Which USB sticks?

[Bertison]

Hi everyone
I have a couple more devices to add to my Spec's, which I will do after this Thread is posted. Both my wife and I have bought Android smartphones, missus has a newer laptop, I have also bought an Android Lenovo TAB3 - 8 tablet. We have also had Sky TV, broadband, landline and calls, with a new TV. All of this was not bought at once! - But over the last 12 months or so.

My thinking is, 2x OTG USB sticks to cater for the Android devices, (phones & tablet) this desktop and the laptop. Our network which has been setup for some time now and we can always stream anything and everything, to and from all devices. However, within the next 5 weeks I am getting a tasty new car (Hyundai Tucson) and I want to be able to record Playlists to USB sticks, and play them through the car audio system. What is the best size of USB stick for this, and what do you guys think are best? I was thinking, maybe 2x OTG sticks of 4 or 8GB, and possibly 4x 'ordinary' USB sticks to play in the car, with several different Playlists in each.

I am also still engaged in recording my massive CD and vinyl collection to my NAS, which I can stream all over the house. About 50% of the way through that, and there is almost 9GB of MP3 music, at 320kbps. So, a lot of music, most of which is from my era: mostly 50's & 60's, lots of 70's but also some modern stuff. About 60% of the NAS music is Elvis. That's just about everything he ever recorded.

I would be grateful for advice here, thanks to all who reply.

 

[Mellon Head]

I use 4 GB sticks in my car. It's a good size to put a lot of songs on it, they are cheap if you lose one, and they aren't so big that you overwhelm the audio system with a ton of files.

My audio system can take sticks larger than that, but I'm of the opinion that it's easier to fill a 4 GB stick with a genre of music than it is to fill an 8 GB stick. It's also harder to play a full 8 GB stick if you set it to random play. I prefer to set it to random as Windows and other MP3 handling programs will always write to or read from the USB stick in alphabetical order. I never seem to get through an 8 GB stick before it resets to the beginning.

 

[Bertison]

Thanks Mellon Head, exactly what I needed to know.

I will buy a few 4GB sticks and a couple of OTG sticks.

 

[Barman58]

I carry a number of 64GB mini USB sticks in the Car and actually store in a one folder per album format in artist folders It's easy to organise the basic transfer manually but my Head unit also has the issue with sorting, I name my album tracks with a CD+Track number at the front 0102 ... 01nn 02nnn ... then title which handles the sort to the way the artist wanted them. there is a problem with a lot of sticks that they store folders and files in the order in which they are added, and car players playback folders in the order they are stored on the stick and tracks alphabetically - this means that unless you transfer the files and folders to the stick in the correct alphabetical order in one go you can get playback in a totally random order even when trying to play in album order.

I have found a solution to these issues, in addition to the names used for albums Artist-Year-Title, and tracks as stated above ...

A little program (from 2008 but still works on 7, 8, and 10) called DriveSort

the description is ...

This program enables you to reorganise the content of the directory tables on a FAT drive, in order to help portable multimedia players to play their music tracks in the right order.
It works directly on the opened disk filesystem, so use it at your own risks. It's a good idea to make a backup of sensitive data before working on a disk.

Although it was made for the I-Bead player, it should work well with other portable multimedia players having a FAT12, FAT16, or FAT32 formatted disk, such as the Lynx, Muro, your mobile phone flash card, ...

BTW as I use MediaMonkey >> Download for audio storage on my PCs I can rename on the fly when transferring to USB to allow for restrictions in file length ( my Head unit displays Metadata rather than file names so it's a little easier than some)

Mediamonkey handles my music library without problems and although I use the paid "Gold Version" even the free version is great for anyone with a larger collection, (last check mine was more than 256 GB)