Audacity Forum

Hi Folks,

My apologies for this off-topic post but I couldn’t find the answer about audio Googling it.

When I rent a car, the rental employees never know how to make sure my music (mp3s) on a flash drive play in a certain order when I plug the drive into the USB port in the car.

I don’t have a newer car with a USB capability so I can’t experiment.

Do I simply create a playlist in VLC Media Player with the songs in set in a chosen order and click to that playlist once the drive is inserted into the car’s USB port?

Or is it more complicated?

Thank you for all your understanding and help.

As far as I know, there is no universal standard unless the car has an iPod dock or unless it's Bluetooth compatible. I think you'll have to Google the particular vehicle.

...My cars have iPod docks. One of them has a USB port where I can plug-in the iPod or a USB drive and it's got various song-selection features but I've never tried a "plain" USB drive. (I have a 160Gb iPod Classic with about 15000 songs on it.)

I think there are only two ways to get exactly the sequence that you want.
Bear in mind that almost every car maker and every "radio" maker uses their own peculiar software so you can't even be sure they honor "playlists". Some limit the number of files or folders. Some cannot recognize track numbers, they sort everything by track TITLE in alphabetic order.

So your most reliable way is to let a phone do all the work, rashly assuming it can stream bt music to the car system. If it can't do that directly, you can pick up an FM adapter for $10 that will redirect the bt music from your phone to any empty FM radio channel, and use that to connect to the car.

But if you are trying to put a USB or SD device into the car directly? You may need to rename all of the tracks in numeric (001, 002, etc.) or alphabetic order, because there's no guarantee the car system can recognize any particular order of tracks or titles.

The "intelligence" of car entertainment systems these days lags far behind that of ipods or cheap cell phones, yes.