[The Wizard]

I use a Windows freeware program named Playlist Creator which, guess what, creates playlists. I then organize my music much like most others - artist folders which contain album folders. I add a Compilations folder for albums containing various artists (Christmas music and the like), a Soundtracks folder for movie soundtrack albums, and a Playlists folder to store all my playlists. If you do that, you might want to put your artists folders under an "Artists" folder to simplify browsing them.

Then you can create playlists for albums where you want to skip certain songs and for your own combinations of various artists (what we used to call Mix Tapes) or even your own "Greatest Hits" playlist combining songs from an artist's different albums.

Playlist Creator allows you easily add tracks (and even other playlists) from anywhere on your flash drive and can put them in a specific order or shuffle them for you if you want more random ordering.

MP3Tag and AudioShell are both excellent programs for tagging files. Other options are Media Monkey and The Grandfather (which can automatically rename the files to match their tags).

 

[barongan]

Loving this thread! indeed

 

[Zar14SRT]

Re: Tips for config of music for USB?

Yep, MP3Tag is what I use, to edit the metadata of the MP3 files, a.k.a. the Tags. MP3Gain is what I use to adjust volume on all the songs.

And I get a lot of songs free using those websites that build you mp3 file from a Youtube link. I suppose that might not be 100% legal, but I've never got in trouble. I've got nasty letters from my ISP for my kids downloading the latest albums using file sharing software, avoid that. Although,, decades old classic rock albums, they don't monitor those and you likely won't get into trouble downloading those.... ...but you didn't hear it from me....

Use VPN and than you can download anything you want. Make sure you use paid VPN, free VPN doesn't work. NordVPN or PIA are the best. Just an idea. ...But you didn't hear it from me.

 

[Todd3.6]

Re: Tips for config of music for USB?

Use VPN and than you can download anything you want. Make sure you use paid VPN, free VPN doesn't work. NordVPN or PIA are the best. Just an idea. ...But you didn't hear it from me.

I'll second the vote for PIA.
I've even used it at my local dealer when they blocked the Dilbert site.

As for music format and software.
MP3 is the best 'universal' format.
Your best bet is to 'rip' songs in at least 256kbps, max is 320kbps.
You can even do Variable Bit Rate (VBR). I set mine to go between 256 and 320.


As for software, assuming you are on Windows:
Ripping = fre:ac (can also be used to convert between formats)
https://www.freac.org/

MP3 Tag software (edit ID3 tags and add album art)
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

Gain/Volume normalize
MP3Gain

All of these programs are FREE, no $$$, no nagware, and no malware.

 

[BillSPD]

Gotta say, I agree with everything stated from Todd3.6 above.

I would like to add that you will likely want your USB drive the be 32GB or less. I have't tried a larger size in my '18 JGC, but in my '15 and earlier, USBs over 32GB could not be read.

Here's a link to those low-profile button drives that are excellent to use, however, they do get a little hot with use FYI.

https://smile.amazon.com/SanDisk-25...V323/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=SanDisk+Ultra+Fit&qid=1550844241&s=gateway&sr=8-1&th=1

Do not copy MP3 files directly to the root of the drive as they cannot be read - have a folder on the root that contains your MP3s. In Windows, for example: E:\Music\my-song.mp3, not E:\my-song.mp3

 

[Yngwie]

Since using the first ever sync system back in 2008, i've always dragged all my files over from itunes. I was told that putting them in folders was not suggested, just dragged them over all in one. With that said, i have a 2014 Dodge Journey that have never been able to organize or read any of my music files. Since then, i've always stayed away from vehicles with Uconnect. I recently test drove a 2018 Dodge Journey and it seems they never changed their version of Uconnect :wtf: no apps, no android auto, nothing. Realized a few days ago that Dodge Journey's were in a world of their own. Surprised to see Jeeps having a updated and much better Uconnect with apps finally. Does anybody have bad experience with file tags and does this Uconnect version do a better job of organizing files?
btw, i've always used 64gb flash drives with my ford sync, no problem, plus, the 2008 would read it much faster than my 2014 Journey. Go figure

 

[Daniel454]

I would like to add that you will likely want your USB drive the be 32GB or less. I have't tried a larger size in my '18 JGC, but in my '15 and earlier, USBs over 32GB could not be read.

You can use larger than 32GB, am using 64GB in our 2015 and have tested all the way up to 256GB in the 2018.... Currently using 64GB daily in it as well.

The key (at least for older models) is to format the USB as "Fat32". Windows won't allow you to format as Fat32 for the larger drives by default but there are plenty of freeware programs that will.

I use "Fat32formatter". Once formatted, Windows will still work with it without issue and the UConnect will see it.

 

[Mongo53]

I just wanted to add a comment that is a bit off road to the current discussion, but the unit will also read/play FLAC files (or at least the one in my '18 does - I never tried them when we had our '14).

Never used FLAC, my impression is that it's a high fidelity format for audiophiles.

Like anything look up the formats and limitations of the system before spending money, so you don't throw it away.

Do a few songs, and experiment with your stereo first. It would suck to spend a whole afternoon putting together a collection on a USB drive, only to find out it doesn't work and you have to start over.

I often find something doesn't work, go back and check the specs/limitations and see I had something off, like pixel dimensions, etc.... Once I get that all down, I start putting the whole collection together...

Album covers in the MP3 Tag or Metadata always get me, they have to be certain range of pixel resolution and perfectly square or they won't display.

I think the OEM Head Units won't display Album covers, unless it's a commercially produced file. The aftermarket head units do. That might have changed with later OEM Head Units.

They did some things as concessions to RIAA and the recording industry. Like the Hard Drive OEM head units you could upload songs but couldn't download them. Instead of dealing with complex digital right schemes, that would probably frustrate customers, they instead made the system impossible to download and thus share, songs loaded on it. Which frustrated customers but not as much as half you songs no playing because they didn't have the proper digital rights credentials. Now with the USB media, they probably can just avoid those complications altogether.

I think the album covers was part of that, I hope its better with the later OEM Head units. My 2011 OEM head unit wouldn't display album covers from any of my songs, loaded on the hard drive, except one or two that were commercially produced files I got from commercial sources. The files I ripped myself and loaded album covers myself with MP3 tag didn't ever display. It might have something to do with built in support for GraceNote also.

 

[lstowell]

What OS would you be creating the files on?
If Windoze, Audacity from sourceforge gives you pretty much any format to any format, although you need the mp3 plugin [licensing issues] and allows editing pretty much anything you want, more flexible than WMP, etc. [more ways to mess up available ]
https://www.audacityteam.org/


Dunno what the largest USB is that UConnect allows, or if the old info from 4 years ago is still current. Probably worth trying.... but modest sized USBs are dirt cheap and load up faster anyhoo.

If you have protected music, there are programs that allow you to tap your audio interface digitally and create unprotected outputs--some at far faster than playback speed.

 

[Todd3.6]

I would like to point out another fact that I've learned...


I have a 2012 with the 430N (RHB).
You can't used USB3 flash drives.
The radio just simply will not acknowledge the flash drive.

You have to use USB2 drives.

 

[Daniel454]

I would like to point out another fact that I've learned...


I have a 2012 with the 430N (RHB).
You can't used USB3 flash drives.
The radio just simply will not acknowledge the flash drive.

You have to use USB2 drives.

Have you tried formatting the USB3s as Fat32? It’s been a while but fairly certain I used USB3 sticks in our 2012 SRT when we had it.

 

[The Wizard]

Agreed. I would think the file system would be the problem rather than the USB level - USB specs call for USB3 devices to be completely backward compatible with the USB2 standard. A USB3 device plugged into a USB2 port will only achieve USB2 speeds but should work fine at that speed (in Windows you might get a warning that the device would perform better using a higher speed port).

 

[daveg56313]

I had searched high and low to figure out how to load music on a USB drive or SD card that would show up as a menu in my 2017 Grand Cherokee Uconnect audio system and would display artist, song title, etc. I had seen suggestions to use iTunes to rip the CDs, but no one explained the rest of the steps. Finally tonight I figured it out. Here's how I did it:

• Rip the CDs in iTunes. I use a Mac, but it may work in the PC version as well.
• iTunes stores the files in AAC format in the iTunes Library.
• iTunes automatically loads the metadata for CDs that are in the GraceNote database, so no typing is required to enter the metadata!
• iTunes automatically organizes files into folders by Artist and Album.
• Copy the folders you want in your Jeep from the iTunes Library to a USB drive or SD card. I used a 4gb USB drive formatted with FAT32. Five albums fit easily.
• Voila! The Jeep reads the folders and files and I can click on "Browse" in the Media player to pick the album, artist, or song I want to hear.

Hope this helps others figure it out.

 

[moparado]

For ripping music from my CD's into MP3 files i use a freeware program called:
FreeRIP MP3 converter.
Extremely easy and straight forward to use.

For editing MP3 metadata i use another freeware program called:
MP3tag.
Also extremely easy to use and can even copy 'n past album cover art into metadata.

Do a google search for each and download the programs if interested.

 

[dlahaie]

Here's my post on the Hellcat forum where I address the configuration question. There may/are many ways to do it, mine is a suggestion. I got to get Uconnect to work perfectly using this method. All mp3s show up in Artist and Album correctly and the playlists work fine as well. See the link below:

link: Uconnect Playlists - one guy's journey!

In case the link doesn't work, here's a copy of the post:

I’ve been working on getting my music on a hard drive and connect to my 2016 Challenger SRT Hellcat UConnect system via USB. Along the way, I had a few problems and thought to post some of the things I’ve found and the setup that worked for me. I hope this can be of use for someone. My music resides on a Window 10 PC and so most of this post relates how to transfer the music from this system to the 2016 Hellcat UConnect system.

• Hardware and Setup

The hard drive I chose is a 2TB Western Digital (WD) My Passport Portable USB Hard Drive. Got it at Best Buy (Canada), here’s a link showing examples available today: External-Hard-Drives-Examples . An important setup note for the hard drive is to format it using FAT32. I have not tried other formatting systems (NTFS or exFAT) available on the PC, but I had read previous posts that FAT32 is the way to go and it worked for me. Because the Windows 10 system doesn’t allow for FAT32 formatting, I used the MiniAide FAT32 Formatter from download.com, MiniAide-Fat32-Formatter . This program, as the name implies will format your hard drive to FAT32, worked well for me. Connect your hard drive, install MiniAide FAT32 Formatter. Open the program, left click on the drive you want to format to highlight it, right click and pick “Format Partition”. You can add a Label to the partition (like “Music”), ensure you pick FAT32 as the file system. You also have cluster size choices, but I just used the default. Once you have clicked ok, click on the green check mark at the top of the menu to apply changes. Confirm yes to apply changes, you will then see progress bars for the formatting.
The hardware is now ready to transfer music to it. I read many blogs on these topics, some say that there are size limitations for the USB drives in the UConnect system. At this moment, I have a 2 TB drive in the car with 110 GB of music and it all gets read by the system nicely. The system does take a while to read it all, but it works.

• Music Organization on PC

As I am an old guy (54 yo), a lot of my music was on physical media, mostly CDs. I ripped all of this into mp3 (320 kbps) using Windows Media Player (WMP). Because of this, all of the formatting of the Music folders was based on WMP. I found that UConnect works well with the folder formatting from WMP. It picks up Artist & Album correctly. So, as far as the folder structure, it goes like this: C:\Users\username\Music\Artist\Album. If all of your music gets read correctly into WMP, then you are set to transfer over to the hard drive. With your newly formatted hard drive connected, copy all of the sub-folders under the Music folder on your PC to the hard drive. All of the music you have should then be readable into UConnect and well organized.

• Playlists

The hardware and songs were a pretty straightforward process to get to work with UConnect. I actually think the system is quite good and pretty robust in reading the files. I’ve had nightmares with other systems from other car manufacturers that will remain nameless here. However, I did get stuck for a long time with Playlists. I had to dig down and try many things to get these to work properly. Learned a few things along the way and thought to share in case someone else is tearing his/her hair out.
Over all the trials I did, I found that both the .m3u and .wpl formats for the Playlists will be read by the UConnect system. I will not talk about .m3u much because I ended up going with .wpl in the end. However, if you decide to go with .m3u, make sure to open your playlist and check that the paths to the mp3 files are correct, I used Notepad++ for this. In my case, I converted the .wpl I had to .m3u using WPLtoM3U Converter, available on download.com: WPL-To-M3U-Converter . Make sure to use the following conventions to correctly define the path from where your .m3u resides in the folder structure to where the .mp3 resides
/ is the root of the current drive;
./ is the current directory;
../ is the parent of the current directory.

Now to .wpl playlists. These playlists were built on my PC in Windows Media Player (WMP). If you can play the playlists on your PC, they should work fine on the UConnect system (mostly, see later). Once you save the Playlist in WMP, they will by default reside in C:\Users\username\Music\Playlists\ . So, when you copy all of the sub-folder under \Music, the Playlists folder will be copied with it. The good news is UConnect, stalwart that it is, will read the Playlists without much of a problem.
However, and this is what took me so much time to figure out, the playlists are read, but in my case, there were some song omissions in the playlists, some of them just disappeared. If you selected this song in the folder structure in UConnect, it would play no problem, just wouldn’t play on playlist. I struggled with this for a long time. I re-formatted the hard drive completely, re-copied all files and playlists, still same problem. I tried .m3u as mentioned above, these playlists were read by UConnect but still had the song omissions. Using Notepad++, I looked at the playlist files for any omissions, saw nothing that would point to an issue, plus the playlists worked on the PC. Eventually, I had to detail all of the songs that were not being picked up in the playlists. So, here’s what I found and I was shocked, but it totally fixed the problem. In my folder system, the album and artist are folders. The playlists pointed to the exact spelling of these folders, but get this, IT IS CASE SENSITIVE. I am shocked by this because Windows paths are not case sensitive, but the playlist paths in UConnect are. So, when I used the exact case for the folders, the playlists were picked up perfectly. So, folks, if you want it all to work, make sure that the paths are EXACTLY copying the spelling, punctuation, special characters and CASE.

• Conclusions

I hope you had fun reading my journey into UConnect. As I said, great system overall, just the quirk of case sensitivity on file paths. If you want a summary of setup, here goes:

• FAT32 formatted hard drive
• WMP folder structure
• WMP generated .wpl playlists
• Watch for path of playlists, they are case sensitive and must match exactly the folder spelling