Lotus Emira USB Music

[GeoffS]

Hi all,  I've just joined the forums, having re3cently purchased a Lotus Emira.  I'm struggling to get USB music working as I would like.  I have a large collection of both Flac and MP3 music files on a 32GB USB.  They are organised in folders named after the album titles.  On most cars I've ever owned they play each album in turn in alphabetical order of the album title, which works out perfectly for me.  In the root directory of the USB I also have an AllMusic playlist file I can select if the car doesn't automatically play in folder order.  In addition all the MP3 tag information for each file is complete with Artist, Album, Genre, Track Number, Cover Art, etc.. so when playing the cover art appears correctly in the cars music widget and tracks on an album play in the correct order.  For the Emira I have exactly the same folder structure on two USBs, a Samsung 64GB USB-C device formatted with FAT32, and a 32GB SanDisk USB-A device also formatted with FAT32.  I've plugged both into the respective slots in the central console.  The USB-C slot is USB1 and the USB-A slot is USB2.  Firstly it seems to take the car ages to recognise that the USBs are installed, and afterwards will only display the folder structure, ignoring Artist and Genre, and it completely fails to recognise the playlist file at all.  Same problem with both USB slots.  Does anyone have any details on what folder structures the Emira will recognise properly?  I have raised a ticket with Lotus support, but they haven't yet got back to me with anything.

[DeanB]

Sorry Geoff I can't answer your question but welcome to MLOC. 

 

Dean

[Elisemadray]

Hi Geoff welcome aboard,  I own an Emira also but not tried music through USB I will give it a go and see what happens and report back 

Cheers

Ray

[GeoffS]

Thanks Ray, please let me know how you get on. Cheers, Geoff

[Elisemadray]

OK so far not good news I tried my old USB stick ( used to use it in my Elise) in all the usb ports and none of them recognised the stick?

I have ordered a new stick off Amazon so will try again

[Elisemadray]

here is the media page from the Emira Handbook

[GeoffS]

Thanks Ray,  I've read the Infotainment Manual, but it doesn't really help.  I've also raised a question with the dealership I bought the car from (JCT600 Lotus in Bradford) and I've submitted a technical query to Lotus directly via the website too.  Hopefully we'll get somewhere eventually.  From what I can see with a bit of googling, it looks a lot of owners are finding that USB sticks and formats that work fine in other cars don't work as expected in the Emira, so it's something weird about the Lotus Music player system.  By the way, if you order a USB stick larger than 32GB, Windows won't by default let you format is as FAT32.  You either have to format is as ExFAT - which I've read somewhere some people seem to have working, or use a utility program to format it as FAT32.  I did the latter, using a program called Rufus.

[Phil Hutchins]

Haven’t got an Emira so a general music question please! I seem to have missed the USB-stick phase of music storage and gone straight from CD’s to having all my sounds on my phone. 
So why bother with usb?

[Elisemadray]

9 hours ago, Phil Hutchins said:

Haven’t got an Emira so a general music question please! I seem to have missed the USB-stick phase of music storage and gone straight from CD’s to having all my sounds on my phone. 
So why bother with usb?

good point Phil

[GeoffS]

I have done some more tests and made a small amount of progress with the USB in the Emira.  My standard USB has 107 Albums and 1200 plus tracks, which the car obviously struggles with. I also noticed that if you select an album via the folder name, it then plays the tracks in alphabetical order of the track title even though the file name starts with the track number. 

So I've just done some more tests with a FAT32 stick containing 4 albums (3 x flac and 1 x mp3).   I also re-tagged all the tracks so title includes the track number, in an attempt to sort the order issue.  With this stick the car correctly recognises the Albums, Artist, Genres, etc, and also reads the .m3u playlist files too.  Unfortunately, whatever I try I still can't get it to play the tracks in any sensible order.  It always randomises the order (as if Shuffle is permanently switched on) and try as I might I can't work out how to stop it.