[gla45life]

I thought I was a technically literate but this COMMAND system has out foxed me.
Previously, I had managed to import the contents of a USB into the music register.. easy peasy.
Now, I have another collection of music I wish to import. I copied it to the USB (same one as used previously) and plugged it into the car.... "No Music Found".. Huh? I checked the format, seems to match the documentation.
Ok, I'll try the CD. Plug the CD in, navigate to Music Register.... "Import MP3" greyed out.
Now I am confused. Any suggestions as to what I am doing differently to the first time I did this?

 

[Jb1981]

You can only import from an MP3 cd, not a normal cd
With the usb, are you plugging it in to the media cable or into the little usb socket (nearer passenger side?)

 

[gla45life]

How dumb is that....
I'm inserting the USB into the socket in the centre console socket.. which is where it went before. The docs list a number of formats, one being .m4a.. in itunes, it says ".m4a". The documentation does say it will not import m4p (aka protected). .....
Weird.

 

[Jb1981]

And that's the grey area! Itunes files are 'sometimes' protected, I always convert to MP3 to be on the safe side

 

[gla45life]

Page 234 of the COMMAND online manual states:
"You can copy music files in the file formats MP3, WMA and AAC (with the extensions .m4p, . m4a, .m4b and .aac) from the following media:
<ul>[*]discs in a DVD changer or single DVD drive[*]memory card[*]USB memory"[/list]Well, I am not burning a succession of DVDs and I do not have a SD memory card to hand.
I can say that it WILL NOT import .m4a from the USB.... "No Files Found".(So now I am faced with creating .mp3 versions of all the media)
If I plug in the iphone 3 that has the songs in .m4a, it reads them and plays. But ofc, you cannot copy them to the music register.
How hard would it have been to have provided the same import mechanism for all digital media?
Oh, and my fingers are too fat to squeeze into the center console to release the MB supplied eye-thingie connection cable.
Overall, I would give it 4/10 for User Interface Design.

 

[Jb1981]

It may be down to protection if they are oldish files,
To convert to MP3 you only have to select all of the in itunes and right click, select create MP3 version
I should have asked if you are pc or Mac too?
When you put the usb in, does it have a name in the list of devices?
At what point does it say no files found?

 

[gla45life]

Yeh, it's just a pain to have to convert 10G worth of files
When I put the files on a USB, it scans them, displays the name of the track and then says "No Files Found".

 

[Jb1981]

How are you adding them on the usb?
Are you copying them from iTunes and pasting as this caused me problems as you end up with the file and an invisible file that only the car sees! If you copied 10 songs tracks one to ten would be blank and 11-20 would be the music files!
Or are you copying from the folder on the hard drive?
To convert 10gb of audio would only take about an hour to be fair and you can always use this as a back up?
I think a 10 hard drive is too small in the car anyway, I have a 160gb ipod, a 128gb usb, a 128gb sd card plugged in to the car and still filled the hard drive!

 

[gla45life]

I was copying them from iTunes, I'll see what difference, if any, it makes to copy them from the drive directly.
I have a pair of mirrored drives, plus a third drive in a different machine LOL... do you LIVE in the car? That's one heck of a lot of music.

 

[Jb1981]

Haha, I don't live in the car no, I only have a 15 min drive to work too! But I bore easily and normally listen to something different to work then home! I know itunes does funny things it might help, are you pc or Mac?

 

[gla45life]

OK. I had a browse through my library and may have found something (although I'll need to recheck to see if it is indeed the issue); I've recopied the files by selecting in iTunes and then copying the files to the USB..
... works!!
As RoyTheBoy would say "User Error".

(being a s/w engineer..)
Non car question for you: Do you have a music streamer in the house or do you just use your mobile gadgets?

Edited by: gla45life

 

[roytheboy]

Something else you might notice if you have a Mac, and that is that OSX creates an invisible file (starting with a dot) for every visible file in its system. It does this as part of its journalling functionality. Whilst these files will not be visible on your Mac (because no files starting with a dot are ordinarily shown), they may appear in your GLA as music files with no content (technically the GLA's system should ignore them). The way to get rid of them is to access the USB stick via a terminal (a Command Line Interface) and 'rm -rf' (remove) them, but as I have said previously, this should not be attempted unless you know what you're doing.

 

[gla45life]

Mac's are too rich for me.I need to experiment to see what it was about the previous copy that upset the COMMAND system.

As for "rm -rf"... I had director ring me up once and ask what would happen if he ran "rm -rf /*" AS ROOT.
I said, "Please tell me you didn't...." it went quiet.

 

[roytheboy]

For those who haven't a clue what this means, 'rm' means delete, the 'r' option (-) means 'recursive' (also delete everything inside a directory), and the 'f' option means 'force' (do not ask: "are you sure?"). The slash means start at the absolute core of the system, and the asterisk means 'match any character'. In other words, 'rm -rf /*' means delete absolutely everything on the computer, including the operating system. But I guess you would have worked that out!