SYNC & USB Harddrive -- Album Display Problem

[NoCaDiver]

So here's the deal. I've got the two USB ports on the head unit, using USB-2 to connect to a 1.8" 40gb HDD that houses about 30gb of music.

What i have noticed is that some of the artist/albums show up and others don't. All music on the HDD is sorted by Artist/Album/Songs in a folder fashion. For instance I have four albums by Disturbed but only one album shows up. ***Thought just came to mind, maybe you can only have one album per artist. Doesn't make sense but I'll check anyway.

None of the music has DRM protection on it as I typically buy the CDs then rip the tracks at 256bps vs. the 128 or 64 quality offered by Amazon, Apple, etc. when purchasing mp3s online.

So now I am in the process of copying all the mp3s onto the HDD without any folder hierarchy, hoping this will solve the problem. I'm still waiting on the transfer to the HDD, over the network = slow.

Some tracks were ripped to a file name such as artist-album-song-track-bitrate-genre.mp3 while others excluded the bitrate-genre portion in the file name. Of note, the file name structure does not seem to impact whether or not the album actually shows in SYNC.

I'm only at ~6,000 songs so I don't think I am hitting SYNC's indexing issue.

Anyone have issues like this? Any input? I'm not completely inept, with only about two days worth of computer experience shakehead.

 

[The Tank]

If you can't fix it on your end it might be a software problem with the sync. I've noticed it will not play certain songs when I ask from them but I can find them by scrolling through my music.

 

[NoCaDiver]

If you can't fix it on your end it might be a software problem with the sync. I've noticed it will not play certain songs when I ask from them but I can find them by scrolling through my music.

From what I've read that means that you have exceeded SYNC's limit on indexing songs. I don't know what the max is....7,000 I guess. The system just won't respond to voice commands for that particular track.

 

[The Tank]

I have over 4000 songs on my iPod and it still doesn't know all of them.

 

[Nacho]

I have about 15000 on mine and i can find them by searching for them. Sync reminds me when I add new songs that Voice commands for tracks are not available. Also, Some songs are found under "Unknown" due to tagging errors in your MP3 info. Mine were pulled from itunes. This is only for a hand full of tracks (100 or so) I have yet to figure out why its doing this since my tags and song info are correct.

 

[MagicMtnDan]

For some reason SYNC seems not to know all of the songs even if the tags are there. It seems to be a small percentage but I don't know how many it actually is nor do I know which ones. I assume this is common to SYNC. (I've got about 3800 songs on my iPod).

 

[ruffstuff]

Have you tried the SYNC My iTunes utility from Ford?

Why does some of the music on my iPod not play on SYNC?

In order to ensure that all digital media on your iPod can be played, it must be indexed first. The Album, Artist, Genre and Song metadata must be properly populated in iTunes and then synchronized with the player before connecting your iPod to SYNC.

If you need assistance on updating your music information in iTunes, please view iTunes Help.

If the problem persists, please contact us.

If the problem persists, it is possible that there are errors in the media information stored on your media player. SYNC My iTunes is a software program that allows all of your music to be indexed by SYNC. View also: Why do I need SYNC My iTunes?

 

[NoCaDiver]

Also, Some songs are found under "Unknown" due to tagging errors in your MP3 info

I will look to see if there is an "Unknown" folder listed. Thanks for the heads up on that.

So I dumped all the MP3s into a single directory and the system (SYNC) still does not recognize certain albums by artist...more specifically all the albums by Disturbed except for Indestructible (this is my baseline, I know it this was an initial problem), same goes for Beastie Boys, only Ill Communications shows up.

Apparently it is not a folder/subfolder/subfolder issue.

Now I am importing all of the MP3s into iTunes and will load them onto an 80gb iPod Classic, leaving them in the original folder-subfolder structure. I will test this out today and see if it works. Maybe iTunes does some "special unicorn" encoding to the MP3s that will make them magically appear in SYNC.

If none of this works then my next step, for those that care, will be to wipe out all the ID3 tags from the MP3s and repopulate them. This will be time consuming and probably won't happen until next week or there abouts.

 

[NoCaDiver]

***UPDATE***

Nothing listed under unknown...FYI.

 

[Nacho]

Maybe you can hunt down a good ID3 tag editor that does edits in batches, so you can just edit the album and artits names.