What is the brand and model of the new drive? I've only had good luck with SanDisk Cruzers in my car. Is everything an MP3 format or something else? Also, did you completely reformat the new drive? Some drives have software (root kits) installed in the root directory that can play havoc with the Audio/Navigation systems in cars. I always do a hard format with the operating system on my PC and usually follow that with a drive wipe using CCleaner to ensure that there is absolutely nothing on the drive prior to my loading tunes. Also, how is the tree structure set up on the new drive? The Cruze used to have a limit of 10,000 tracks for the USB interface. Check with GM Total Connect for additional help.

 

Well I didn't format the new drive because I was thinking since it's brand new there was no need but I will do it tomorrow, the new duve is a 16GB Lexar don't have the exact specs. Did a chat with CS for the mylink and they wrote that I have to format the new stick with ntfs and do a reset on the car...turn the car on for 1 minut than shut it down living the key on acc and leave the door open for 10 minuts, than go to config menu on mylink and set it to factory reset, than insert the stick and let it index. Tomorrow I'll try to tag the filed better than they are now with the format and factory reset see if it helps.

 

NTFS - the normal format for USB drives this size is FAT32. Besides, unless you're running Windows you may not be able to format to NTFS, but everyone can format FAT/FAT32. Definitely reformat the drive though. I put a brand new Lexar drive in my system once and it wanted to install software on my computer, so I know that at least some of their drives assume you can't read larger USB drives.

 

I have never gotten a Lexor drive to work in my car. The last one I bought had some sort of programming on it that Norton puked all over. Some of the cheaper made drives have an internal architecture that car audio systems just can't handle, regardless of how the're formatted. I've come to belive that Lexor is one of those.

Update: The OM and NM for my car specifies formatting the USB flash drives as FAT32. I know NTFS doesn't work with these systems.

 

Today I formated the stick, cleaned up the tagging and leaved 2400 songs in the stick. Did all the possible resets on the mylink and the open door 10 minuts ajar. When I put the usb stick in in starts playing no trouble and all the folders/songs/artist and so on is ok, but still indexing forever. Tried friend usb stick with 400 well tagged files and same thing...indexing. Is it possible that onstar has to do something with the indexing since I did't renew my services with them? It's very frustrating not be able to use the voice commands since it's indexing all the time. Maybe someone has a clue how to fix that.

 

Btw, moved this to the Audio section since the gas owners have the same system and could maybe bring some insight to you.

OnStar has nothing to do with the indexing service.

I don't have the MyLink system - I have the crappy, slow radio before that that's much slower than MyLink - and I dumped some music on a very slow, 4 GB flash drive I had no other use for (about 800 songs). It indexed for the good part of 20 minutes, then did it again when I started the car again.

Did the same thing with a cheap SanDisk drive, and it took it all of 2 mins. I don't know if the car is USB 1.1 or 2.0, but that was a 2.0 drive.

 

ok thanks, I think I'll just buy another usb stick and you're the third to say that sandisk works better. Saw a 100/mbs sandisk 32GB usb 3.0 at a good price I'll give it a try.

 

I took my most heavily loaded drive out and plugged it in. 25 seconds to index and show 97 albums, with 1,263 tracks, totaling 6.7GB of tunes. The first track on the drive started playing at 10 seconds. This was an 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Edge drive. Write speed of 4.70 MB/sec. Read speed of 20.4 MB/sec. 3 for $25 at Costco.

 

I took my most heavily loaded drive out and plugged it in. 25 seconds to index and show 97 albums, with 1,263 tracks, totaling 6.7GB of tunes. The first track on the drive started playing at 10 seconds. This was an 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Edge drive. 3 for $25 at Costco.

Now you got me curious. Selected a whole bunch of random folders from my music library and dumped them onto the 12 gigs of free space on my 16 gig Cruzer. 2500 files - so 2000-2200 songs I think.

Took the computer about 30 mins to write them all and the car just over 4 minutes to index it. This is the old monochrome display stereo unit - not the much faster MyLink system. Not too bad. In the meantime, it plays the first song on the drive immediately and just shows "USB Indexing" at the bottom. Probably be better with a faster jump drive - this one's fairly slow (6 MB/sec write speed).

 

Bought a sandisk ultra 3.0 32GB fast write/read stick...was told that it's the cadillac of usb sticks, loading my library on it at this moment and I'll try it tomorrow see how the indexing is...

 

****, 3 words come to my head since I'm playing around with the usb in my audio system...in my cruze the audio is "the weakest link" lol. Again, formated, done all the resets and nothing to do with this indexing crap, 22GB of songs on my sandisk ultra, drove for 1 hour and still indexing. Tried my usb in my friends car and no indexing at all, everything worked like it should be. One thing I can't understand is if the mylink has trouble reading some files why it just not showing a popup saying to skip those files and continue to index...because I think it's hanging over in something and just freezes there on indexing forever. Even my other friends crappy audio system read the card no problem and it's a low budget system. At this point I just chose the song I want to play in the menu and leave the stupid indexing going since there's no other choices. IMO mylink is not 100% ready for usb media to work as it should be 100$ later spent on usb sticks and many hours on taging and sorting files same trouble so I don't know I'm just tired of working on that. Hope GM is working on an update soon to fix this problem.

 

Hmm...weird. Maybe a certain directory or corrupt file is tripping it up. I do try to keep my music a bit organized on my computer...artist, album title, song name. Then it's sorted into folders by album. I don't know if that makes a difference or not - I just dragged over a whole bunch of folders to the jump drive.

I don't know if there were .m4a (iTunes) files in those directories or not...I do manage my music with iTunes and a lot of the newer stuff probably is that format, along with all the older mp3 files.

 

Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but I build my music drives on my PC in the sequence I want them to be on the flash drive. I rip CDs to the computer with RealPlayer and it converts all tracks to MP3 format and tags them in album order. I then drag and drop each artist/album to a flash drive image on the computer's hard drive. Then I drag each album to the flash drive one at a time to ensure things stay in the same physical & sequenial order on the flash drive with all files contiguous (not fragmented). I end up with a traditional tree structure of Artist/Albums, Artist/Albums, etc. Of course, performance could well be due to the audio system & firmware it's using too. FWIW, the factory installed nav/audio system in my car was originally designed for Porsche and had an option MSRP from the factory that was almost twice what the Cruze nav system listed for in 2013.

 

The tree structure of the folders is ok just as you mentioned but I have maybe 5 folders with 200 songs each as my playlists, but again when I look in the menu everything is there artists and songs are splited well fron those folders. That's really weird because all my files and the exact number of songs is listed as on the pc...4400 songs so I don't know anyway Thanks for your inputs.

 

I'm having the same indexing issue. It never gets done. I created a new disk and have around 7 gb of music (around 800 songs). Put it in the drive before I left for work. 50 minutes later it was still indexing when I got to work. It will start all over again the next time I start it up. It never finishes though. Also when it starts playing it will play the first song fine. Everything after that stutters and skips constantly. I ripped the MP3's at 320kbps so maybe that is too high of a rate for the Cruze. Any ideas about how to solve either or both issues?

 

I have the same problem as well and nothing seems to work. I do have it set for Shuffle (X) and I'm positive there was an option to start from where the stick left off last and I selected that. Now I can't find where that option even is?

 

If NTFS works I'd just use that.

Just be careful. Unlike FAT32 if you just yank the USB out you will corrupt the entire drive rather than just one file.

 

NTFS does not work. The car doesn't even recognize the USB device is plugged in when it is formatted as NTFS.

 

Also are you renaming the drive when you delete/add music? On my MyLink I had to rename the stick each edit or forever index. Also not spoken of yet, any playlist that exceeded 20 or so songs also screwed with indexing.

 

No I have not been renaming the drive. The name of the drive stays as what was used when it was formatted. Today though on the new USB stick I created it was the first time it was ever in the car.

 

OK, today I let the indexing run while listening to the songs stuttering and skipping and then the indexing finally finished about 20 minutes into my drive and then all songs began playing without stuttering and skipping so that would mean the indexing was what was causing that problem. Does anyone know if it still indexes the USB drive when it is in the drive but you are listening to another source like FM? I don't want to have to listen to 20 minutes of stuttering and skipping music every time I go somewhere.

Also the music that I have on this USB thumb drive was converted from Spotify playlists and the software automatically puts all songs into a folder with the artist name and then a subfolder with the album name instead of using the playlist title but I can manually do it so the folder name would be the name of the playlist with all songs from that playlist going into that folder. But the Cruze seems to just ignore folders and it lists all of the songs on the drive alphabetically. Or I can set it for random play but I would rather be able to just listen to songs from a single playlist (folder name) the way the Spotify player does on the phone. Is there a way to make the Cruze see the folder and just play songs from that folder?

 

I just had "Afternoon Delight" play at double speed on the stick. First of all its bad enough listening to the Starland Vocal Band at its regular speed and I had no idea a USB stick can do this. The 'Indexing' indicator was also doing its thing.

 

Mine does this occasionally with Spotify. It will work fine if I unplug the phone and plug it back in. Going to see if there's a software update when I take it in for an erl change. But my question would be why do you have that song in the first place?

 

I do not have my link so I don't think I can play Spotify over USB. I think all that happens when I plug my phone into USB is the Cruze audio system is just treating the internal storage of it as a USB device. I even checked the MyLink website and it doesn't list the 2012 Cruze as an option for MyLink. Correct me if this is wrong.

Chevrolet MyLink: Take Control Of Your Vehicle’s Technology | Chevrolet

As far as the amount of songs there is around 800. It is a USB stick so there are not apps running on it. The only thing on the stick are MP3's.

 

Probably a setting on the phone to change that. My iPhone didn't really care where the audio was coming from; it would play over USB.