Kenwood head units - MP3 format or numbers issue?

This should help you from the Kenwood website concerning USB usage on the 8120:

Maximum number of folder layers 8
Maximum number of folders (per device) 254
Maximum number of files (per folder) 255
Maximum number of files (per device) 64770
Maximum number of files per playlist 7000


Rex

I have over 6000 songs on a 200G USB external drive connected to my DDX812. I just keep my collection organized an a PC to tag everything correctly and then use a MP3 folder flattening script to set up the Kenwood compatible file structure on the external drive. It's a bash script but I'm sure someone could make a windows version in a snap. http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/1949

I've moved all my songs to a 250GB USB drive in to folders with 255 songs per folder and the DNX1820 seems to find them all. Only problem I'm having is it's painfully slow to sort by artist. For some reason when I go to the artist list, paging down through the artists is dreadfully slow. Even when not paging through them, the unit is slow just sitting on the artist screen. You can tell because the flame animation in the upper left corner (i'm using the fire skin) is so slow it's like a slide show and the seconds skip in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

You would think once it loaded the list of artists, I would be fine. Guess not. Once you move to the sub catagories like albums under the artist it speeds up again.

I've had this unit in my car for about six months now and this is my biggest gripe. The MP3 capabilities are an after thought. Oh, and the hands free microphone is a joke. Ever heard of noise cancellation Kenwood?

that's interesting... i thought kenwood's BT implementation is from Parrot? or is that only for the 2009 models?

They seem to be using a really slow sort routine for song tags. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxENKlcs2Tw I don't even try to search for artists. I have called tech support about it.

I spent a while on the phone with Kenwood tech support on this issue a couple days ago. My external drive is a sata laptop drive that is powered by the DNX8120. Tech support claims this is unsupported by the unit, and that it was only designed for jump drives. At first I thought it was a load of crap, and he didn't know what he was talking about. I figured, if the unit had enough power to recognize the files why would it matter how many?

So, I did some testing. The largest jump drive I had on hand was a 16GB which I filled with music. While this isn't as much as I had on the SATA drive, (I had around 25GB) there was absolutely no slowdown sorting by artist with 16GB of music. It also searched through all the music and made PLIST available in about 2 minutes. The 25GB took at least 15-20 minutes to finish. I think it has something to do with access time vs power consumption. I've gone ahead and ordered a 64GB jump drive, and it should be here in a couple days. If it performs anything like the 16GB drive did, I'll be perfectly happy with that.

Well, it looks like there is no difference in how it handles the music. I loaded up a 64GB jump drive with 30GB of music and the Kenwood choked. I talked to tech support and they've decided there's a problem with the unit. I still think it's under engineered for as much music as they claim it will support. I've called my installer and it looks like their willing to replace it. We'll see if that helps, but I'm not holding my breath.

The hardware has plenty of power but the software is simply badly written. Sorting 10000 entries on a embedded system database is trivial if a proper index is created. Most of the grunt work was spend on the UI and basic function, optimizing the underlaying systems to have linear response times with large number of files seems not to have been a project objective for Kenwood.

I normally use mine on random mix anyway and don't try to select songs anymore.