Greetings...first time posting but I'm proud owner of 2010 Sport (and former owner of a 2007 FIT as well.)

I've done the searching on the forums but can come up with no answers.

Does anyone know what the display reading of "USB No Songs" means?

Just purchased a new WD Elements USB drive with 320 gigs on it. I've formatted it in FAT32 (multiple times). I've placed one or two folders in there and while it seems that the drive is being picked up it goes from saying "Loading" real quickly to "USB No Songs". Now I'd imagine it is going quickly from one message to another because there is barely anything on the drive.

I've gotten two flash drives to work, a Sony Walkman and a WD Passport 160 gig drive. But I cannot get this one to work.

Can anyone provide any assistance???

GGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Cheers,
Christopher

 

Many external hard drives won't work, none of mine did either. You would have much better luck with a flash-based device like a thumb drive. I ended up with a 32gb Kingston flash drive, works great.

 

I agree--my SanDisk 16gb works perfect.

 

are you getting a similiar message of 'USB no song'?

I can return the drive but for some i'm still thinking they are communicating?

maybe it's denial.

I'm wondering if I got my friends western digital 160 passport I can try the larger size version of the same brand.

 

My Toshiba Gigabeat reads out the same thing. I've tried everything. It's just not compatable. Aux in or nothing, I'm afraid.

Dan

 

There might be a limit on the size of the drives that can be attached. Maybe partitioning the drive into smaller parts would work.

 

some have reported up to 500 gigs...now whether that was partitioned smaller they didn't say. it's funny...with my friends jensen system, the 160 gb wd HD wouldn't work on his...but worked fine in the fit. my 320 gb wouldn't work in the fit but worked fine in his jensen. no consistency...it's just frustrating.

 

wow, i would be scared to just put a harddrive in the car in general because of the bumps of the roads, the disks would probly skip and the heads of the harddrive would get jacked up.

if there is a limit its most likely like 400gigs or whatever it is on Windows 98/early XP because those above 400 require a special partition. i know if this because i bought a 400 gig a SUPER long time ago and i had trouble getting it to work because OS's did not have it in standard yet to run something that big at the time.

 

I don't know about size but to the OP, it's been my experience that if it's not compatable no tweaking will make it so. It's either recognized or it isn't, in which case you're relegated to the aux in. My gigabeat is 40 gigs but it just isn't compatable. I too get the 'no song' message. I fully expected it not to be recognized though. At least there's an aux in.

Dan

 

I know the solution (maybe lol). I had that same experience with my 500GB HDD when I first time bought it and used it on my Z4. U need to go to the disk management (on ur computer) and delete the partition and then create a new one as primery and then format it to Fat32. I had to repeat that like 5 times to make it work. I went across another problem people having using HDD on HU is that some of HDDs come with preloaded factory program in HDD. If that's the case then u have to erase the factory partition using disk management from ur windows (make sure u back that small factory partition up before u erase it if u wanna use in the future) and then make the whole HDD into one partition. I have 3 external HDDs (80GB, 320 GB, and 500GB) and they all work fine using this method. The only thing is that I buy HDD and encloser seperate because it's cheaper that way most of time...

 

Oh, you're talking about just a usb drive? Forget what I said about the aux in! LOL!

Dan

 

What format are your songs? if it's not mp3 then probably you'll hear no songs at all.

 

i've done as much research as the forum will allow. i understand that they need to be mp3's and the drive needs to be reformatted to fat32. i utilized 'drivesort' to be able to rename the date modified category so they would all be consistent so they would then be forced to read alphabetically. i get all that.

like i said...through out this forum, the other fit forum and google searches there was no mention of 'usb no song'. there was obviously 'usb no data' which through either having no drive or a ntfs drive hooked up were telling me that both weren't working. i was hoping that the brief display of loading and 'disk no song' were pointing towards that it was kinda working but either something was a little off and/or i was doing something else wrong that maybe someone else stumbled on.

as to the fear of hard drives...do most of you realize that those kind of hard drives are utilized in most cars...whether it's currently in the dash navigation or mp3 systems and with the police and ambulances. if there was a ridiculous rate of failures on those...they would have found another way. obviously solid state is coming...but it's not there yet pricewise!

 

I have a 16 gb sandisk and i can't get it to work. Any trick to loading music?

 

Not necessarily, all my files are in WMA format, and play just fine. It's probably a drive compatability problem.

 

doesn't the fit navi run off of DVD? I always assumed most in car systems would use SS, if not DVD?

Anyway, I would still expect a hard drive tossed into my glove compartment to not last. For all of you HDD ipod folks- how many of those have you gone through over the years?

I would also expect an in car HDD to at least be outfitted with proper hardware and software for that kind of abuse, something that your average HDD on the shelf at Best Buy is not going to feature.

Just guesses...

 

Good for you looking into it. We seem to be the only two that get this exact message. I too thought it was locked, but needed a tweak to get it there. No dice. Search, try, tweak. But I'm here to tell you- it...will....not....work. USB compatability is hit and miss with anything other than ipods and even then, I've heard of some issues. Just the way it is.

Dan

 

I just took mine out of the package, and formatted it according to the directions posted in the other usb forum...loaded mp3 songs on it...it worked.

 

got it finally...so i'll thumb my nose up a little bit to all the disbelievers BUT...

it appears for me that with both the WD elements drive and the WD my passport drive...that the USB port would not recognize either of those when they were over 250gigs. elements is 320. my passport is 500.

when i partitioned both drives to around the 250 gig range...the 'USB No Song' went away and the mp3's played back fine. once the partitions got into the 260 range...it was a no go.

so again...in this situation...formatted to fat32 and kept at around 250gig and both WD's worked. YMMV

that's my story and i'm sticking to it.

 

I'm guessing the magical number is 256... Anyone want to test 255, 256, & 257GB? See where it drops off?

This was going to be my suggestion (partitioning) and then I read on... DAMN, someone already tried it...

As for the Hard drive failure rate in cars. You should see hard drives last a while in cars. They have shock protection and also are not being accessed very much. think of how long it takes a hard drive to read 5MB of data (milliseconds). That data is read, then played back. Most digital audio players don't play like conventional audio players (cassette, record, CD) but read the data, convert to audio, then play back. In the mean time, the drive is pretty much idle. Granted, it may not read the entire file at one time but it'll read some data, then the hard drive will park the head for a few seconds, then more data will be read, and the head parked... you are more likely to hit a bump while the head is parked than while it's being read... and even if it is being read, drives have emergency parking mechanisms. (for he head, not for bad drivers who can't parallel park).

My wife's iPod video (5G 30GB) has been in our Ridgeline for 2, maybe 3 years and in the integra prior to that. Still runs like a top with no issues. I use a Sandisk 8GB flash drive for the Fit as it holds more than my iPod nano and accesses song data faster.

The best thing however is that Manufacturing processes are getting smaller, so flash drives are getting bigger. SSD drives aren't needed for this type of application as a Standard flash drive will do and with the rate at which they are dropping, we'll see 256GB flash Drives in the stores soon. (for a reasonable price)

~SB