MG ZS EV USB Music Folders

sgt4hed said:

I can't say it is a feature I will ever use given that the vehicle has Android Auto and Apple Carplay

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patience said:

I use it because I with that I just switch on the car and it carries on playing from where I left off. I have a stick with a lot of tracks (that I like) on it, so it saves me setting anything up which I would have to do, even if it's voice activated, with my iPhone

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Nickel said:

OK, so the workaround seems to be functioning. Something similar was suggested early on in the thread.

Here's what I've done:

• At first, I thought tracks were being displayed in alphabetical order of filename, but they aren't. They are being displayed in alphabetical order of the Title field in the ID3 metadata
• So, the first step was to use MP3tag software to modify that field to include Artist, Album and Track No.
• You need to be brief, or you won't be able to read key data for a later step. The player only displays the first 14 characters of the field and doesn't scroll any more.
• I changed the Title field of each track to: "Artist/Album/Track No/Track title" Suppose I'm loading Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water from the album of the same name. (Yes, I am that old... ) I change the Title field to (e.g) "S&G/Bridge/01 Bridge over Troubled Water."
• Now when the sort is done, the player will group all Simon & Garfunkel (S&G) tracks together, then group all tracks on the Bridge album together, sorting them into track number order. (You need the track number to have the leading zero as this is a pure alpha sort, so would otherwise order as 1,10,11,2, 20,3,4 etc.
• Placing your USB in the car, you now have a potentially huge list, ordered into Artist, Album and the correct track order. Still exceedingly difficult to use.
• The final step is to scroll through the list of tracks and mark every "01" track as a favourite. Now tap the little button that puts the track listing into Favourite mode.
• Presto, you now have a list of all albums on your USB stick, grouped by Artist. Tap your choice, and the album will start playing at track 01. If you want to change track, put the list back into Title mode, and the other tracks on the album will be close at hand.

Is this ideal? Of course not - there should be a proper sort and selection facility in the player. But I gather that MG are far from the only marque with players that behave like this.

Is it a faff to do? Up to a point. It's work for the customer that should be unnecessary.

Does it take a long time? No. Using MP3Tag's batch editing ability, the Convert Tag->tag function and a suitably crafted format string to utilise what info your files carry, it's quick enough. Once I'd sorted what I was doing, I could edit an entire album in less than a minute.

So, if anyone's interested, that's what I did. I'm happy that I now have a selection of my favourite albums in the car, and I can choose what I want. I'll top the stick up as I feel te need.

If anyone has any questions, I'll do my best...

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