Configure a USB drive for a car radio

This applies to Mazdas (works on my CX-30) but may be useful for other cars as well.

I wanted to load up a USB thumb drive with mp3s to have the option to play music just in case I was in an area with poor reception, or just got tired of flipping through stations or streaming music playlists.

I should note that I have a meticulously maintained playlist on both Spotify and my Mac called ‘1 song per artist‘ that currently has about 1800 songs. Yes, 1800 songs with only one song per artist. That’s 1800± different artists. It’s all alternative/indie too… from the late 60s (artists that influenced modern day alternative rock) through today. If interested, you can . () [shuffling is recommended]

This is how I was able to get the car entertainment system to read the thumb drive’s music folders AND playlists.

This is the USB drive I have. It’s incredibly small, very low profile, and affordable.

First , the USB thumb drive must be formatted as FAT32. On a Mac, use Disk Utility for this. Once that’s done, then proceed.

On my Mac, I created a new login just for the purpose of copying music to the thumb drive. This way I don’t have to mess with the music stored on my main account.

Call this new computer login whatever you want, then login to that account. (If you have a Windows computer then the logic is similar. The main hurdle for me was formatting the playlists.)

Open iTunes (now called Music.app) and open Preferences. Click on Files at the top of the Preferences window. Set this account’s music storage location to the USB drive. Make sure you set it to the root of the thumb drive. If your thumb drive is called ‘MUSIC’ then this preference will show, “/MUSIC”. Check the box for ‘keep Music Media folder organized’.

Copy any desired mp3s from your usual music folder to the root of the thumb drive. You may want to do this first, before you sign into this account. Then add them to iTunes/Music.app and let the app do any folder/file organization. Once iTunes/Music.app is finished adding the mp3s and reorganizing the folders/files, you should have a thumb drive with a folder for each artist at the top level, with album folders within them.

This is all you need if you want to manually choose artist/albums/songs from the car. If you want playlists, then continue.

Create any desired playlists and add the songs to them, within iTunes/Music.app.

When you are finished modifying the playlist, you want to export it.

Choose File > Library > Export Playlist, and save it to the root of the thumb drive as an M3U formatted playlist. (You can save it elsewhere first if you want because we have to modify it.)

Open the playlist m3u file with a text editor, like BBEdit or Notepad++.

When you open the playlist, it may look something like this. This is a small excerpt of a playlist, only showing 2 songs. There will be 2 lines per song.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:365,I Don't Want to Let You Down - Flyying Colours
/Volumes/MUSIC/Flyying Colours/ROYGBIV/01 I Don't Want to Let You Down.mp3
#EXTINF:153,Pink Showers - Deeper
/Volumes/MUSIC/Deeper/Deeper/01 Pink Showers.mp3

What we need to do is use the text editing application to find/replace a couple things so that every line with the file path looks like this.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:365,I Don't Want to Let You Down - Flyying Colours
\Flyying Colours\ROYGBIV I Don't Want to Let You Down.mp3
#EXTINF:153,Pink Showers - Deeper
\Deeper\Deeper Pink Showers.mp3

The 2 changes you have to make, in this situation, are:

1. remove: /Volumes/MUSIC
2. find all forward slashes ( / ) and replace with backward slashes ( \ )

Once you have done this, save the file(s) and put it on the USB drive. I created a folder called “playlists” and put them all in there. My car is able to find them.

That’s it! Depending on the music software, your computer, and where you store your music, your process may be a little different but the end result you want to achieve will be the same. Look at the second file format example above and try to achieve that.

In case you’re curious, you can see what the EXTINF line is for here, but I don’t modify that. The number following EXTINF is the length of the song, in seconds.

Related Information

If you want to see how I created my own wireless phone charger for the center console, see this post. It’s much cheaper and more user friendly than the poorly thought out version Mazda offers.