I'm going to post this here, since it looks like the latest thread concerning USB issues and questions.
My 2016 Scat Pack does ok with thumb drives, but once it plays one folder, it just stops.
I have to manually select the next folder I want it to play.
I don't drive it a lot, so I haven't pursued this, but is there a setting in there that'll let it play continuously, or even skip folders?
You know, like a $100 car stereo does.

 

thats just how the uConnect software deals with multiple folders from what I’ve seen. I don’t know if any settings to alter it or workarounds to defeat it. You would need to save all the songs in the same folder for it to continue playing past the end of one album and into the next.

All drives formatted to NTSB

NTSB or NTSF?

 

Part two on my USB journey. When I started as the above post, things seemed bleak based on others experience, but the good news is I have success at all my experiments. To repeat, all I had read was a USB 32GB formatted to Fat32 was all that would work, I have had success with all these external drives. Plays all resolutions, 16/44.1, 24/96, 24/192 and 24/48 from DVD-A. All files are FLAC. If you have ripped a SACD to DSD, you will need to reformat the DSD to FLAC.
These are the drives I have and the 2021 Challenger will play them all, with proper tagging, Artist, Album, and song titles, including artwork. You can operate via voice command, steering wheel selectors, or UConnect screen.
All drives formatted to NTSB.
Sandisk 32GB
Sandisk 512 GB
Lulnani 1TB
Samsung SSD 1TB

I am much better with audio than car stuff, (learning quick though), PM me if you need any help with playing music files in your Challenger, my only experience is a 2021 and I do not know if Dodge has made improvements with there USB playback.

 

My USB center console hub did not work on delivery, I tried the Fuse 38/12 pull and put back, no help. Dealer installed new center console hub and all good.
My car is a 2021 Challenger RT Shaker.

Well, I am happy as heck, got it USB drive playing through UConnect.
The last few days I have been reading and YouTubing about playback from USB drive into UConnect, 2021 Challenger. Complicated and basically sucks for what I want.
I started with my SSD 1TB Samsung which plays perfect in my Ford Escape and did not play at all in the new car.
Internet says no bigger than 32GB drive and has to be formatted to FAT32. On top of that will only play MP3, sucks, sucks, sucks.
Today I did an experiment with a Sandisk 128GB that I formatted to NTSF.
Like magic, the 2021 Challenger now reads all the folders, in alphabetical order, click folder and all tracks show and play. I loaded 4 albums and best news they where all FLAC, 16/44.1, 24/96, 24/192 and a 5.1 DVD-A as 24/48, all played. I tried a DSD rip, now that was a No Go.
I set the audio to the Surround mode, which has a center speaker in dash and they all played.
The stereo of the 24/96 Led Zeppelin II with track 1, Whole Lotta Love has all the back and forth in the last 1/3 of song and did go front to back in clearly a Faux Surround.
The DVD-A 5.1 24/48 of Foo Fighters One By One, played well in the surround mode with track 1 starting in vocals front and then breaks into all speakers.
1. I am ecstatic I got it to play in FLAC.
2. I am going to try another drive above 128 just to see how far I can go, but I am sure I cannot play a 1TB unless it is the style of drive?
3. Surround mode: I have been listening to surround for years and I will say that the surround mode via UConnect is pretty good, with the stereo FLAC's, it is obviously faux surround but activating that center speaker working it does enhance the stereo image.
4. Real surround from FLAC Blu Rays or DVD's (SACD not an option) to be honest I have to listen to some more to tell if it is actual discrete surround, albums I am very familiar with.

If all this holds solid I think I just saved a lot of money by not taking to a car audio store.

 

This is a peeve of mine, too.
Not just because you're hearing them in a different order, but many albums are recorded so the songs segue into each other.
Dark Side of the Moon wasn't made to be played in alphabetical order.

 

I always lay out my MP3’s that way, anyway. The problem was Uconnect would only sort them alphabetically.

 

Personally, I'd rather have the track number in the title field than no tags at all.

 

Only way to get this to work was to use MP3Tag to literally remove all meta info from every single MP3 on my thumbdrive. Easy enough, but rather time consuming.

 

Syke!!! Just took longer to re-index everything than it had before, for whatever reason.

Does Chrysler have somewhere you can contact about this?

 

I think/hope/pray I’ve fixed the issue. Ran the lasted Uconnect software update and it appears to be displaying properly, even after re-indexing the drive.

Fingers, toes and shoulder hair crossed.

Nick

 

Good question....wish I knew so I could send them a less than pleasant email.

 

I hear you, I have the same issue. I have approx 500GB of MP3's in my collection and have ZERO desire to re-tag them. I've just been living with the odd sorting. Annoying, but I have better things to do with my time than cater to my Uconnect's odd habits.

 

I hear you, I have the same issue. I have approx 500GB of MP3's in my collection and have ZERO desire to re-tag them. I've just been living with the odd sorting. Annoying, but I have better things to do with my time than cater to my Uconnect's odd habits.

I guess I'm just having a difficult time understanding why someone would intentionally program the interface to ignore the sorting on the device or even the album sorting from the metadata and instead sort alphabetically with no other options.

Nick

I am not responsible for any of the UConnect software, but I’ve written more code than you can shake a stick at, so I have some experience on the upstream side of what you’re dealing with. The short answer to your question is “no one”, as in no one would intentionally program it that way.

So how did it end up in your car’s music playing hardware? Well, my best guess would be something along the lines of:

The infamous UConnect screwup of a couple years ago caused a massive rollback in revision of all the primary software and all the secondary software that has to run with it. Once they found a previous version that wasn’t hosed, they had to then go about adding back in all required functionality to bring it up current specs (without hosing it again), and identifying and integrating the previous versions of ancillary software to do the same.

That is a massively difficult and tedious task that isn’t even guaranteed. Apparently they got a workable suite, and kudos for doing it. However, for the MP3 decoding/playing/displaying software, they either overlooked re-enabling the functionality you desire, or they were unable to turn it on without breaking something else.

You might think the former option is impossible invtoday’s Day and age with such a massive company who surely has unlimited resources to QA test their releases. I can assure you that stuff is way more common than you’d think it would be due to the lack of (or elimination of) QA testers in the software groups.

Why would they do that? Simple, you don’t need human testers when you have automated test classes running test cases on all affected code at every check-in.

The problem with that is it depends upon the developers writing useful and honest test cases. I will admit that rarely do that unless paired up, and even then the tests are hardly useful. They mostly just pass the test cases, and that’s it.

As far as the latter explanation, that happens too, and there’s nothing that can be done without more work and a subsequent release that will fix it.

So watch out for minor updates to the software, as they would likely fix this issue if it were due to either.

 

Do you specifically want your songs played in the order they appeared on the original album? After years of CD's in the car, I got used to hearing certain songs after others, but now I have all my ripped MP3s and digital downloads on a 64GB SD card, and play them on a random shuffle. If I want to hear a particular song, my voice-activation will retrieve it. So how the songs are titles doesn't really matter any more.

 

Yeah, it would be cool if Uconnect sorted by my format (which is album order, in reality), but I'd just be happy if it actually played the cuts in album order rather than alphabetically. When I have a multt-CD/LP album that I rip, I'll number the tracks 1-20, 30, 40 or whatever. I'm happy it just played in album order, though.

Nick

 

Grrrr.... I'll have to try that, then, thanks. This is my MP3 "collection" which has accumulated over 20 years of ripping my CD's and digital downloads. It's well over 100Gb... not exactly trivial LOL!

Nick

 

Unfortunately, this was a rather unwelcome change made to Uconnect in an update about 6 months or so ago. The system now uses the ID3 "Title" tag to sort the actual files in the folder, and it does so alphabetically. It no longer uses the file name.

If you want the system to sort by track number, you need to include this track number in the "Title" ID3 tag. Incredibly annoying for those of us who already have thousands of MP3's tagged correctly.

There is a great utility out there for PC's called Tag&Rename. Although still tedious, this makes it easier to bulk re-tag MP3s. Hope that helps.