USB drive in car audio has crazy glitch. Help if you can please.

[Kahoona]

Hi,
I have had a problem playing USB music for perhaps 10 years and it is driving me nuts. You are my only hope Obiewan. Nobody else has had it as far as I can discern and nobody has ever had a way to stop it.

Problem:
During playback of music on a USB thumb-drive, while playing songs and in the middle of a song,any song, another song will replace it and start playing at the beginning. It can happen at any time. It will stop and return to the old one somewhere or at least end and go back to the original order. It is always the same song that drops in. It happens in the middle of the "victim" song rather than replacing it in the play order. It is a song that I have on the stick but it is not always. It can be a song that was there but was deleted.

An example: Listening today. The unit has been playing for seven minutes. BB KIng is playing We Gonna Make it from the Blues Summit (lets call this a "victim". Suddenly about a minute in Sweet Jane (lets call it the Usurper) replaces it and plays. If push the back button I will once again hear BB King but at some point it will happen again. In this case the Usurper is not even currently on this USB drive but must have been there once

Details:
If I format the drive it will happen with the next batch of music but it will use a song that is elsewhere on the drive.
They are USB's that vary from low res to highest. It happens on drives with only 256's on the drive and most recently only 320,s
There are no hidden files or hidden file types on the drives I have now.
It is always the same song.
I have had this happen with an EMTEC 32g, a Sandisc 32 and every other one I have tried in the past 10 years. They may have been 32g also. Unsure.
It has happened on 2 aftermarket Mitsubishi car audios, one new Sony replacement car audio and now the OEM audio in my 2012 Subaru (just bought used. )
Most have been made on the same PC using drag and drop from my main music area. Originally made on Windows XP Pro and later on Windows 7 pro but I did make some with a HP laptop with Win 7 pro.
It has happened with less than a gig of music on the drive and with 30gigs.
There are times when a newly made set of files will play for many hours before going wacky but they always do.
Did I mention that it always happens in a different place?
This has happened in three different vehicles.
It does not happen with an Ipad mini, phone or laptop plugged into the regular round aux jack.
Sageing has not helped and once a tribe of people with feathers and strange substances (at Burning Man) tried to drive out evil spirits but it did not help.

This is taking the fun out of travel ling in our RV with the tunes cranked. I am having to assume that it has to do with USB drives specifically and only when played in the car audio.

PS Fat32

 

[DaveVoorhis]

After you've copied files to the USB drive, do you select the "Safely Remove Hardware ..." option?

Your symptoms sound like a corrupted filesystem. In other words, the way the files are stored on the drive is slightly damaged.

On several occasions, one of my students has wound up with a corrupted filesystem on a USB drive by copying a large number of large files (like a bunch of songs) to a USB drive and then unplugging it without "Safely Remove Hardware", and before the operating system has a chance to make sure all the data has been correctly written to the drive.

 

[Kahoona]

Something to think about and back then I did not but I am sure that I did recently and absolutely sure on the most recent in the example.

 

[DaveVoorhis]

How often do you replace your USB drives with new ones?

Not selecting "Safely Remove Hardware ..." and yanking the device out before it's finished writing is almost guaranteed to cause filesystem corruption, but USB drives are not very reliable at the best of times. As USB drives get old, they get unreliable. If you're using old ones, they might be getting flaky.

 

[Kahoona]

Update. I played the one in the example on my PC and I did get the same problem in the same place as in the car except that it had a cut from The Who, Quadrophenia that was the userper. I backed it up and replayed and the same userper came in in the same place. It is not due to the car audio than but the USB. One note. The Userper was also a song from a previous use of the drive and does not show when I look at the drive contents in Windows. It also does not show on Winamp's playlist either yet it played! An incomplete delete? Windows 7 will not do a full format in FAT or I'd try that. Probably uses up the drive too fast.

 

[DaveVoorhis]

Update. I played the one in the example on my PC and I did get the same problem in the same place as in the car except that it had a cut from The Who, Quadrophenia that was the userper. I backed it up and replayed and the same userper came in in the same place. It is not due to the car audio than but the USB. One note. The Userper was also a song from a previous use of the drive and does not show when I look at the drive contents in Windows. It also does not show on Winamp's playlist either yet it played! An incomplete delete?

Almost definitely a corrupt filesystem, and very likely either due to either removing the drive from the computer without "Safely Remove Hardware ...", or a failing drive, or both.

 

[woodj]

I have seen rather bizarre happenings when drives are removed without invoking "Safely Remove Hardware ...".
One of these was adding another Drive Letter in the drive list (XP and 7) each time stick was reinserted, only one of which would work; so that you might have E: F: G: etc, and if there were enough of these the OS would become confused as to which was real (all the drives except the last one could not be addressed).
Had to go in and delete all the drive letters to restore order.

 

[sqlsavior]

If one has not written to the USB during a session using it, "Safely remove hardware" should not be required. Not saying that it isn't required, just that it shouldn't be for read-ony use. If read-only use corrupts, that is a design flaw, and not a small one.

 

[woodj]

PS Fat32

What gets messed up are the FAT Tables which delineate where stuff is stored on the drive.

 

[Poinzy]

I had USB car audio glitches because the thumb drive couldn't handle real-time indexing commands very well. Flash drive is good for static storage, but not much else, I discovered. I had to merge the tracks from each particular album into a single track. Too bad, but the track mix-ups stopped. It's like I'm back to playing cassettes again.

 

[mikeybc]

Are you able to do a full format in exFAT ? drivs formatted in exFAT works in my cars

 

[Bob]

as the above posters suggest: it's probably in the USB file system. repeatable in one
chain and same results in a PC suggests this.

1. try SFC on the drive. and others for a second opinion
2. verify the audio player supports the size of the drive(s) you use
(some DAPs have strange/lower limits that cause instability at the extremes
even though the file system supports it). in fact try the smallest one you have
3. try a different file system. even MAC fs. or whatever is supported on PC and player
4. are any of these off eBay? I hope not. there are methods that upsize the header
information - h2testw is a good tester to see if your cards are lying.
5. if there seems to be an issue with SS USBs, try a HDD in a portable enclosure
which will not have the same symptoms. and start with a small partition and
gradually enlarge them. this could very well tell you if #2 is true.

I once consulted where the CDB addressing changes for larger storage spaces
was not updated under special conditions, the result was that ALL data used
was completely corrupt and not recoverable. since your corruption is consistent
there's something in the sound chain that's not playing by the old/new rules.