Indexing a large USB drive

I recently got a USB hard drive large enough to hold my entire music library, which is substantial, coming in just short of the car's 9999 total track limit. I have had it for a few weeks now and still have not managed to get the system to index the entire drive. The drive itself is reasonably fast, and when my computer was transferring to it, it seemed to move along at a nice pace so I don't think that drive access speed is an issue. The problem is that I prefer to just set it to random play and forget it, but based on experience with a much smaller drive that I used previously, until it indexes fully there is a significant delay when moving from track to track in random play unless I manually hit the "next" button.

I am wondering if anyone knows how the indexing works. It seems like it should have had time to get it done by now, but I am thinking that maybe it does not retain its progress when I shut it off and I am starting off back at square one every time I start up. If this is the case then it would seem that my only choice is to either leave the car "on" in the garage for a long time (which seems wasteful and I don't really want to do) or to do as I read in another thread and put it in with only part of my library on it, let it index, and keep adding files to it and letting it re-index until I get it all on there.

The library is probably 80-90% tracks ripped from my CD collection, which I store as WMA Lossless, so the files are quite large. The rest are high bit-rate MP3s that I have purchased primarily from Amazon. I don't know if the size of my WMA files is an issue; it doesn't seem like it would be since I would think that it is only reading the tags encoded at the beginning of the files rather than the entire tracks.

So before I decide what to do, I was wondering if anyone knew for sure how it actually does work. Am I right that it has to be done all in one session, and if so, is adding files incrementally as I mentioned the way to go? Or will it eventually get there if I am patient enough? I hope someone has experience or inside knowledge that can help me out. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

A follow-up with a new issue: I ended up just going ahead with breaking up the job and only transferring part of the files at a time. I found that if I broke it up into three batches of 3000+ tracks that it would index the new music in about four or five minutes. So obviously something is broken when it comes to dealing with large numbers of files, because from this experience, it follows that it should have been able to index the whole 9900+ tracks in about fifteen minutes, but instead goes on forever. I had at least a couple of two-hour continuous round trips and it never completed in any of them.

But this post is actually about a new issue. Even once the entire drive is indexed (which I can tell because it will start to display track numbers), every time I shut off the car, when I start it back up again, it will play the song it had queued up, but it apparently has to re-scan the drive, and during this time, the player only sees the song that was playing when it started, and it acts like that is the only track on there. If that song finishes before the drive is re-scanned, it will repeat the same song again. If I try to move to a different track with the selection buttons, I get a message to the effect of: "Please wait while your library is re-scanned." This seems to take just under five minutes, so unless I am lucky enough to have a long song selected to start playing, my choice is to either listen to that song again or to pause it until everything is ready again.

It just baffles me why this is so hard. My mom's Ford Escape can play from a collection this large with no issues whatsoever. If it is really going to be this big of a deal, they should have just set the total file limit to 5,000 or whatever they could handle. I suppose I could go back to playing from my music player via the aux cable, but I prefer not to sacrifice the sound quality and the ability to control directly from the touchscreen.

 

How many songs do these drives contain? I find that it can index up to somewhere around 3,000 without an issue.

 

Your issue seems to be even more severe than mine. 1,800 should not be an issue and should index in just a few minutes. And I never really seemed to have an issue with missing songs once everything was indexed. Of course, I don't know this for sure, because there is no way to check through 9,000+ songs to see if some are missing, but judging by the numbers it displays, they all seem to be there--songs near the end of the sort order show as track #9___ (whatever the actual number would be, but they are in the 9,000 range).

As to whether Toyota monitors this site, I would be surprised if they did. Some contributors have reported talking to "insiders" about issues raised here, but there was no indication that they were directly monitoring the thread. But anyway, between issues like this and the dismal app representation, I agree that it is ridiculous that a car designed around technology would be lacking in so many basic areas. But they do at least have the engineering of the car itself down pretty well.