2020 Rav4 USB track order

[chris ha]

It sgreat to have Carplay etc etc, but I have my entire cd collection on a USB stick, 32gb and yes its recognized and everything appears...

My Problem... how do I get Album tracks to play in the correct order and not alphabetical... I knows its a bit of a first world problem but its really irritating to her a randomly played Dark Side of the Moon!!

I took the first " I'm bloke I will work it out " approach and that got me nowhere.

Plan B RTFM.. Read the flippin manual...............

I still cant find out how to do it... this is the same USB key I used in my xtrail and I had obviously worked out how to do it on there 3 years ago  but I cannot find out how do it in my Freshly minted RAV4

[PeteB]

11 hours ago, chris ha said:

It sgreat to have Carplay etc etc, but I have my entire cd collection on a USB stick, 32gb and yes its recognized and everything appears...

My Problem... how do I get Album tracks to play in the correct order and not alphabetical...

I don't know if this helps any, but I also have my entire collection on USB.  I've always used Playlists, created in my PC.  They've worked fine on all my previous Toyotas and some loaned Lexus models, but not on my 2019 RAV4 Excel.  They didn't work on the test drive car which had the standard auto, and having the JBL upgrade on my Excel made no difference (not that I wanted the upgrade, I wanted the Panoramic Camera system - which is wonderful, BTW - but they only came as a pair).

However, I have found that, for some strange reason, Playlists do work when streaming from my phone via bluetooth.  Less convenient, I have to remember to start the music App on the phone before setting off for it to work.  But, for me, better than no Playlists at all.

11 hours ago, chris ha said:

...Plan B RTFM.. Read the flippin manual...

Oh, is that what it stands for... 🤣

[chris ha]

PeteB..  there must be a way.. I had the same problem with my Nissan but then worked it out... maybe a call to Toyota...

[BigR1ch]

The Manual does say this  but that is the only reference to playlist in the manual apart from voice recoginition section

 

Just found this on the  https://blog.toyota.co.uk/toyota-touch-go-how-to-play-music-via-bluetooth-or-a-usb-device in the comments section at the bottom, which might help

 

 The Touch and Go system picks up ID Tags rather than folders and file names. You can find more information on this in the owner’s manual and if you have any further issues you can contact our multimedia team via this number: 0344 701 6202

[chris ha]

 

1 hour ago, BigR1ch said:

The Manual does say this  but that is the only reference to playlist in the manual apart from voice recoginition section

 

Just found this on the  https://blog.toyota.co.uk/toyota-touch-go-how-to-play-music-via-bluetooth-or-a-usb-device in the comments section at the bottom, which might help

 

 The Touch and Go system picks up ID Tags rather than folders and file names. You can find more information on this in the owner’s manual and if you have any further issues you can contact our multimedia team via this number: 0344 701 6202

Thanks I will give it a look

[chris ha]

It happily picks up the album, but when it gets to the tracks it does them alpabetically

[philip42h]

On 3/24/2020 at 11:23 AM, PeteB said:

However, I have found that, for some strange reason, Playlists do work when streaming from my phone via Bluetooth.  Less convenient, I have to remember to start the music App on the phone before setting off for it to work.  But, for me, better than no Playlists at all.

It's not so strange, and I thought you'd explained it quite well! 🙂

The USB stick is just dumb filestore. It contains folders and files some of which represent albums and track; some playlists; some other stuff. The 'intelligence' required to play your music comes from the infotainment system and it would appear from these posts that it doesn't recognise playlists ...

If you stream music from your smartphone the 'intelligence' comes from the smartphone while the infotainment system acts dumb and plays what is streamed to it - and it would appear that it is smart enough to do this much! 😀

[roadster-rav]

When, many years ago, I decided to digitise all my music collection I realised that being able to sort in track order was almost essential. So all my tracks are prefixed with a two digit track number ( 01,02,03 ... etc.) If you want to do this retrospectively it could easily be done via something like foobar2000 provided there is track number metadata in the files. Without the metadata its more difficult but it can be added to well known albums using the automatic retrieval from the freedb database which foobar2000 uses by default when using the tagging option on selected tracks. fb2k file operations will also convert tracks to other formats or rename into new folder and/or file structures.

[PeteB]

19 hours ago, philip42h said:

The USB stick is just dumb filestore. It contains folders and files some of which represent albums and track; some playlists; some other stuff. The 'intelligence' required to play your music comes from the infotainment system and it would appear from these posts that it doesn't recognise playlists ...

Yes indeed, but since all previous Toyotas I've owned/driven that support USB memory also supported playlists, it's disappointing the people responsible for the specification and software creation for the latest system didn't follow suit.  Might be considered industry best practice.  And from posts I've seen on various sites (for new Corolla as well) I'm certainly not the only person annoyed by the lack of support.

[Phill111]

On 3/26/2020 at 11:13 AM, PeteB said:

Yes indeed, but since all previous Toyotas I've owned/driven that support USB memory also supported playlists, it's disappointing the people responsible for the specification and software creation for the latest system didn't follow suit.  Might be considered industry best practice.  And from posts I've seen on various sites (for new Corolla as well) I'm certainly not the only person annoyed by the lack of support.

I totally agree. The track numbers are meta tags supported by most software so it should be very simple to use those, just like the older models did and even the £70 Sony head unit in my daughters car. I am sure it is an oversights and I would hope one Toyota will fix soon.

[chris ha]

well I will give that a try.....  all 21gb  of thm!

[chris ha]

sorry to bump this but used foobar  renamed all tracks which are listed under windows in correct order 1,2,3,4,5  etc etc, but it still does it alphabetically ignores the numbers... do I have to cahnge the "details"  tab on each file to something else not just the title?

[chris ha]

ok reply from Toyota

 

"

Good Morning Chris,

Thank you for your email confirming the details of your Toyota RAV4.

I have asked our Multimedia department for advice on this issue and I am sorry to say the system is designed to run in alphabetical order I am afraid. However the order can be changed can adding all desired tracks to a playlist.

 I apologise again for any inconvenience but I hope this has helped and thank you for contacting Toyota. 

Kind regards

-------------------------------------------------------------

except

According to the manual

 

 

[brisbane man]

I (well really my teenage son) managed to do a work-around to get the system in my 2020 RAV4 to play albums in the correct track order instead of alphabetically. It involves adding the track number to the song titles on the usb. Now you might think this is a proper ball-ache especially if like me you've got thousands of tracks on your usb stick, but download a free program called Mp3tag and it will add the track number to the song titles in bulk in a few seconds so the selected album plays in numerical order.

I have to say the infotainment system on the RAV4, including the sat nav is appalling and it will affect my car choice next time. Coupled with the inability to find out when Car Play/Auto upgrade will be available, its a really poor show.

[MazdaConvert]

On 8/29/2020 at 4:04 PM, brisbane man said:

I (well really my teenage son) managed to do a work-around to get the system in my 2020 RAV4 to play albums in the correct track order instead of alphabetically. It involves adding the track number to the song titles on the usb. Now you might think this is a proper ball-ache especially if like me you've got thousands of tracks on your usb stick, but download a free program called Mp3tag and it will add the track number to the song titles in bulk in a few seconds so the selected album plays in numerical order.

I have to say the infotainment system on the RAV4, including the sat nav is appalling and it will affect my car choice next time. Coupled with the inability to find out when Car Play/Auto upgrade will be available, its a really poor show.

I have to agree with the above.  I was very surprised to find my RAV4 didn't have a CD player but I would have to transfer my c. 100 CD collection to a USB stick. A comparison of steps involved in playing of a CD in the 2 methods is:

A.  CD

1. Insert CD

B.  USB

1. Gather CDs I want to transfer to USB

2. Insert CD to CD drive on Windows 10 desktop

3.  Find that MS Media Player doesn't work.

4. Try my Windows 11 laptop with an external CD drive.  Media Player seems OK.

5.  Transfer some CDs to USB stick.

6.  RAV4 doesn't recognise it.

7.  Realise, after much googling, that RAV4 can only handle FAT32-partitioned USBs on 32 GB or less.

8. Use a utility to convert my 1 TB exFAT USB to 32GB FAT32.

9.  Find another USB drive when said utility destroys my 1TB drive.  I can't even reformat it.

10.  Transfer CDs to USB stick.  Find that some can be ripped but don't transfer.

11.  Find out that some CDs appear as a title that is nothing to do with what's on the CD.

12.  Discover that the RAV4  can't find all the tracks on many CDs, just a few.

13.  The RAV4 plays the tracks in either alphabetical or random or backwards order.  Annoying if you're trying to listen to e.g. a symphony in 4 movements.

14. Spend inordinate amount of time recovering missing tracks and relabelling tracks to play in the right order.  Not yet succeeded.  I'll try your utility, thanks.

15.  Put up with a playback system where (1) the search facility usually can't find the music, (2) has a track-ID display of very few characters so you can't tell what it is that you are playing, (3) is so fiddly and user-unfriendly that it is dangerous to use while driving..

 

Sigh.  Such is progress.