I can help with two, maybe three, of those...

(5) If I subsequently start the car, it once again automatically comes up with the radio. I can hit MEDIA, and it goes back to the folder/song I was at, but shows it at the beginning of the song and doesn't automatically start playing it. If I hit play, THEN it shows it at the point of the song that I was at when the car turned off, and it starts playing. Who designed this thing???
(6) It also takes quite a while to index when we turn the car on. I'd be fine with this one, but EVERY TIME we turn the car on??? Again, my CR-V doesn't have such a problem.

Anyway, am I not using this properly? Are there ways around these issues? Does my car have a "bug" in the media player? Or do other Subaru cars (Forrester? Outback?) have the same feature? I have a Limited with the Navigation package...

This is VERY disappointing for a car that otherwise is quite impressive...

I agree with 1-4, so, I'll skip them. Other than custom file naming with "Artist - Album - Track# - Track Name" (which I used to do 20+ years ago when players didn't know how to read ID3 tags to find the track number), there's no easy fix for the one that's the biggest pain for me - playing albums out of order.

As for #5:
Turn on USB auto-play (or "Device Auto Play") in the settings

As for #6:
I have a 128GB NTFS formatted stick with 50GB of music on it, and it's very quick.
Try another USB stick and make sure it's formatted as NTFS, and then copy all the folders "at once" - by that I mean select them all on the computer, and drag them all at once to the stick to copy them, that way it copies them in order and builds a sensible directory structure and file system layout.

MOSTLY, I use Android Auto and Rocket Player to play songs stored on my phone. Otherwise, I use Android Auto and Google Play Music.

 

I listen to MP3 books all the time on USB sticks and also have some complaints. I hate that I can't automatically play the next folder. So when I finish a disk, I have to go browse, sort by album, find my album and look for the next folder for my book. Since I have a stick with 10 books and maybe 60+ folders, it's hard to page through.



You have to choose one setting so the USB starts to play automatically. Check the media settings. However, the radio will still come on first. When you turn off the car, power to the USB ports is cut off so that's why you immediately switch to radio. I don't like it but I get it. I have a large USB stick and I haven't noticed the indexing being slow. Coming from my '15 Outback, this is leaps and bounds better. The Outback would forget where you were and if you are listening to a book, that sucked big time. I went back to CDs in the Outback because it was more reliable. The Outback was also MUCH slower to index. The Ascent it much better.



Renaming the files probably won't help - you have to rip the mp3 with the number prefix. It doesn't read the filename, it reads the MP3 embedded name. I check the filenames and disk names any time I rip something so I can get them to be in sort order.



Sorting by album, keeping your place for browsing and other simple things would be nice. I'd like more user configurable default options. I have noticed that the initial radio play time is actually much shorter than it used to be - not sure why. But my book will start up after only 2-3 seconds of radio now. I actually was pleasantly surprised when I pulled out this stick and played another. Later, I went back to this stick and it remembered exactly where I was. So some features are good and better than I expected.

 

Renaming the files probably won't help - you have to rip the mp3 with the number prefix. It doesn't read the filename, it reads the MP3 embedded name. I check the filenames and disk names any time I rip something so I can get them to be in sort order.

Good to know!

I had a tool that would rename MP3's ID3 name... I will see if I can find it (or a more recent version since it's been ages). I never plan on using my USB drive anywhere else, so, I don't care how the stuff is named if it works and I can figure out the song name.

This is the stick I use. The radio is only playing for a second or two at most with it. Sometimes, not at all.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BGTG2A0/

The other great thing about it is it's barely noticeable once it's in.

 

So, we finally got around to putting some .mp3 files on a USB flash drive. We like to listen to the music "by folder", not by album, genre, or artist. We have a "single level" of folders, and they show up fine (alphabetically). However, we have noticed several quirky, if not downright awful, behaviors regarding the media player:
(1) When we select a folder, all of the titles inside the folder appear and are played ALPHABETICALLY. That is NOT the order the music is intended to be played, especially if we are listening to a soundtrack!!!

This is VERY disappointing for a car that otherwise is quite impressive...

Agreed - depending on how you listen it can be very annoying. Me personally, I have mine on shuffle and just a bunch of music on a flash drive. The manual for the infotainment system mentions how the drive should be formatted and how it reads songs/folders, so you might want to take a look at that.

Good to know!

I had a tool that would rename MP3's ID3 name... I will see if I can find it (or a more recent version since it's been ages). I never plan on using my USB drive anywhere else, so, I don't care how the stuff is named if it works and I can figure out the song name.

This is the stick I use. The radio is only playing for a second or two at most with it. Sometimes, not at all.

The other great thing about it is it's barely noticeable once it's in.

Just because I'm in IT/Tech going to share the Samsung flash drives as the Sandisk minis are known for overheating and eventually dying. The Samsungs do get a little warm, but seem to be pretty darn reliable. Also, solid warranty and CHEAPER.

128gb for $24

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D7PDLXC/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_3?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

For using a drive this big and formatting to FAT32 you may have to use a 3rd party software like Mini Partition Tool which is free for home use.

I used to have a tool as well but I don't remember the name and would have to find another. Nice USB stick. I have a lot of smaller capacity ones - all authors on one stick - a stick for new stuff. I have a large capacity for music but I prefer books on my long solo drives.

There are some ID3 taggers out there, there's also a helpful free tool called fastfilerenamer which can help if you need to rename a bunch of files quickly. I think Winamp media player also allowed for editing ID3 tags.

 

Just because I'm in IT/Tech going to share the Samsung flash drives as the Sandisk minis are known for overheating and eventually dying. The Samsungs do get a little warm, but seem to be pretty darn reliable. Also, solid warranty and CHEAPER.

128gb for $24

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D7PDLXC/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_3?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

The IT/Tech Guy in me agrees as well. It's one of my frequent complaints about the Sandisk stuff that I am STUCK using in my phones (because sadly, Sandisk has had the highest capacity MicroSD cards now for the last half decade and more).

I'm not worried about losing my car's USB music collection though, and I liked the way the tiny SanDisk hides itself when plugged in.

I stay away from all of their other products just because of how much I hate the (lack of) reliability of their MicroSD cards.

So...

• For those of you looking for better brand reliability, go with the Samsung FoRealz suggests.
• For those of you looking for pretty and inobtrusive and so small it can't get in the way, buy the SanDisk, but beware.

This is pretty much the one thing I like about the SanDisk one (it's barely "there")...

 

I've had the folder problems on all my Subarus. I resorted to just putting all the tracks all together, and letting the Shuffle function be the DJ. Doubt they;'ll ever fix it, because music streaming is the go-to format these days.

 

I see a "Favorites" button on the left, but I have yet to spend the time to see if it's functional and, if so, how I can add songs to it to make my own singular playlist.

 

I have been thinking about how to handle this situation and I am thinking about just getting a handful of smaller USBs and just putting a playlist that I like on each one and then swapping them out when I want to change playlists. I know that it is cumbersome and that modern technology should have an easier fix but it seems every car out there has antiquated tech when it comes to this as they believe that everyone just streams their music anyway.

 

Gonna throw my hat into the ring, but if you have them (being music or audiobooks) in Google Music; or even Smart Audio Book player on your phone, they integrate with AA and do just fine. I have the entire Dresden Files on my phone and they handle it just fine. It will go to the next just fine. I highly recommend it

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ak.alizandro.smartaudiobookplayer&hl=en_US


Google Play music handles offline books really well for the most of the time, it's better handled on the PC to do the heavy lifting and then DL the music to the phone and it should be fine.


YMMV. just my 2 cents

 

Glad someone brought this up. I have the exact issue with the headunit! Even when it comes to browsing the channels on xm I have to keep scrolling back to where I was. It gets mighty frustrating. I sent subaru an email about it, but never got a response.



One trick I've done was to create a folder full of playlists and have it be at the very top so it is easy to access when "browsing".

 

In my Subaru Outback, the media player did order the files based on the alphabetical filename itself, rather than using the MP3 tag data. I did go into my USB and rename some files to fix the order. Naming them with track number first worked likes this

• 01 - Song 1
• 02- Song 2
• 03 - etc

NOTE: the leading 0 is required or you'll have track 1, then track10, then track 11, then track2.

A brief check at lunchtime and it looks like my orders are still correct so I'm betting the new headunit does the same thing. Careful file naming and you should be fine.

There are tools that can read your MP3 tag data and create filenames based on that, so you should be able to automate the renaming if you have a lot to do! I can't remember the one I used off the top of my head, but I could look on my home computer if you need me to.

 

Can you have that scandisk in for music and use AA for Waze?

 

Yes, that's one of the things that works really well with the system. You can use the USB stick for music while using AA and any app that's not on Android Auto's music tab and it mixes audio sources as expected (with the occasional glitch).

 

I've tried every combination I can think of to adjust the music files on my USB drive and still I can only get it to play albums in alphabetical order. I've reworked mp3 tags in various ways, to no avail. I've renamed tracks every way I can think of
Artist - 01 - Track Title
01 - Track Title
01 Track Title
01_Track Title
01Track Title
1Track Title
etc, etc.



But still nothing but alphabetical for me. It's a really sh*tty way to listen to beloved albums! It's a very small thing but still has a large impact on how much I enjoy my Ascent.

 

Go here:
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2501727756534901&id=1181595818548108

I explain how to make playlists. It is pretty easy.

 

Or you can join the rest of us in the 21st century and just stream it from your phone

 

Lol!



LOL! Sometimes, it's nice to have it readily available and not on or streamed from one's phone, such as on long road trips into the middle of nowhere with no data available.

Personally, I always go overboard. I have the USB stick, SiriusXM, and a phone with 30GB of music. In my case, I like that my Ascent starts up and plays what I like to listen to (via the USB stick) until I plug in my phone and decide whether or not I want to use it instead.

 

I’ve mentioned this before in another post but has anyone with the expertise looked at the open source code? It’s posted online and available. Just saying maybe someone can look at it and possibly figure out all the bugs. I have the same complaints as everybody regarding this media player.

 

If I find the time, I will. But, after spending all day programming, I tend to not think about it after work. Perhaps this coming weekend.

 

Brainstorming tonight I realized I could probably change the mp3 tags to include the track number at the start of the song title field, which should force-sort them in the correct order despite alphabetization. Now I just need to find an editor that can do that functionality in batches (hopefully). Will try it out in the morning.

 

Lemme know if that satisfies your needs, otherwise, I will whip something up that makes Ascent compatible playlists based on folder and ID3 tags as soon as I find the free time.

 

Well that was another failure. I started by hand-typing new mp3 tags for the titles in one album, changing the Title field to "Track# Title" format to each song one at a time. I then batch-updated two other random albums to the same format. This was all done using Mp3tag software on Win10.

The Ascent recognized the track numbers of 3 out of 15 songs in the hand-updated album. It ignored the track number in the title field of the other 12 songs and still sorted them alphabetically (see pic). For the two batch-updated albums, one of them recognized the updated tags for 2 of the songs and the other album recognized none of the updated tags.


So, back to square one I guess. Maybe I'll try a different mp3 editor.

 

I had the same issue where I renamed by mp3 title tags to get them to play in order, but my Subaru did not recognize most of the title changes. I spent the better part of a day experimenting with my files and I think I figured a few things out.

More details will follow, but the short of it is that if you add track numbers to the start of the title tag AND you modify the end of the title tag in some way, the radio will re-index the tracks, use the new track titles, and then play them in order. For example, for a track that has the title "Yesterday", if you rename the title to "05 Yesterday - The Beatles", it will recognize the new track title. Changing the end of the track title is an essential part of the process.

Here's what I think I know:

The radio looks at only 3 pieces of data in the ID3 tag to determine how the files gets indexed: the artist, the album, and the title. The file name and the file path are irrelevant to the index, so there is no value in re-ripping the files, changing the file names, or moving around folders. The radio seems to create some sort of internal ID for each file based on parts of the artist, album, and title tags. Since the internal ID is based on only parts of the artist, album, and title tags, small changes to those tags may not be recognized by the radio. If the radio perceives the ID as being the same, it does not reindex the files and continues to use old track data (which is why adding track numbers to the start of the title tags doesn't work well.)

Based on a lot of trial-and-error, it seems that the internal ID relies far more on the END of the tags than the start of them. Therefore, adding a number to the start of the title ID ("Yesterday" becomes "05 Yesterday") is not perceived by the system as a new file, so it's not re-indexed. Making a change to the end of the tag, however, causes the radio to perceive the file as a new track, which it then re-indexes. I used Mp3tag to change all of my title IDs to {track number} {actual title} {artist}. ("Yesterday" becomes "05 Yesterday - The Beatles") Changing the end of the title tags causes the radio to recognize the files as new. It re-indexes those files and then plays them alphabetically, which are now in order because each title tag now starts with the track number. (Be sure to use leading zeros.) I batch updated over 1,000 tracks with Mp3tag in about 10 minutes, and my Subaru now plays them in proper album order. It's not an ideal solution—Subaru fixing their system is the ideal solution—but at least I can listen to albums in the order they were intended.

A few more details: Whatever you add to the end of your title tags has to be alphanumeric characters. Adding extra spaces, asterisks, parathesis, or other symbols won't cause the file to re-index. Also, changing the end of the artist or album tag would achieve the same goal of re-indexing, but changing those would mess with your ability to search by artist or album, which is why I chose to change the title tags instead.

Good luck!

Well that was another failure. I started by hand-typing new mp3 tags for the titles in one album, changing the Title field to "Track# Title" format to each song one at a time. I then batch-updated two other random albums to the same format. This was all done using Mp3tag software on Win10.

The Ascent recognized the track numbers of 3 out of 15 songs in the hand-updated album. It ignored the track number in the title field of the other 12 songs and still sorted them alphabetically (see pic). For the two batch-updated albums, one of them recognized the updated tags for 2 of the songs and the other album recognized none of the updated tags.


So, back to square one I guess. Maybe I'll try a different mp3 editor.

 

I did submit a comment expressing my disappointment about this through the Subaru website. Maybe I'll get one of those mysterious gifts at my doorstep for the trouble :dunno:

 

Add the track number to the the appropriate id3 field. ?

 

I still feel like a lot of time and heartache can be saved by using CarPlay or AA and letting your phone handle the music sorting. Manufacturers are, and should be, moving away from their fragmented proprietary systems trying to handle everything and allowing iOS/Android to do it for them. Just my 2¢

 

Functionality with AA is not much of an improvement. But it is a tiny bit better.

 

I wasn’t trying to push Apple on you. I like their interface and am looking forward to the iOS 13 changes. Since I haven’t been able to do it myself I was hoping someone had used both to compare them to the oem interface.

 

No worries. Anecdotally, I would guess they're about the same, which suggests the problem is with the media player itself. I'll be interested to see if Samsung improves this for 2020, but that probably won't help us early adopters much.

 

Robert,

Adding the track number to the track number ID3 field has absolutely no affect in my car. The HU still plays back the songs in alphabetical order. All of my files are ripped from CD with WMP. WMP already correctly put the track numbers in the correct ID3 field. It also puts the track numbers in the front of the filename with the XX format.


Jack Hidley

2020 WRX, NOT an Ascent

 

I just found another solution which I've just tested and it seems to work on the five albums that I've tested it on.

From another forum:

"I have to copy all music into a temp folder on my PC and remove Track & Title ID3 tags from all songs before copying to USB for use in the car.
Note - do this on a hard drive vs modifying ID3 tags on a usb stick. 1000x faster.

The head unit will read Artist/Album info from the ID3 meta data, then pull track order & track name info from the file name.

My windows file names are in this format: Folder (Artist Name - Album) | Track # - Title
E.g. AC DC - Back in Black \ 01 - Hells Bells.mp3"

In other words from inside Mp3tag, select all of your audio files (Edit, Select all files). On the left side of the screen under Title, use the pull down to select < blank >. Under Track use the pull down to select < blank > also. Hit tab once, then click on the floppy disc icon on top left to write the changes to the tracks. This one part of the software is not obvious.

 

I like this idea.

But on a Windows system (Win7), when you have a series of folders, or folders within subfolders, you can't highlight them to show a Details tab with the "Remove Properties and Personal Info"

So a quick way to do that is to do a search for all MP3s within those folders, then highlight all, right-click, properties, details, and then do your business.

 

So, we finally got around to putting some .mp3 files on a USB flash drive. We like to listen to the music "by folder", not by album, genre, or artist. We have a "single level" of folders, and they show up fine (alphabetically). However, we have noticed several quirky, if not downright awful, behaviors regarding the media player:
(1) When we select a folder, all of the titles inside the folder appear and are played ALPHABETICALLY. That is NOT the order the music is intended to be played, especially if we are listening to a soundtrack!!!
(2) For one particular folder with 29 songs, I tried going into the properties for the mp3 files and manually setting the titles of the songs on the Details tab so that they start with a number, figuring that they would stay in order that way. When I put the USB drive in the car, about 1/2 of the songs showed up as I expected with the number sorted properly (16-29). Track 6 also had a number. However, the number was "ignored" for tracks 1-5 and 7-15, such that they did not have a number, and were listed alphabetically! I can't for the life of me figure out how that happened!
(3) While listening to a song in a folder, sometimes we want to see the other songs in the folder. However, when we hit the Browse button, it takes us all the way to the top of the list again, such that we have to scroll all the way back down to the folder and select it again, and then scroll through it. Sure, I could have just gone forward or backward, but then I can only see one song at a time, and can't "jump" to the song I want. In my Honda CR-V, I just hit the "select" button while a song is playing and it has me positioned in the folder at the song, ready to do something.
(4) When we turn off the car, it automatically switches over to the radio!!! Why not just let me continue listening to the music that I already had on???
(5) If I subsequently start the car, it once again automatically comes up with the radio. I can hit MEDIA, and it goes back to the folder/song I was at, but shows it at the beginning of the song and doesn't automatically start playing it. If I hit play, THEN it shows it at the point of the song that I was at when the car turned off, and it starts playing. Who designed this thing???
(6) It also takes quite a while to index when we turn the car on. I'd be fine with this one, but EVERY TIME we turn the car on??? Again, my CR-V doesn't have such a problem.

Anyway, am I not using this properly? Are there ways around these issues? Does my car have a "bug" in the media player? Or do other Subaru cars (Forrester? Outback?) have the same feature? I have a Limited with the Navigation package...

This is VERY disappointing for a car that otherwise is quite impressive...

Hello,
I may have a solution for you, I too have just bought the latest 2019 Outback and have discovered the same annoying problem that Subaru can't or will not rectify.
Go to your saved mp3 files, right click on all tracks and then click Properties, then click Details, then click remove Properties & Personal information, then deselect everything except Album name, then save. The critical thing is to remove any alphabetical reference to song title, so when you play saved mp3 file in Subi the song title will be replaced by a number, but most importantly WILL play in original order. If you've got many albums it wil take time, but at least you won't go crazy listening to tracks out of order.
Good luck

 

That'll also remove the song names and revert to displaying file names.

 

I found this tool works very well to get predictable sorts on a usb drive:

How to Sort Music on Your Flash Drive for Your Car Stereo

A simple way to keep the music on your flash drive in sorted order when being played on your car stereo.

www.techmadeplain.com

 

I like many Subaru owners have been trying to restore episodic playback for albums with limited success until recently. It appears the coders for the stereo might have used ID3v2.4.0 sorting frames not typically used in common tagging. These are different fields from the standard "Title" (TIT2), "Artist" (TPE1), and "Album" (TABL). So far I have populated the fields for "TitleSort" (TSOT), "AlbumSort" (TSOA), and "AlbumArtistSort" (TSO2). For episodic playback in an Album or Audio Book "TitleSort" seems to be the important one, the others are for good book keeping. Those familiar with Mp3tag can reference the website and do this by customizing the Tag Panel usually found on the left.

The albums I have have "re-tagged" with the sorting frames have all been 100% correct playback.
How my drive (32GB, USB3.0, formatted NTFS) is setup: //Artist / Album / 01-AlbumArtist-Title
(Have not played around too much with the folder structure, but naming does not seem to impact sorting as long as the sort frames are set)

How I populated the sorting frames in addition to the standard Title, Track, Artist, Album.. frames:
"TitleSort" = Track 0# + Title = 01-Title (w/ leading zero and the only frame I combined two fields)
"AlbumSort" = Album
"AlbumArtistSort" = AlbumArtist

This can be automated for bulk tagging with a Mp3tag Action (script).

See Below

Now the new problem...
By establishing a numeric sorting for the songs to achieve intended playback for an album, the Songs field on the head unit will display the songs also in a numeric order moving all the first tracks to the beginning of the list (01-aaa, 01-bbb, 02-aaa, 02-bbb...). So before the Songs were displayed alphabetically now after setting the "TitleSort" frame they are displayed in a convoluted numeric episodic grouped format. This might not be an issue for those like me who sometimes play Random songs when not listening to an Album, but it is also very annoying when trying to find a specific song. Thankfully the voice commands can overcome this most of the time!

Links:

id3v2.4.0-frames - ID3.org

Tag Field Mappings – Mp3tag Documentation

Overview of all available tag fields, their names in Mp3tag, and how they are mapped to the internal structures of the different tag formats. Mp3tag is the universal Tag Editor.

help.mp3tag.de

 

@SuBeeBee - That cracked it! I think you finally found the key to this. Thank you SO MUCH!