One thing that's missing also is the ability to search within tags. Scrolling through 100s of artists or 1000s of albums is a pain, yes they have the quick "jump" letters down the side to make it slightly easier but being able to type the name of the artist or album and it filtering down as you hit each letter (a bit like searching for a place in the nav) would make things much easier!
Exactly as noted. The unit does not sort folders, it displays them in the order they are on the disk. This is a serious screw-up on Pioneer's part as it's a literal single line of code to perform the sort.
SONGS are sorted within a folder, so if you have the track filenames as "01 -- Some name", "02 - Some other name", etc it works as expected. HOWEVER, if using the tag browser it's not because track NAMES (in ID3 tags) do NOT, as a matter of rule, have track numbers and thus when the unit sorts the ID3 tags (and yes, it does at the bottom level!) the album plays in ALPHABETICAL track order -- which is ALSO wrong!
The software "engineer" responsible for this deserves to be strung up by his balls -- but until and unless Pioneer fixes this (note that other head unit manufacturers ALSO typically get this wrong!) with a FAT32 directory you can use an external utility to sort the directory order and resolve it. There is no way to do that with NTFS filesystems.
Great info, fellas. I agree, this is a silly oversight by the software people - makes me wonder if they every actually use the head units themselves. Hopefully this will be addressed in an update. The ability to drill down by typing in a few letters rather than scrolling down through hundreds of folders would indeed be a nice touch. Personally, I don't use playlists on my Android phone or Windows PC, nor utilize ID3 tags for anything. I just navigate through the folders, so hopefully that won't prove too cumbersome. Compared to fishing through a huge binder (which still only gives me access to a fraction of my collection) of CDs and having to eject & insert a disk every time I want different music, I have no doubt I'll be able to live with the USB storage quite happily. Great to hear of the pitfalls before I dive in with all the new gear, though!
... There is no way to do that with NTFS filesystems.
I wouldn't say no way to do it... just not any widely-known solutions... but I could be wrong.
Anyone know the particulars of how the HU reads folders (is it files also?) in non-alphanumeric order (other than firmware screw-up). It seems it would read them in some order other than non-a/n order... be it folder creation date, master file table, etc.
It just reads the directory tree in order as on the disk.
It just reads the directory tree in order as on the disk.
And that info is contained in the master file table (MFT)... so there has to be some way to influence the MFT to create (or rather recreate) the directory tree.
Has anybody actually tried it with an NTFS formatted drive?
It may well work as I thought NTFS sorted alphabetically by design unlike FAT.
Has anybody actually tried it with an NTFS formatted drive?
It may well work as I thought NTFS sorted alphabetically by design unlike FAT.
Good question. With all the members saying ntfs isn't sorted or 'sortable', I had been assuming several had already tried.
No, it is not; I have tried it with NTFS (what I started with on the SSD) and reformatted it using FAT32 to be able to fix the problem.
I brought my HDD to the local dealer, who plugged the extra USB power connector into an external USB charging port and the data connector to the 4000. It slowly read the disk for about 20 minutes before hanging at 99%. Next attempt read it quickly, but hung again at 99%. Doesn't necessarily mean a HDD won't work, but not what I was hoping for. It's a WD My Passport Ultra; I have no idea if this is a more power hungry drive than most.
I have a WD passport hooked up 250 gig, took a while to read the first time but It works fine and is powered just by the USB it's hooked up to
Yeah, I really thought it would work, as it should have had plenty of power. It's NTFS, so I might give it another try on FAT32. It could be that the display unit in the store has an issue or the drive itself, although the drive works fine with every PC it's been attached to. It also didn't work with both USB connectors plugged into the 4000. Ultimately, I'm sure it will work with a pair of big SSDs, but that will add over $400 to the total cost.
I brought my HDD to the local dealer, who plugged the extra USB power connector into an external USB charging port and the data connector to the 4000. It slowly read the disk for about 20 minutes before hanging at 99%. Next attempt read it quickly, but hung again at 99%. Doesn't necessarily mean a HDD won't work, but not what I was hoping for. It's a WD My Passport Ultra; I have no idea if this is a more power hungry drive than most.
It will sit at 99% for a LONG time -- but it's still going, it's NOT hung. Wait.
This is a one-time deal; once it's indexed it comes up in a few seconds on subsequent turn-ons.
It will sit at 99% for a LONG time -- but it's still going, it's NOT hung. Wait.
This is a one-time deal; once it's indexed it comes up in a few seconds on subsequent turn-ons.
I left the drive with them and they said it sat at 99% for over two hours, after taking about 20 minutes to get to 99%. Do you think it could really take THAT long? I'm wondering if an SSD would do the initial load any quicker, or if the lag is based on the the head unit processing the list. Any thoughts about whether it might work any better on FAT32 vs NTFS?
How big a drive?
My SSD takes ~10 minutes to index from new and sits for a good long time at "99%" before it's finished -- but it DOES finish.
Once indexed if you change it the drive will go to "99%" more-quickly, but then sit there for several minutes before it completes. Also normal.
2 hours sounds ridiculously excessive but it might not be if it took 20 minutes to get that far....
It's a 500GB HDD with 14,999 files and 1,421 folders, totaling 370GB of FLAC files.
Ok, so you're right up against the limits. I would not be surprised if it takes an utterly ridiculous amount of time to index it the first time around -- but I'll bet it is not hung.
This is way I love my iPod Classic. 30,000+ files and instant.
This is way I love my iPod Classic. 30,000+ files and instant.
And chances are, those 30,000+ files are not in lossless format.
Going lossless is the only reason I see to go with a larger storage device... the reason I will be attempting to replace my iPod Classic optical HD with an SSD. I got the mSATA to ZIF adapter earlier this week, but have yet to obtain an SSD. Currently working on other related matters which have a much higher priority...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
All-around best option is an iPod Classic 160GB... and then perhaps modify to a higher-capacity SSD. JMO
Yes, I know I mentioned it earlier... but I didn't exactly say it's the all-around best option
Think there's any chance Pioneer will listen to us regarding the sorting & gapless issues?