ChrisXConnor

Hey,
Just got a 2011 EX-L, brought an external hard drive full of tunes to the dealership expecting it to interface right away, got a

"NOT SUPPORTED"

prompt on the screen. The car salesman's iphone hooked up right away, assuming my droid will also.

But, is there a certain way you have to format an external drive that the EX-L interface will like? A way to make it think it is an ipod, or other similar mp3 player?

I was thinking I could get a usb-powered terabyte drive. Any help would be real appreciated.

Thanks

ChrisXConnor

doing a little research, apparently there's a 700 folder, 65,535 file limit, so there goes my terabyte idea. and it doesn't play flac i don't think which is also kind of lame. if anyone could help to shed some light on this formatting thing though I'd really appreciate it.

MelJ

It may only accept FAT32 formatted drives. My PS3 is like that and I think the XBox360 is the same way. I'm somewhat of a computer nerd, but I can't remember why they only accept those formats.

ChrisXConnor

you are indeed correct and in this instance it was a case of RTFM (lol.)

it also says not to use hard drives, but flash drives (we'll see about that though,) and I do have a 4th gen ipod laying around somewhere that needs a battery so I'll figure something out.

Thanks

MelJ

Lol. You can probably still use your external, but you'd have to stay within that song limit. Although I'd see it as kinda bulky in the car.

ChrisXConnor

yeah but just the idea of all that **** at my disposal at once is a cool idea. 65k songs is roughly 65gb, give or take. luckily one of my externals is already formatted for fat32. it's a one that a friend gave me i didn't even realize it was formatted that way. think it's 120gb but at least i won't have to hunt down a batt for the ipod or buy one online. guess i just can't fill it all the way.

oh, if you meant bulky as in the external being big, it hides under the armrest in the center console. that's where the usb port is. i thought you meant too many songs at first.

LTDan

Were you able to get the USB hard drive to work? The owner's manual spells out which file types are compatible, along with which iPods are compatible. The compatible formats are MP3, WAV, and AAC, I think. The iPod list isn't complete though. It doesn't list iPhones at all, just iPods, nanos, and iPod touches. But my iPhone 3G works just fine with the USB interface. And 65k songs is an awful lot of songs. I'm not even sure you could listen to every single one once if you played them continuously for 100k miles. You don't necessarily need to split all the songs out into different folders. The stereo will split them out by artist and album automatically and you can scroll through them that way. Oh, and it would take forever to find one specific song on a drive with 65k songs on it using the stereo dial. So, I'm not sure how practical it would be to load up a hard drive with more than 65k songs to carry around with you. It sounds cool and all, but would probably be overly cumbersome in practice. I just hook up my iPhone with about 500-600 songs that I really like and push random and just skip a song if I don't feel like listening to it.

ChrisXConnor

yeah, you are probably right. i am postng/thinking all this without successfully interfacing anything yet. i did try the fat32 drive last night and it was unsupported. was drinking a little bit, the car was in the garage, but i don't think that had anything to do with it.
going to try interfacing my phone now, that will probably work. put a couple flac songs on there to, highly doubt they are going to work. extreme first world problems here. going to try to hunt down a 4th gen ipod battery today. don't feel like ordering one online though that's what i might have to do ultimately. they're like $7.
and you're right, it gives a list of what's compatible, like 4th gen nano, etc, but doesn't say anything about 4th gen 60gb. it does say flash drives and now they make 120gb flash drives which is ridiculous, as is the price tag, and i now they've made 60gb ones but i don't really feel like buying one of them.

ChrisXConnor

am i crazy though thinking there's got to be a hack, or should be soon, or some type of software to put on an external that makes your car think it's an ipod? would love this thing to play flac but doubt it's going to.

LTDan

The list of compatible devices in the manual is incomplete. Other devices will work too, and I would say your 60GB iPod is likely to work. Have you tried plugging in the iPod with the dead battery into the USB port yet? It may be able to get enough power through the USB line to work. You can at least do that to make sure it'll work before buying a battery for it. And what's the advantage of using flac over an MP3? Most music I've seen pretty much everywhere is in WAV, AAC, MP3, or WMA (I think these are compatible too) format.

MelJ

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, which basically means the audio is the best of the best. If you really really enjoy audio, this is the type of music you want. It takes up more space, but it is worth it.

ChrisXConnor

you are a genius. hahaha. i probably never would have thought of that. pretty sure it's at my parent's house and i'm going over there tomorrow. will find and try it out.
flac doesn't work, unfortunately, but i was kind of expecting that. my phone's internal storage is 8gb and that holds a surprising amount of stuff.

LTDan

Yeah, I have about 500 songs on my 8 GB iPhone and it's only half full. But listening to those 500 songs back to back takes about 26 hours of driving. I only leave the songs on my phone that I really like, so I don't have to skip a song very often.