Volt HDD Music System Now Almost Usable... But not quite.

[Ohm]

Ok - I just picked up my 2012 Volt yesterday and immediately loaded it up with 8 GB of what was well organized music on a USB stick. I'm obviously missing something major.

From USB:
I can browse by folder - sort of. It flattened my directory structure. I had things organized by Genre/Year/Artist Letter/Album. I now apparently only have folders for Album. Disappointing to say the least. I then go looking for "More songs like this" - only to find the option unavailable.

From HDD: There's no folder browsing *at all*. 30GB of music storage without folders?!? I then go to "More like this one" - out of 1,600 songs, there should at least be one more, right? No. No matter what I select, I only get the song that's playing. To make it worse, once I do that, that one song goes into infinite loop mode - even when on shuffle. And finally - I have a son that likes an artist starting with the letter L. I've found that with just 8 GB of music, it's a nightmare trying to get to the L's! The best I can do is hold down the page down button for a minute (or two) as it scrolls through things - but that just sucks. I know I can add the artist as a favorite, but that's not really the point either. Why can't it accelerate as it scrolls, or allow me to move the scrollbar to the rough area I want it to be?

Before I got this car, I was thinking how much I'd love to be able to put in a bigger hard drive. Now that I know how it works, I'm thinking that anything more than 4 GB or so is a nightmare to work with!

*Please* tell me I'm just missing some obvious button or option somewhere...

[Steverino]

I tried using the USB port with a portable 300 GB hard drive (recycled from a dead laptop). It has 11 GB of mp3's on it. I plug it in the Volt and the drive's green light comes on, but the Volt does not recognize it. I tried a 126MB USB thumb drive and it was recognized. So I know the port works, and small thumb drives work. Any ideas? The drive is formatted as NTFS. Would exFAT be a better choice? Or does the Volt simply ignore larger hard drives?

[Krellion]

I think the Volt's USB connection only recognizes FAT32 formatted drives (no mention of whether or not it does in the Owner's Manual). Windows will only let you use FAT32 when formatting on drives up to 32GB in size, but there are other utilities that can do larger drives. I've made use of Fat32Format to do so.

[crom99]

This is one of my biggest peeves with the entertainment system. I have no idea how such a glaring oversight could have been made given how well designed everything else is. In a Facebook chat a few weeks ago, Chevy said they would be equipping the next batch of Volts with MyLink, but 2011 and early 2012 Volt owners are out of luck. If they aren't going to give us MyLink, I hope they at least offer some software upgrades for the current system to make it more usable.

[BAZINGA]

I have my entire CD collection stored on my iPad (350+) CD's. Can I plug in my iPad and export them
to the Volt's Hd? If so how long would it take?

[dumluk2002]

I really do not like the HDD storage for music , if it cannot play the songs without alphabetizing them or creating hours worth of work for me, what is the point? Really aggravated about this!!!!

[crom99]

I really do not like the HDD storage for music , if it cannot play the songs without alphabetizing them or creating hours worth of work for me, what is the point? Really aggravated about this!!!!

I finally broke down and retagged my library just for my Volt. I had to delete all 2000+ tracks and reimport them. It'll take days to finish the re-importing process because it's painfully slow.

The retagging part was fairly painless and quick, though. Just use foobar2000 and the masstagger plugin (if you use Windows), add all your tracks to the queue, select them all, right-click and select Tagging > Manage Scripts, add the action "Format value from other fields", choose TITLE, and set the pattern to "%discnumber%.%tracknumber% %title%", and click Run. That's all there is to it.

[Thomas Dravecz]

"More Like this one" only works for music imported from CD, so their answer is "Working as designed."

I really wish they would change the design, and agree with your comments.

I wish the car had a wifi connection to allow me to update from my home PC. I would even accept an itunes option, which is what I do now, sort of...by plugging my iphone into the car, and just using either Pandora or iTunes...the 30GB hard drive has a few songs, just because.....

Wish I could use it for photos at least....

[silyman1]

I have my entire CD collection stored on my iPad (350+) CD's. Can I plug in my iPad and export them
to the Volt's Hd? If so how long would it take?

Sadly the iphone/ipod/ipad doesn't support pulling music off of itself. You can load all of that music from itunes onto a thumbdrive, but two things first:

the protected AAC files will not play.
all your albums will play in alphabetical order, not track order.

I am recommending to everyone that if you want to use digital music, get an ipod and plug it into the usb port. that way, your albums remain correctly ordered, AND you can set up playlists on a computer (setting playlists on the volt's drive system takes about 5 seconds to add a single track... yeah)

I love my volt. I HATE That GM hasn't fixed this yet.

[gadgeTT]

I love my volt. I HATE That GM hasn't fixed this yet.

And sadly, they probably won't since the HDD was removed for 2013. Since it's no longer in active production, there's no real incentive for them to "fix" it.

BTW, I agree- an inexpensive flash portable music player (iPod or other similar device) can be had for less than $50 and store tons of music. That music can easily be managed on a full-screen computer (not just using the built-in nav screen) and is portable for use elsewhere. I have an older 5GB nano and use that in my current car - will do the same in my '13 Volt.