How to format 64 GB USB sticks/SD cards so that the Hifi Professional can read them (

[Squddie]

[crossposted in case anyone here needs this]

Bit of my continuation of my EQ measurement thread:
http://www.z4-forum.com/forum/viewto...p?f=23&t=73993

I finally managed to format USB sticks larger than 32 GB so that the Hifi Professional in the E89 can read them. Tried a 64 bit card, no problems observed, reads all music and playlists off it.

mkfs.vfat -F32 -s64 -v /dev/sdm1 # or whereever yours lives

This 64 GB formatted one works in the e89, in Canon Powershots, in a Canon 1D Mk 4 (which cannot format such a card but works if you formatted it that way), my dashcam, Rockbox running on a Sansa Clip Zip and my Zoom H4N (which previously recognized 64 GB cards but failed to correctly use them).

If your OS doesn't make mkfs.vfat the settings translate to this:

• Format as FAT32 (32 bit FATs)
• 64 sectors per cluster
• 32 sectors per track

Should look like this:

00000000: EB 58 90 6D 6B 64 6F 73  66 73 00 00 02 40 40 00  .X.mkdosfs...@@.
00000001: 02 00 00 00 00 F8 00 00  20 00 40 00 00 00 00 00  ........ .@.....
00000002: 00 78 8B 07 80 3C 00 00  00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00  .x...<..........
00000003: 01 00 06 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
00000004: 00 00 29 87 74 A9 8C 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  ..).t..
00000005: 20 20 46 41 54 33 32 20  20 20 0E 1F BE 77 7C AC    FAT32   ...w|.
00000006: 22 C0 74 0B 56 B4 0E BB  07 00 CD 10 5E EB F0 32  ".t.V.......^..2
00000007: E4 CD 16 CD 19 EB FE 54  68 69 73 20 69 73 20 6E  .......This is n
00000008: 6F 74 20 61 20 62 6F 6F  74 61 62 6C 65 20 64 69  ot a bootable di
00000009: 73 6B 2E 20 20 50 6C 65  61 73 65 20 69 6E 73 65  sk.  Please inse

[Asbjorn]

Thanks for sharing. Could you elaborate on how you use playlists with the "import from USB" function? Can it generate top-level folders or otherwise sort music according to some playlist format?

I have noticed that mine normally creates a new folder called USB[number] during import, unless it somehow thinks I used the USB drive before. Then it adds the songs to one of the old USB folders, making it almost impossible to find the songs I just imported. I would really like to get more organized than this.

Also, do you have any idea which mp3/music format is best to use for importing? I have a suspicion that the system converts the files so that no matter if you imported CDs or mp3s at xxx bitrate, it becomes mp3/wma/whatever @ yyy kps internally (for space reasons). I would love to avoid letting the system do any (probably loss-generating) conversions, and just upload files with the best possible bit-rate / encoding directly.

[Squddie]

I only tried mp3 and wav so far as far as the music format goes. I should try flac.

The playlists are fuzzy. The Hifi Professional thing has some thing going on where the USB disk is searched for playlists in the background, so that you don't have to wait after inserting. This has the odd consequence that it first claims there are no playlists at all and later there are some. A bigger problem I have now is that for a large USB disk it seems to remember playlists that I removed and not pick up the new ones.

As far as playlists format is concerned it seems to be flexible. Ending must be m3u (m3u8 does not work). Relative paths ../../folder/foo.mp3, absolute paths /folder/foo.mp3 both seem to work, MS-DOS and Unix line ending both seem to work. Weighted playlists by repeating lines multiple times to boost their weight in random play seem to work, except that the undocumented limit for size seems low.

The thing crashes and burns with large numbers of large playlists. What I do is that I make a subset of playlists available to the BMW by renaming them from m3u8 to m3u, and the real music players pick up both. But as I said even doing that, right now it seems to be confused as to picking up new playlists. But I didn't really force the issue yet. It is annoying to test this as you have to physically move the USB disk.

In the end large amounts of music and a smaller number of reasonable size playlists do work.

[Squddie]

Oh, actual import. Sorry I have not used "import from USB", I'm not sure I even have that. I have the Hifi Professional but not the navigation screen.

[Asbjorn]

Originally Posted by Squddie

Oh, actual import. Sorry I have not used "import from USB", I'm not sure I even have that. I have the Hifi Professional but not the navigation screen.

Alright, thanks anyway! I'm stuck on the old platform, so it is either DVD, AUX or import from USB. I am not listening to Chinese FM radio... it is just not happening...