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what is the optimal usb and ssd drive type/size


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I have resigned myself to the assumption that a HDD won't work, but when I get the 4000 I will still give it a go, even if it means leaving it attached overnight to try and get it to finish.  If it doesn't work, I will just have to "suffer" :) with using the 64GB and 16GB USB sticks and 32GB SD card I already have, augmented by the 80 or so CDs I have on-hand until I can budget for the SSDs.  This still represents a huge increase in available music compared to my current CD-only setup, so not a bad scenario to start with, and massive storage to be added down the road.  I hadn't thought about the idea of gapless playback, but if that's a tradeoff for having such prodigious music choices, I can live with it.  There's tradeoffs in everything; I've been considering a CarPC instead of a head unit, which would solve all music storage/playback issues, but would be even more expensive and complicated to implement.  Even worse, it would limit SiriusXM to app or browser playback via wireless data connection, which is iffy at best in a lot of places, and I can't compromise on not having continual access to Howard Stern. 

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Of course they aren't lossless, we've already been through this... ;)

 

I also like the fact that the player is the iPod itself and the HU is just a controller and audio output.

 

That gives me Smart Playlists and gapless playback, I haven't tried playing something off SD or USB like Dark Side of the Moon or a live CD but if it can't cope with gapless then it's a non starter for me anyway.

It is not gapless off a SSD or SD card, which is a (IMHO) big f-up on Pioneer's part -- it is simply not difficult to open the next file in sequence and read the first couple hundred kilobytes "on the come" in the anticipation of a sequential play.  Hell, my Phatbox was capable of it TEN YEARS AGO (and is still in my Jetta.)

 

Especially being an Android device (as the NEX is), this is galling.  It is simply crap software design exactly as is the folder sort failure, and is only a bit more difficult to do than the folder sort.

 

However, the iPod is not a panacea; it does indexing too, just in iTunes when you load it.  Likewise on the NEX the indexing only takes place ONCE -- when you first connect it.  Now, with my SSD plugged in (all 120Gb of it) the startup time is in the single-digit seconds, although "first index" on a new plugged in disk takes about 15 minutes to complete.

 

Most of my music is in FLAC; the only exception is things that I ripped from CDs a very long time ago and the original disks (I don't steal music) are now rotted sufficiently that they don't read cleanly -- or I would have re-ripped them.  There are also a handful of albums that I purchased as digital music due to the inability to get a rationally-priced CD (e.g. the remaster of Pink Floyd's Division Bell); those are MP3s because I simply don't see the value in a $100+ box set when what I want is the $15 CD and can buy the tracks for $6.

 

I too contemplated building a "CarPC" and some day still may, but the NEX really does "do it better" in a number of respects; HD Radio is very nice when you want it, the Pandora and aha radio passthrough control works fabulously over Bluetooth (including through my BlackBerry 10 phone running the ANDROID clients, which people said wouldn't work -- oh yes it does!), bluetooth streaming works excellently (and amusingly enough my PHONE is gapless when streaming music, along with properly remembering where it was when the car is shut off and then turned back on) although it would be even better if it supported aptX as a Codec since my phone does (and I can stuff a 128Gb SD card in THAT) and finally the hands-free phone interface is quite decent.

 

What would really round out the package would be in-unit voice recognition so you could hit a button on the steering wheel and say "Play artist Pink Floyd, album Echoes".  That requires a lot of CPU to do speaker-independent, however, and the unit simply may not have it -- and it also, for most manufacturers, means licensing the speech recognition package.  For the actual speaking part (voice feedback) Festival is available and works really, really well.

 

As far as I know nobody does that in the aftermarket world as of yet; there are some factory units that do but most of them stink to some degree.  Even just speech annunciation with a way to get into the indexing and use the steering wheel controls to scroll on a drill-down basis would, however, be extremely helpful -- again, this is something the Phatbox did 10 years ago (but it cheats in that it builds the voice prompts on the PC while you were are the disk cartridge, so it is not doing on-the-fly speech synthesis.)

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It is not gapless off a SSD or SD card, which is a (IMHO) big f-up on Pioneer's part -- it is simply not difficult to open the next file in sequence and read the first couple hundred kilobytes "on the come" in the anticipation of a sequential play.  Hell, my Phatbox was capable of it TEN YEARS AGO (and is still in my Jetta.)

 

 

Wow, that is a shame, really that is a deal breaker for me for not using an SSD then. One of my pet peeves is buffering gaps, no excuse for it.

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I'm coming up with an issue that I hope I can get some help with.  I am using a 240GB Corsair SSD with USB 3.0 enclosure.  Since day 1, it was working fine without issue.  My music is around 85gb.  I have a folder for each artist with all their respective songs in their folder.  No subfolders.

 

I used Media Monkey to rearrange the folder structure so that I would have Album subfolders in each artist folder.  The software did that succesfully.  I then transferred all of this to my SSD.  NEX8000 format read it fine, taking the usual 20 minutes or so.  Shut the car down.  When I start car again, all I get is Format Read.  Nothing else.  No SSD activity going on.  Unplug it and plug it back in.  Same thing.  Just Format Read. 

 

I tried it with another SSD, an older 120GB with the same issue.  Tried it again with a 128GB flash drive.  Same issue.

 

The unit is ok with the original folder structure.  So not sure why this is happening.  Any thoughts?  A hard reset perhaps? 

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I would also like to know if this is a MediaMonkey-initiated problem.  I don't use MediaMonkey to do my folder structuring, but I do use it to manage my library otherwise (playlists, deleting lesser bit-rate files when I get higher bit-rate files of same title, etc.).  For folder structuring I use dBpoweramp.

 

iTunes will also do artist/album folder structuring automatically if you 'let' it manage your files... unless your files are FLAC or some other iTunes unsupported format.

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I have FLAC files, otherwise I would just use a 160gb ipod classic and be done with it.

 

Tickerguy's post reminded me.  When I first did the folder restructure, it worked fine.  But track #'s were messed up as it showed:

 

1 - Song name

10 - Song name

2 - Song game

 

So I re-did it so that it would 01, 02, etc...correct sequential order.  And it's after doing that is when I'm having problems.

 

Looks like I will re-format my SSD, and try dBpoweramp instead.

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You can use dBpoweramp to convert your FLAC files to ALAC and use an iPod.

 

My problem there is I have more lossless than my 120GB 6th gen iPod will hold (more than a 160GB newer will hold too).  In the meantime, I just load it with what I am most likely to listen to.  120GB would take what, maybe several weeks of listening 24/7.  I'm seldom in my car for more than 12 hrs at a time and even that is only a few times a year.  Typically not in my car more than an hour a day.  :)

 

Anyway, when you re-did for two-digit track prefixes, did you recreate the folder structure under another directory (main folder) or did you just rename the files and they got put in existing folders?  What I'm wondering is whether the folders have a different time stamp than the files they contain and that is what is causing the problem... similar to the HU's sort problem when you add files to a FAT-formatted drive... which leads to: Did you format your drive as FAT or NTFS?

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What has probably happened is that the drive is being re-indexed, and it may not actually be hung.  The head unit doesn't think it's a "new" drive because the serial number hasn't changed on the volume.

 

I'd either let it sit (it MAY eventually sort itself out) or do the organization on your PC (e.g. renaming of the file names, etc) and then format and re-copy the data onto the SSD.

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So I've been on vacation this week and left this issue at home.  I did initial drive format in NTFS.  But I've tried different SSDs so my head is spinning in trying to remember the different scenarios I've tried.

 

When I re-did the 2 digit track prefixes, it was in the existing folder structure.  Before I left, I had Media Monkey re-do my original music folders, this time copying them to a new folder.

 

I will then use Mini Partition to delete/wipe existing partition on SSD and create a new FAT32 and try that.  I think that will solve the problem.

 

Fingers crossed.

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I reformatted my SSD to Fat32 because I wanted to be able to use DirSorter to resolve the issue that the head unit has with missing one line of code in the directory display routine -- the one that sorts the returned directory list.  The software dude (or dudette) at Pioneer who left that out ought to be strung up by their genitals, but it is what it is and you can resolve it with a FAT32 formatted partition, so that's what I did.

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So back from vacation and re-tried the above to see if it works properly.  I'm getting similar results on the original file structure and new file structure.  First format read takes it usual 20 minutes or so.  When it's done, it starts to play the music and it's showing 12,136 available songs.

 

Shut car down, start it up again.  Format read takes about 5-7 minutes this time.  Plays music...available songs drops down to 5,256 available songs.  Shut down car again and restart and format read takes only 2 minutes before showing a different number of available songs.  Going to the File tab shows several folders being greyed out.

 

Not sure what is driving this issue.  But I think it's the NEX and not the SSD or the music files itself. 

 

Is there a way to do a hard reset as opposed to using the pin in the reset hole on bottom right?

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