wschomburg
Seasoned Member
Well having had my CT5V BW since Jan of 23, I never liked the USB music catalog. Using Audio search to find a song was nearly impossible seeing as I have thousands of songs on my home machine and all nicely cataloged. But how to get them recognized by the head unit was the challenge. I just never had this issue surface to the top of my "to do" list and today as I was stuck home literally watching paint dry as the painters are here painting the house, I finally made this a priority.
FWIW Google Gemini is your friend.
It created a script to read the USB drive, creates a .m3u file for every song in every folder automatically and works great. The only issues with that is now I have a single playlist with 2500 songs, so... Create a Playlist per genre folder helped that out. Then rename the *.M3U file it creates to Genre folder name.m3u and move it to the root of the usb drive.
I ended up with about a dozen .m3u files and now when I go into audio, USB, playlist I see the 12 playlists and can easily play these songs. Bonus feature with the audio system is that I can tag a playlist as a favorite so when listing to the USB drive, I have "quick lists" like channels on the USB drive to play favorited playlists / songs so easily changing up audio while drive.
Second bonus is that my C8 also reads the same .m3u files so now I have the same experience between vehicles minus the favorite playlist feature which is not supported on the C8
Open Command Prompt on Your USB
2. Run the Magic Command
Copy and paste the exact command below into the black window, then press Enter:
(echo #EXTM3U & for /f "delims=" %i in ('dir /b /s /a-d *.mp3 *.flac *.m4a *.wav') do @set "p=%~pnxi" & cmd /v
n /c "set "p=!p:\=/!" & echo !p:~1!") > Playlist.m3u
"the weird character should be a colon and then o - so "slashv colon on" for some reason this site does not like this combination
change "playlist.m3u" to GenreName.m3u for better separation of music
FWIW Google Gemini is your friend.
It created a script to read the USB drive, creates a .m3u file for every song in every folder automatically and works great. The only issues with that is now I have a single playlist with 2500 songs, so... Create a Playlist per genre folder helped that out. Then rename the *.M3U file it creates to Genre folder name.m3u and move it to the root of the usb drive.
I ended up with about a dozen .m3u files and now when I go into audio, USB, playlist I see the 12 playlists and can easily play these songs. Bonus feature with the audio system is that I can tag a playlist as a favorite so when listing to the USB drive, I have "quick lists" like channels on the USB drive to play favorited playlists / songs so easily changing up audio while drive.
Second bonus is that my C8 also reads the same .m3u files so now I have the same experience between vehicles minus the favorite playlist feature which is not supported on the C8
Open Command Prompt on Your USB
- Plug your USB drive into your Windows computer.
- Open the USB drive folder so you can see your music folders (e.g., Rock, Pop).
- Click on the address bar at the very top of the Windows Explorer window.
- Type cmd and press Enter. A black command prompt window will open, already targeted directly at your USB drive.
2. Run the Magic Command
Copy and paste the exact command below into the black window, then press Enter:
(echo #EXTM3U & for /f "delims=" %i in ('dir /b /s /a-d *.mp3 *.flac *.m4a *.wav') do @set "p=%~pnxi" & cmd /v
n /c "set "p=!p:\=/!" & echo !p:~1!") > Playlist.m3u"the weird character should be a colon and then o - so "slashv colon on" for some reason this site does not like this combination
change "playlist.m3u" to GenreName.m3u for better separation of music
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