Portable hard drive instead of flash drive?

[SQMonte]

Got it all worked out! When I open iTunes my music looks perfectly tagged, but when I opened the actual album folders that wasn't the case. So the problem is there are strict guidelines you have to stay within in order for the deck to read the music via usb...if your title is longer than 32 characters, deck won't recognize it...but that's not all, Albums and Artist names, etc., all have character limits on them too. So basically I had to fix the way my music is tagged so it fits those guidelines....I've only got about 3k of it done, got another 6k to go. Thank goodness for MP3tag, a batch tagging program, makes this process much faster and easier.

After my earlier fails I ended up wiping the drive and instead of 32gb partitions, I just made a single 128gb partition, FAT32....with my music tagged right not only does it load up and start playing music faster than when my iPod was connected but it also will pick up playing where it left off the last time it was plugged in. The banking thing takes a while but I can still listen to and change songs while it's doing it's thing so no big deal there. Just thought I'd share for those having issues along these lines.

This is really awesome, because I wanted to get an external HDD and try the same thing. But I did not want to waste the extra money if it did not work. I am also glad it worked on you Alpine deck, I have a CDE-HD137BT, so hopefully a eternal HDD will work on it as well.

Before u do it, check ur owners manual to make sure ur deck can handle it and what the requirements are, it'll save u some aggravation. I wasn't sure how this would work out but am glad I went ahead and tried it. Hope it works out for u too, let us know.

[412 CVX]

How much of your 64 gb is taken up with music?

[1996BLKBauer]

Got it all worked out! When I open iTunes my music looks perfectly tagged, but when I opened the actual album folders that wasn't the case. So the problem is there are strict guidelines you have to stay within in order for the deck to read the music via usb...if your title is longer than 32 characters, deck won't recognize it...but that's not all, Albums and Artist names, etc., all have character limits on them too. So basically I had to fix the way my music is tagged so it fits those guidelines....I've only got about 3k of it done, got another 6k to go. Thank goodness for MP3tag, a batch tagging program, makes this process much faster and easier.

After my earlier fails I ended up wiping the drive and instead of 32gb partitions, I just made a single 128gb partition, FAT32....with my music tagged right not only does it load up and start playing music faster than when my iPod was connected but it also will pick up playing where it left off the last time it was plugged in. The banking thing takes a while but I can still listen to and change songs while it's doing it's thing so no big deal there. Just thought I'd share for those having issues along these lines.

This is really awesome, because I wanted to get an external HDD and try the same thing. But I did not want to waste the extra money if it did not work. I am also glad it worked on you Alpine deck, I have a CDE-HD137BT, so hopefully a eternal HDD will work on it as well.

Before u do it, check ur owners manual to make sure ur deck can handle it and what the requirements are, it'll save u some aggravation. I wasn't sure how this would work out but am glad I went ahead and tried it. Hope it works out for u too, let us know.

I hope it does, because I have almost 400gigs of music, that I would like to have all the time with me.

[SQMonte]

How much of your 64 gb is taken up with music?

All of it, I have no apps, no pics, no vids, nothing but music loaded on it. Everything I could get rid of to make room for music, I got rid of.

[beaker]

FAT32 partitions over 32GB tend to corrupt themselves. SSD's are comming down a lot in price, though I would look into possibly a carpc or an android based device if you wanted to go over the 32gb limit, then you wouldnt need anything external

[412 CVX]

How much of your 64 gb is taken up with music?

All of it, I have no apps, no pics, no vids, nothing but music loaded on it. Everything I could get rid of to make room for music, I got rid of.

why do you need more? haha jeebus have you listened to every song more than once?

I shouldn't be talking i guess, i've got an 8 gig nano with less than a gig of music on it.

[SQMonte]

FAT32 partitions over 32GB tend to corrupt themselves. SSD's are comming down a lot in price, though I would look into possibly a carpc or an android based device if you wanted to go over the 32gb limit, then you wouldnt need anything external

SSD's might be coming down but they're still pricey at the moment....do they make portable ssd's? I'm sure those are even more expensive than the internal ones. I'd love to have an SSD for this but for now this will suffice.

[SQMonte]

why do you need more?

I guess I could ask the same of those of you who have ridiculously large systems...just because i'm happy with my single 12 on 2500rms means all of you should be content with the same?

[BEEMDUB]

why do you need more?

I guess I could ask the same of those of you who have ridiculously large systems...just because i'm happy with my single 12 on 2500rms means all of you should be content with the same?

how did you go about transfering your music to your hdd? Because I am trying to but its fuckin up ALL the names and puttin the artist, title and track number all in the title

[SQMonte]

how did you go about transfering your music to your hdd? Because I am trying to but its fuckin up ALL the names and puttin the artist, title and track number all in the title

That's how all 9k of my music was too, i'm guessing it's a function of iTunes. The way I used to organize my music was like this:

After downloading an album I'd unRAR it and use MP3tag to tag it properly. End result would be an album tagged with the correct song title, album artist, song artist, genre and year of release. The song file would be the name of the track only, nothing else. After tagging the album I'd place the tagged album into my "add to iTunes automatically" folder and then open iTunes, which checks that folder and automatically adds the music to iTunes and makes a new folder for it (based on the artist and album name). If the artist already has a folder, it'll make a folder in the artists folder for the album. If the artist doesn't exist, it'll make a new folder for the artist as well as a folder for the album in the artist folder. I think at some point during all that iTunes renames the file and adds the track number at the beginning because every single song in my collection was tagged like that.

So what I did was retagged it all with MP3tag, and once the songs were tagged right and while still in MP3tag I simply selected all the songs and dragged them into a new folder on my desktop.....I didn't bother to make any folders for each artist or anything. So I ended up with a folder on my desktop with 9k+ songs in it. At that point I opened the folder and highlighted about half the songs and just dragged and dropped them to my HD....let that finish and then dragged and dropped the other half. Done deal and all my songs kept the tag info like I set in MP3tag and all were recognized by my deck.

Let me know if you have anymore questions.