SD Card unreadable :(

Tony1982

Tony1982

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Hey guys,

I normally play music in the car with my iphone 6 plugged into the MMI or sometimes via bluetooth, but after a drunken night out I am now without an iphone and will be for a couple of weeks. Anyway I went out this morning and bought an SD card (16GB SDHC class 10), got home and formatted it with my macbook and transferred a load of music onto it, everything is filed into artists individual folders and then into sub-folders for relevant albums (I simply drag and dropped my itunes library on to the card). When I plug it into the car it comes up UNREADABLE.

Any clues as to what the problem is?

Thanks.
 
Aren't the itunes files AAC? If so does the MMI play AAC files??? Didn't think you could drag and drop from itunes to another device/card.
 
This has come before with a MAC, do a search for 'Itunes on SD card-MAC' and there is lots of really good pointers to get the library across without the additional files that are present.
The SD Card system is really good once you have got it across from Itunes.
 
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S32B said:
Aren't the itunes files AAC? If so does the MMI play AAC files??? Didn't think you could drag and drop from itunes to another device/card.
Click to expand...

I don't know to be honest, I've just looked and the files appear to be a mix of mp3's and m4a's. I didn't drag the files directly from itunes, i dragged them from the source folder on the hard drive which itunes plays them from.
 
traindweller said:
This has come before with a MAC, do a search for 'Itunes on SD card-MAC' and there is lots of really good pointers to get the library across without the additional files that are present.
The SD Card system is really good once you have got it across from Itunes.
Click to expand...

Thanks, will give it go, although I have searched similar wording already without any luck - but then I'm not the most computer literate person out there.......
 
Some tips:

- format SD card as Fat32
- Copy music from iTunes music directory to preserve folders, or just create them
- use drivecleaner to remove hidden Mac system files, otherwise you get loads of greyed out duplicates
 
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There's no issue with using m4a and mp3 files on the SD card, it works fine. Can you read the card back in the Mac ok still?
 
steverobertsbbc said:
There's no issue with using m4a and mp3 files on the SD card, it works fine. Can you read the card back in the Mac ok still?
Click to expand...

Yeah it's fine on my mac and my kids windows pc, just comes up as unreadable in the car :( I've deleted it all and reformatted it and tried again with no luck. I've just noticed there's a jpeg in each of the album folders (artwork and presumably a back up as the artwork is still there after deleting all the jpegs), there were also a few digital booklets for a few albums so deleted them to, also just downloaded clean my drive to give the card a clean up. Will test it out in a few minutes.

EDIT: Still no luck :(
 
Last edited:
You do need to format as FAT32.......in fact, it would have come formatted that way by default. iTunes type files okay fine. Take it you have tried it in both SD card slots and/or selecting the correct one for music?
 
Yeah tried both slots, when I format the card I don't get the option for FAT32, the options I have are: ExFat, MS-DOS (FAT), OS X Extended (Journaled) and OS X Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled). The default was ExFat so went with that.
 
Try standard FAT rather than extended. Also, what size is the card.

I have a 32gb that works fine and fits around 1000 AAC and mp4's :)
 
xBox said:
Try standard FAT rather than extended. Also, what size is the card.

I have a 32gb that works fine and fits around 1000 AAC and mp4's :)
Click to expand...

Yeah just been reading up on what the different file systems are, seems that the MS Dos (Fat) system is FAT 32 so just reformatted it to that, now just need to wait a while for it to copy the library again. Fingers crossed. Will report back. It's a 16GB card btw.
 
Tony1982 said:
Yeah just been reading up on what the different file systems are, seems that the MS Dos (Fat) system is FAT 32 so just reformatted it to that, now just need to wait a while for it to copy the library again. Fingers crossed. Will report back. It's a 16GB card btw.
Click to expand...

Don't get your hopes up re album art - iTunes will typically hold images that are too big.

Otherwise, you should be good now :)
 
For album art, any albums with the art missing, good tip us to save the album image from Amazon into the album folder. Sometimes they are too big but adjustment to max 600x600 does the trick. Doesn't always work for some reason and I am still experimenting myself. Hope the format has worked......pretty sure it will.
 
Right, so now I've changed to the MS-Dos (FAT) file system it is working :) but yeah it seems most of my album artwork is too big so isn't displayed, I'm not that fussed about that to be honest. Thankyou to the guys who helped, it's much appreciated.

New problem though, I think I may have a duff SD card reader, my nav card was in slot 2 (since I first collected the car) and only works in slot 2, problem is the music card only works in slot 2 and neither work in slot 1! So if I need to nav anywhere I can't listen to music from the SD card, looked through the manuals and they don't say anything about which slot is for nav or music so I presume it's either or..... So I think I need to get in touch with Audi to confirm if my SD card slot 1 is in fact broken.

People with SD Nav, what slot is your card in? And does the other slot work for your music cards, or (which I suspect it shouldn't)) does it make a difference what slot you use?
 
I use MP3 tag which is great for album Art as you can select ones below500*500 then copy to the SD Card.
 
Pretty sure my SD card worked in both slots before I got Nav activated, it now resides in slot 2 with 1 occupied by the Nav card.
 
MarkyH said:
I use MP3 tag which is great for album Art as you can select ones below500*500 then copy to the SD Card.
Click to expand...
Yes MP3 tag is great for sorting out all the meta data and album art.

I have music cards in both my slots - work fine.
 
You unfortunately have a duff slot :(

Cant remember the chap that recently had a defective mobile SIM slot, which caused him endless problems, as he couldn't get Audi Connect to work.
 
As for art: 500x500 max size and under 200kb file size.
 
Awesome so it looks like I will be able to get it to work with my Mac, is there a maximum size SD card I can use?

Merry Christmas
 
Pretty sure there is a limitation on the number of tracks that the system can deal with......9,999 rings a bell.
 
jaypers777 said:
Pretty sure there is a limitation on the number of tracks that the system can deal with......9,999 rings a bell.
Click to expand...

Think its 5000-files per directory and 1000-files per play list ... i.e. plenty!!
 
mine are 70% flac, 25% 320K MP3 and the rest 128-256K MP#, across both cards I have approx 14K music files.

no issues, I did ensure all album art was 500x500 or less.
 
I had the same Problem. Thank you for all the above help. It's a must to Erase files in MS-DOS(FAT) Volume in Mac Computer. This will make the SD card Readable.
 
I’ve recently purchased an integral 256gb sd xc card and tried to format to Ms-Dos or Fat32 on a Mac computer. Neither of my Sd slots will read the card? I noticed people commented to have had success using 128/256gb cards on here. Is there a particular one that anyone can recommend?
 
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