I've been thinking about getting a Pioneer NEX series head unit for the past couple months. I have a 2014 F150 with the sync system that I don't really care for. It's really a pain the butt to browse my music on a usb stick, and there is no random options. The voice activated stuff is cool, but when you tell it to play a certain artist, it just plays their songs in alphabetical order which is quite stupid.

So I guess my main question is how hard it is to browse MP3 on the SD card? Is there a limit to how many songs? Is there some kind of random feature? Would my iPod Classic work better for playing MP3s? My Ford Sync system chokes on my iPod because it can't handle that much music.

You can browse your music by Artist, Album, Song, Genre.

file limit for usb, Sdcard are 15000 files, 1500 folders. You can choose random or alphabetical order, and you can choose repeat.

NEX will not choke on your iPod, it will just swallow it. (joking)

Besides you will have at your disposal, 2 usb ports, 1 hdmi input, 2 aux inputs, SDcard. Full of optional inputs.

Thanks for the reply. Now when you say it can do random, can it random everything or just certain artists. Also, you said random or alphabetical, does that mean it can't play an album in order?

Also, do you have the file limitations with an iPod? Would an iPod be better for music than the sdcard or usb stick?

I've read tons of reviews, but none of them spend much time on MP3 playback.  

No file/folder limitation with iPod.  Playlists on the iPod are also supported.  NEX has no playlist support for Disc, USB or SD.

Does the NEX show album thumbnails from an sd card?

Does the NEX show album thumbnails from an sd card?