i just recently installed a 4500NEX in my car and i am loving it. one thing that attracted me to this unit was the SD card slot which held the promise of being able to buy a large SD card to put a large portion of my music library on it in lossless (FLAC) format.

i wanted to share my experiences as it might help other trying to do something similar...

 i had read about many people reporting about some limitations of using the TAG mode where the albums would playback/be listed in alphabetical order. i read many explanations for why this was the case, and solutions. in the end, renaming the files, changing the track numbers to a three digit format, and paying attention to the "writing order" of transferring the files to the SD card did not resolve the issue. the thing that worked for me was to use MP3tag (thankfully runs with WINE on a Mac, as long as one isn't running the latest Catalina OS) and change all of the Song Titles to have a prefix of a two digit track number. it works exactly as i would hope and i can how access my music using Artist or Album and the albums will play back in the proper song order. the only downside i see of this approach is that if one wants to search by "Song", the alphabetical shortcut on the RHS of the screen won't work because all of the song titles now start with a two digit number. for me, that's not a big deal because my goal was to be able to play back the songs by Album.

with this SD card, i then freed up space on my iPod touch (3rd gen, 64gb) to hold my playlists with ALAC format (lossless), so now i have a great music library in my car, all at the source resolution.

it would have been nice if the Pioneer deck didn't have what i consider is a bug/oversight, but at least this kludge works for my uses.

other small tidbit/question:

- has anyone been able to format a large capacity card in FAT32 format? (for cards greater than 32gb) i ended up having to use NTFS (which requires some extra work for this Mac guy).

 

*there is a related issue if you hook up a newer iPhone or iPod (5th generation touch or newer) and try to read the music as an iPod (i.e., not using carplay): what happens is the Playlists get messed up and will only playback in alphabetical order. Pioneer tech support confirmed this for me. :\

 

 

I signed up to follow this thread , specifically related to the possible way to use SD cards larger than 32 gigs.
 

Both my old school 160gig iPods need me to make repairs I don’t want to make. I’m hoping that in the dev sub-forum there’s some ROM’s that use basically the pioneer software and make some subtle changes like allowing larger flash memory. It would also be great to adjust the way the microphone  works with CarPlay. What trash . The iPhone’s voice recognition is not great but car play is TERRIBLE 

i was able to format at SDXC card (micro in an SD adapter) using the NTFS file system (a trick for this mac guy but easy if yo are running Windows) and my Pioneer 4500NEX recognizes it fine. i have just over 10,000 tracks using up 249gb of the space.  i couldn't get FAT32 to work (that would have made things easier on the Mac side of things)

let me know if you have any questions. i don't know if it will work with older NEX units, but i believe it works on the 4400,8400,4500,8500 based on my limited research.