4200NEX File Browser and Large Music - Overcome Problems

[ChrisKemper]

The short -> Great Unit Marred by a Substandard File Browser

 

When loading a Fresh Media card, SD or USD (Only change the USB when the car is powered down), you MUST wait for the entire collection to read before powering down the head-unit.  A fresh card refers to not only the first insertion, but also if you remove the card to add new music.  IF you power down the head unit before this, you will need to factory reset the unit …. for it to again read past 90% on larger music collections and a tendency to freeze playback on some powerups requiring a restart of the vehicle.   

 

The file browser will quickly load to show all the artists you have, greyed out.  You will NOT be able to select these artists for play until the ID3v2.3 tags have been read in and the selection becomes white.

 

You must use ID3v2.3 tags and REMOVE all other tags. 

 

While we are at it, you should ONLY have music files (mp3, flac, etc) in your folders.  JPG, DB, INI, etc files will cause SIGNIFICANTLY longer initial load times.

 

99 GB worth of MP3s (about 400 artists worth) takes nearly an hour to load once clean.  Each repower takes about 5 minutes to re-read the SD card, assuming the card has NOT been removed.  It takes about 15 seconds to resume playing.  

 

Fully load your SD source before shutting down the car to load your USB1 source.

 

Sadly, when you click on the file explorer it takes you to the top of the folder.  This means if you are on Artist Queen and you want to play Queensryche you will need to scroll down from your ‘A’ artists.   

 

The file list is not in perfect Alphabetical order.  For example, Amanda Palmer is listed after Element 101 but before Ellie Goulding. 

 

The Long ->The Story of how use SD/USB stored Music & Album Art

 

I use the Pioneer AVH4200-NEX unit to play primarily from 2 sources -> a USB thumbdrive in the top slot that contains up to 3 audiobooks at a time (frequently updated) and a SD card that contains my entire music collection (seldom updated).  Both drives are formatted as NTFS - SanDisk Ultra 200GB Class 10 Micro SDXC & SanDisk Ultra Fit 64GB USB 3.0.

 

The SD card stores the music in the following structure: Category/Artist/Album/*.mp3. 

I only have 4 categories: Children, Music, Musical, & Soundtrack

 

Upon receiving the unit I noticed that a great deal of the Music library was poorly tagged  due to using different tagging methods over 15+ years of turning my crawl spaced stored CDs into 320kbps MP3s.  After messing around with a few different solutions BlissHQ was used to have proper ID3v2.3 tags with embedded art.  All other tags, including APE have been removed. 

Prior to the upgrading the firmware from v1.01 to v1.03 I could resume playing SD Music or USB Audiobook within 10-15 seconds of starting the car.  If I were to add a fresh song to the SD card, it would take about 20 minutes to re-populate/read for full playback access, however I could play most pre-existing songs off of the SD card or listen to a USB stored Audiobook while this occurred.  The only issue was a few greyed out file folders and some of the Artists would be listed out of alphabetical order -> it is this issue that prompted me to try the latest and greatest firmware.  

 

With no changes to any of the files on the USB or SD card, after the firmware update the SD car would not read past 90% and every time I restart the radio it begins reading from 40-60%.  MANY of the artists would no longer populate and would often be unable to play either USB or SD without a vehicle restart.  The ONLY action I took for this to happen was to remove the SD and USB drives so that I could install the v1.03 firmware.

 

After talking to Pioneer it appears the unit has no way to roll back to the prior firmware and they suggested that I do a factory restore -> it keeps v1.03 but allows the settings to go all back to default.  Note that Five Star Stereo has found has suggested that 1.01 CAN be flashed over 1.03 IF one can only find the files.  With no changes to the unit, and only the SD card inserted, the problem persisted.

 

So, it was time to try something else. 

Note: Do the following at your own risk

 

Using a Windows Machine

1  - Copy the music to a local HDD.  I put it into a folder named TempMusic

2 -  Format the SD card, unselect Quick Format, and give the card a new name

3 – Strip the TempMusic of everything other than MP3 files, post Tag Cleanup, all album art should be imbedded anyways

4 – Right click TempMusic and ensure that ReadAccess is disabled for the folder and all subfolders

5 – Create and run (NOT as an Administrator) CleanForPioneer.bat file in TempMusic with the content below.  Note that this deletes all files with the extensions listed in all subfolders from TempMusic.  /A:H then removes any previously deleted/hidden files.  

cd %1

attrib -h -s *.* /s

del /s *.ini

del /s *.db

del /s *.m3u

del /s *.jpg

del /s *.png

del * /A:H

 

6 – Now ensure only MP3 files remain. 

Open CMD and CD to TempMusic

dir /s/b >f.csv [enter]

This returns a list of all directories and files. 

Open this in Notepad and replace all “,†with “ “. 

Open this in excel

Column B: =RIGHT(TRIM(A1),4)

Column C: =IF(LEFT(B1,1)=".",0,1)

Filter by C  = 0

Sort by B.  This will return a list of all 3 character long file extensions.  Remove anything that is not an MP3.

 

7 – Now run CleanForPioneer.bat again
 

[ChrisKemper]

The file list is not in perfect Alphabetical order.  For example, Amanda Palmer is listed after Element 101 but before Ellie Goulding.  -->   I REALLY wish I could figure out how to overcome this problem

[LON3STR]

I have a similar issue but I am not using a SD card. I have a 5th gen iPod Touch and the songs within playlists come up in alphabetical order. Its really annoying because like my "Garbage" Playlist, it has their 5 albums or more and I have them put in the playlist in order for when the albums came out and the song order from the CDs themselves. If I were to play the playlist by clicking on it through the radio it puts all the songs in alphabetical order. I've found telling Siri to play the playlist will put the songs in the correct order. Problem is Siri seems to have comprehension issues on some playlists and then just comes up with whatever to play. I've spent countless hours trying to learn tagging and all and retagging music files. Even tried putting numbers within the tags and it doesn't work. I am a little confused by your method but I am open to any help on this issue! Thanks.