Hello everyone!
I'm hoping someone can help me understand USB usage with the Alpine headunit and that my thread can in turn help someone else as I am sure I am not alone scratching my head over this sometimes!

I've gone through the forums and have found plenty of good answers to get me where I am now but unfortunately one question remains:
How does the Alpine Headunit sort files/folders read from a USB stick?

So far I've learned first that your USB stick needs to be formatted in FAT32 and not NTFS otherwise the HU won't read from it. That's done.
Second, I learned that the HU can only list 100 items. This means two things: your folders cannot contain more than 100 songs... but also, your root folder cannot contain more that 100 subfolders!

No problem, I've spent about an hour re-naming and re-arranging all my files and folders. The HU can now read all my MP3 library. Yay!

Sadly... this is not the end of the tale. The HU seems to have a very convoluted way of reading through the files and folders and sorts them in what appears to be a random sequence. But it is not so random as everytime I take out the USB stick and dumb it back in, the order of my files stays the same!! So obviously the HU is reading some specific attribute to my files and sorts them accordingly... but what setting is that?? It is certainly not alphabetical, I've tried numbering my folders, still no good. It's not creation/modification date either. I am really at a loss here.
Anyone figure this great mystery out yet?

Sorry if the big post seems daunting to read... I like to be thorough!
Thanks for any insight you may have on this situation!

Pierre

Yeah, most of alpine's head units are like this-it ____es me off. I had 2 in my last car and they both did the same thing.

While I'm not specifically familiar with the alpine/toyota head unit, I have had some similar frustration with the w900 model I have in my car.

My unit "banks" groups of songs to a limit of 1000 per bank. It has been infuriating so far, and I can't imagine how much more so having a limit of 100 would be. My kenwood in my other car has a different, bizzare problem of limited folder access. I'm not sure of the number limit, but I can get to all of my music, but only if it's in a limited number of folders.

As far as how the head unit reads/orders the files I have the SAME problem, but I think I may know the cause. First is that the files are read/ordered from your device in the order they were written to it. The only way to control the order would be to manually drag/drop files on to your device one at a time. I hate the idea of spending that much time on it to do that, as I've already spent countless hours converting my music collection to MP3 and making sure they have the correct tags. The second issue, is it's very picky about the way titles are written, and that makes scrolling through songs that start with the same letter kinda frustrating

Good luck. I've been meaning to try the drag/drop on a formatted memory stick, to see if it works on a small scale, but haven't gotten around to it. I can't even test it right now as my wife is borrowing my scion for a weekend trip.

Hey Jericho, on your w900, does it play movies off of a usb? Such as AVI or MP4 files?

I've never tried to play movies, except off a DVD. I've never really watched much stuff from those formats. I tend to only watch from dvds/blu-rays and streaming like netflix. I'll see if I can find something I converted for my PSP a few years ago and see if it works. I know it requires 2 connections for playing video from iPods, though. It reqires a phono jack and the usb connection.

I tried using a flash drive, but it ____ed me off. Even on random, there's no random. It jumps to the middle of the playlist, then starts going in order after the first jump. So I've gone back to using my phone.

Wow, totally not trying to derail the thread, but I'm using an 8GB microsd in a usb adapter on my pioneer, one folder called "various" has 227 songs in it, totally plays everything and on either folder random or random on the whole usb works brilliant.

question, are these the alpine units that the "tC" setting was all jacked up? would this have anything to do with the USB?