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A real first world problem

January 23rd, 2014 · Posted by Skuds in Music/Technology · No Comments · Music, Technology

So. About that car that I said I wouldn’t go on about any more? I got a 64GB USB stick and filled it up with music. The car (or rather the car’s computer) had no problem reading such a large capacity and playing anything from it but because of the number of tracks you can only select tracks via the dashboard controls and not by using voice commands.

Considering that not many years ago I still had a tape deck in my car, this is not a huge problem, but it is still a little frustrating. I know the reason for it, sort of. The system builds its own database/index for a USB stick and there is a limit on the number of items in that database. I think that the items are track name, artist name, album name (possibly) and genre (possibly) so an album of 10 tracks could represent 13 items (10x tracks, and 1 each of the others). Ten individual tracks from different albums by different artists could represent up to 40 items. I think the database limit is about 10,000.

I tried culling albums that, if I am honest with myself, I am unlikely to ever choose to listen to and won’t care if they never crop up on shuffle and ended up with about 8500 tracks and the that is still too many. If I want to get the thing working properly now I’ll have to start leaving off things I might actually want.

I already decided that perhaps 5 whole albums by Joachim Witt is a tad excessive and deleted 3 of them, and I’m down to only about 8 or 9 Yes albums now. I deleted 2 of the 3 Pantera albums on the basis that they all sound the same anyway so one is enough.

Once I’m finished I will have well under 32GB of data so I can move it to a smaller capacity stick and use the 64GB one for podcasts. Since they are all about an hour long I could fill it and still have a small enough number of tracks for voice control to work – though so many 100s of hours of the Bugle and Collings and Herrin would be a dangerous thing to listen to.

I’m so glad my life otherwise good enough that I can worry about such trivialities!

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