I'm picking up my new Volvo on Thursday, the headunit will read up to 60000 files off a USB HDD but only 500 folders, I've tried MediaMonkey and WinAmp to synch the HDD to my MP3 library but both create huge numbers of folders. I've been told an iTunes library is the way to go, never having used iTunes I can't see how exactly to get my library currently J:\MP3\ to the HDD via iTunes.

How do I do this?

Hmm, not sure about that. My iTunes folder (as organised by iTunes itself) has one folder per "album", enclosed within one folder per artist... ie, pretty much the same as I organised my flacs during ripping.

Does the volvo browse the folder tree? Sounds like you maybe need to manually work on how you'd like to browse your music.

Sounds strangely like an empeg playlist tree is required

I also find it strange that it can handle 60000 files but only 500 folders. 120 files/folder without any allowance for Artist\Album\Track etc?

I don't see how iTunes can make it any better. It still needs to store the files. Sounds like someone has just said "iTunes" since that magically fixes everything....

Sure about the 500 folder limit? Maybe just give it a go? Thursday's not that long to wait to find out.

Worst case do you think you'd have 500 artists?

In my store I keep it like this:



with special "Comedy", "Audiobooks" and "Various" at the top levels.

In my case I could probably just get away with removing the Album subdir and dropping one artist's tracks all in one directory. That's assuming of course the Volvo is smart enough to sort alphabetically and doesn't leave them in file system order.

I appear to have 4025 artists. I've got my iTunes library on the HDD now, will wait till I pick the car up to see if it works. The library has been organised as Artist\Album which means lots of Album folders on various artists compilations.

Yeah I was hoping NOT to change my directory structure, I've got5 directories under MP3:

AF
GM
NS
TZ
Under which I have Artist\Album

plus Various which contains all the multi artist compilations under which I have Label\Album

The Volvo can browse the folder tree and I guess this may be where the folder limitation lies, maybe stuff off playlists will be OK.

Never played with an empeg so unfortunately no idea what a playlist tree looks like.

It seems to me that Doubletwist would be better at syncing to a USB mass storage device. But I might not be understanding the problem correctly...

Not sure what Doubletwist would do for me, I now have the library on the HDD, problem is going to be the number of folders

Yet another product where the progammer used fixed length arrays. Sweet.

Maybe you'll be lucky, and the description of the limits were an oversimplification? Maybe the 500 limit is only per-tree-level, i.e., you could have 500 root folders, and 500 folders at the next tree level, etc...

We shall see...

Wait, what?


That's a lot but it all depends on how you organise your music. For full albums I keep an artist directory and subdirs for each album under that. For singles they go in one big folder currently. So for my current 75GB odd collection I only have (yes exactly!) 500 folders including the top level A through Z and a few other top levels but excluding the actual album folders.

Yeah, I know...

Let's swap libraries