Use your USB port as an audio player.

I'm not sure how many people are aware of this but your factory USB port can be used an an audio player. All you need is a USB thumb drive, no need to connect your phone, buy an ipod or carry around CDs. My free XM Radio trial was ending, and I was planning on burning an MP3 CD based off an XM station, but then I thought, lets give the simple USB thumb drive a try. Sure enough, it worked. I downloaded a bunch of music based on that one XM station I listened to and now I have a personalized radio station with over 1,500 songs with no signal loss ever. It seems so obvious now but I didn't realized this was a feature when I bought my truck. I have a 2015 TRD Sport with Entune Audio Plus, your mileage may vary.

 

This is relatively know, but make sure you use one of those extremely compact low profile drives. This reduces the stress on the port if you keep it connected for an extended period of time.

 

I thought everybody knew that.

 

Me too, and you can search the files, play as you like or let them play randomly. lots of options available.

 

You can also set up folders to keep various types of music together. Select them and listen all the songs in order or just randomize that folder.

 

I've got a 2013 without entune. I loaded my music on in sub folders, by artist, then by album. I'm the album folder are all the files. What I find frustrating is that the radio just has a list of every album on the thumb drive. Is there a way to set it up so that it shows by artist then by album?

 

You may have to set up the MP3 tags properly for each file. I had a similar problem before doing that.

 

I wish Toyota had done a better job of the USB audio function. It only seems to read off the ID3 tag data to load songs, and couldn't care less about the actual files or folders.

So if you have a folder with 1 album inside, but the artist did some collaborations with other artists, Entune will display multiple artist names and not recognize the set as a singular album (unless you browse by Album name).

Someone on another forum suggested a workaround to this is to go album by album, and assign each album to a unique genre. Then, using the Entune interface, just pick X genre and it'll play the entire album.

I've found it easier to just load the songs on my phone and then use the BT Audio function. The shuffle function on BT Audio works fine, but in USB Audio mode is wonky because it reshuffles every time you advance the track back or forward.

 

Been using a low profile drive since I bought the truck.

Originally, I connected my Iphone to the USB but noticed that when I played my music the phone's battery would continue to discharge, even though I had it connected separately to charge. I also realized there was a lag in the music booting up when starting the truck, and when fast forwarding and reversing the music.

I installed the flash drive, and mounted and powered up the phone separately, and everything works great. I transferred my Itunes music to the drive long ago and am able to play the music randomly, by songs, artists, etc.

 

Is there a size limit for the flash drive you use? I had a 32GB drive in there that worked fine, but it was physically big and I keep bumping it. I just bought a new ScanDisk Ultra Fit 128GM USB 3.0 drive. I spent an hour copying 110GB of music onto this thing, then plugged it in. Nothing. The truck doesn't see it, and just toggles between FM. AM, and Bluetooth. WTF?

 

It's a USB 2.0 port.

 

well, there you go....

 

I use a USB 3.0 flash drive (SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB) and it works fine. It has to be formatted in FAT32 and the stock head unit will only acknowledge 9999 songs regardless of the size of the drive.

 

I had over 12K songs on there. I'll cut it back, reformat to FAT32, and try again.

 

... 64GB

 

Damn that is small. Who makes that?

 

Where did you download all your songs from?

 

Sub'd

 

My 08 has 2 usb ports - 1 for charging and one for playback.......

 

SanDisc among others. I've been running a 32GB one for months now, works great.

If you use the dreaded iTunes to manage your music, there's a stand-alone program called NotPod that will manage a USB drive for you. You just set up a playlist in iTunes for everything you want, then run NotPod to copy that playlist to the drive.