know how orthodox my method is, or even if I'll be explaining it clearly enough, but I have a simple Sandisk stick and have arranged music into Folders saved to the root. I've individually named each folder as either a dedicated album name, or a compilation name to contain a selection of tracks.

From my PC I just drag the tracks (mp3) to the relevant folders on the stick. I don't try and save an entire album by album name, instead I copy all the tracks from an album into the relevant folder. Everything works fine and plays in the order I've saved them, any relevant track or album data shows on the screen as each track plays.

When plugged into the car's C drive (using the innermost of the 2 console sockets) , the infotainment menu recognises the stick as 'Partition 1', I click on that and the list of folders appears on the screen ready to open, I can then choose to either 'play all' or scroll down to specific tracks. I ignore the infotainment's 'album' and 'track' menu, and only open 'partition 1'. Never had any issues with this method.

P.S. Looking back on the posts, my method seems to be much the same as @Novascape described. Numbering each track in the folder is important for the playing sequence.

Your problem is that you have to ignore the infotainments attempt to sort your files for you.  On the track selection screen move up through the directory structures to the top where it gives the option of artist / album etc.  Go the bottom of that list to where its says 'USB xxxx'.  Select that directory and then you will find it behaves more as you would expect.

Edited 3 February, 20251 yr by avi4tor

@avi4tor Thanks, I realise that is a possibility - but it means that you lose all the convenient navigation using metadata. The metadata-based navigation is supposed to work, and I have not heard other people here say that they all use the basic navigation you describe; the metadata-based navigation seems to work for them.

I did a thorough search of different keywords across the whole forum and found this post:

 

This poster's problem was slightly different, but sufficiently related to mine that I decided to try the solution. I took all my music off the USB stick, formatted it as NTFS, put the music back and – fingers crossed – it now seems to work as it should!

So, if anyone else is having strange issues with their music on a USB stick, it seems Škoda can't handle exFAT.

Unfortunately, I have to take my words back. The issues have come back. I am now trying to figure out what might be factors in this:

File system (FAT32, exFAT, NTFS)
Music format (MP3, AAC, FLAC)

Folder structure on the stick

Size of the stick (some claim too large can be a problem)

Brand and model of the stick

Will update here if I find something that works 😢

In terms of the formatting I never found NTFS to work well when I was setting up my usb stick when I had to move from my MK3 to MK4.

Most usb chatter on internet state FAT for up to 32gb and exFAT for anything bigger.

As a general question. Have you set the Meta data clean and correct for every single music file? I use MP3tag to make sure each track has the right data as the car uses it to index.

The key items I make sure are done are

1. Track name - track number followed by track name

2. Album name

3. Artist

4. Track number

5. Genre

6. Add 500x500 max size art to track (instead of album picture in usb folder)

This will then allow car to index tracks correctly into the folders

Albums

Artists

Genre

Etc

I would then access via media folders by going into the album folder and all tracks from folder would play in right order. Or while my voice worked say

Play album "Queen's greatest hits"

Play song "Free bird"

I had loads of issues with the metadata to start with. If it's not correct it sticks loads of tracks together and your issues sound more like metadata problems.

P.s. it can only handle 1 instance of say "greatest hits" in album name and groups all albums together no matter artist. So you need to make sure every album name is different

Using the above mine works on a 256gb usb on both my Skoda and new VW ID.7

Hope this helps

Thanks @Novascape . I have always been quite thorough with my metadata; I download album art using Album Art Downloader and embed it using MP3Tag. I use the latter to make sure my file names are consistent, etc. My collection of digital music is fairly well maintained as far as metadata is concerned, and it has always worked well on my Slimserver, various DLNA players and on my mobile phones. However, I decided to give it an extra check and realised that many of my files lacked the "Album Artist" tag (as opposed to the "Artist" tag, which was present in all files). It appears this is not a problem for mainstream players but might be the reason Columbus doesn't work well. Consequently, I used MP3Tag to rectify the issue and (touch wood) it seems to have fixed the issue. I have yet to spend proper time in the car to verify it's all working well, but early signs are good. I will report back here with confirmation after some time.

(As a curiosity, I can report that if the "Album Artist" tag is blank, then Columbus will report the "Artist" and "Album" as "Unknown" as well, even with these tags present in the file.)

Edited 29 May, 20251 yr by beneix

I've got about 200 albums setup on mine and not using album Artist for at least 90% of the tracks

I've been using a Kingston Data Traveler 80 USB Stick (256GB) formatted to ExFAT with single partition. data is in the below order:

\\Albums\Artist\Album name \ Tracks

i.e.

O:\Albums\Beastie Boys\Hello Nasty\01-Beastie_Boys-Super_Disco_Breakin.mp3

O:\Albums\Beastie Boys\Hello Nasty\02-Beastie_Boys-The_Move.mp3 ....etc

O:\Albums\Beastie Boys\Ill Communication\01-beastie_boys-sure_shot.mp3

O:\Albums\Beastie Boys\Ill Communication\02-beastie_boys-tough_guy.mp3 ...etc

O:\Albums\Biffy Clyro\Only Revolutions\01-biffy_clyro-the_captain.mp3

O:\Albums\Biffy Clyro\Only Revolutions\02-biffy_clyro-that_golden_rule.mp3 ...etc

MP3 tag is setup with just the below metadata

Title

Artist

Album

Track

Year

Genre

And Tag type is mostly "ID3v2.3"

Normally if I remove the USB and plug it back in it can take a couple of on/off times of car ignition (getting in/out) to index all my tracks correctly into the sub menu's "Artists/Albums/Genres" on the media centre lists.

If your setup matches that I would say its either the USB Stick your using or something wrong with car infotainment.

When I was first setting mine up for my Mk4 after moving from Mk3 I was trying to use an external M2. SSD drive and that just would not work at all properly. think there was some incompatiblity between the SSD drive hardware and car. Just wouldn't read correctly. I read a few forums where there was a lot of discussion about different USB stick models. Some would work, some wouldn't