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

[volt11]

GM probably subcontracted that whole system, so reprogramming it is probably like an act of congress. We'll be lucky if they ever resolve this issue. I also doubt we'll get the option of upgrading to the MyLink interface, but of course they'll be happy to take your Volt on trade for a 2012.

[Driverguy01]

Glad i could help

[silyman1]

GM probably subcontracted that whole system, so reprogramming it is probably like an act of congress. We'll be lucky if they ever resolve this issue. I also doubt we'll get the option of upgrading to the MyLink interface, but of course they'll be happy to take your Volt on trade for a 2012.

You're probably right. Still though, I'm going to keep on nudging my volt advisors until they block my phone number from their system. I'm also planning on toting along as many of my old CDs as i can on my next road trip, so i can have an excuse to sit in my car uploading cds for hours and hours in order to get the songs ordered correctly.

[bjhorton2005]

I am about to venture plugging in this $12 flash drive I purchased from staples and see what happens. I'm thinking the only organized and enjoyable way to keep doing music is with the iPod I normally keep in there, (sometimes my iPhone.) It sucks that there is a huge hard drive built into this thing that is practically useless!

-Brad

[Slapshot28]

I am about to venture plugging in this $12 flash drive I purchased from staples and see what happens. I'm thinking the only organized and enjoyable way to keep doing music is with the iPod I normally keep in there, (sometimes my iPhone.) It sucks that there is a huge hard drive built into this thing that is practically useless!

-Brad

Hmm... I have 53 audio books loaded on my Volt hard drive.

It's a long way from practically useless to me.

[bjhorton2005]

Well, you know I mean from an organizational standpoint. Not that the storage space itself is useless. I just wish they had some organization by album, artist, etc...

[solar_dave]

Well, you know I mean from an organizational standpoint. Not that the storage space itself is useless. I just wish they had some organization by album, artist, etc...

I am confused, mine is loaded with Artist, Album information. Loaded from Burned MP3 CD off my iTunes.

[bjhorton2005]

I am heading to the garage now to see. I haven't tried yet, but all my reading lead me to believe it throws the mp3s in with alphabetical order of track names, and that was the only option. I could be totally wrong though! *crosses fingers*

[tfford]

I am confused, mine is loaded with Artist, Album information. Loaded from Burned MP3 CD off my iTunes.

It's not that they're not organized by either artist, album, genre, etc., It's that particularly in album view, the songs don't appear in the order they do on the actual album. They appear in alphabetical order and there's nothing (easy) you can do to change that.

This of course refers to mp3 or aac files loaded via a flash drive. I've not had the car rip a CD but apparently it keeps song order correct when you do that.

[drew-volt]

I have a "sort of" solution that may help some people out there. This works for mp3 and m4a files.

First: I'm another one that has complained about this to my Volt Advisor enough times to probably be annoying, I'm sure. And the answer was always "you can manually edit your tags in each file and it will work" which I thought was a ridiculous solution. And it is, but I've now found at least an easier way to do this, so I thought I'd share it here for people that care. Please note that this worked well for me but may not work for you (see below) so apologies in advance!.

The most important thing to know is that the player does *not* use the track number specified in the tags (even though that's what the GM people told me). Even when the track num is there, it is taking the song title *from the tags* and playing the tracks in alphabetical order based on this -- and if you're trying to listen to an album you love, this gets annoying very fast.

So I have an iTunes lib with about 60GB of music in it. And I don't want to go hacking the tags of all of my music files just to play them in the Volt (especially hacking the actual *song titles* -- that's just unacceptable), so I figured I would just pick 10 or 20 albums, make a *copy* of those files to somewhere else, hack the tags there and the load those onto the Volt HDD. And so that's what I did.

And yes, the thought of manually changing 400 music files one by one was unpleasant. But I found a tool that changed them as one big batch, so that made it a whole lot more acceptable!

The trick is though: in my case all of my music files are named as follows: <two digit track num><space><song name>.<extension>. I have no idea whether I decided that should be the file name years ago or whether that's just what it does. But the key is that the file name of every song has a two digit track number on the front of it. (and it has to be a two digit track number or else track 10 will show up between track 1 and 2...)

Of course, this makes the Volt bug all the more annoying -- if they just used the *filename* instead of the track name in the tags to alphabetize things, it would have still worked for me.

Ok, so for me at least, this file name format is what made this whole change into just a few mouse clicks instead of hours of editing file by file. (although even doing it this way with the tag editor I found looks to be *very* easy because of the way the application lays out the old and new tag values and let you make changes).

So after googling a bit I found something called "MusicBrainz Picard". The nice thing for me is that it runs on a Mac. (not trying to push that particular software, that's just what I found and it worked great for me).

So open the program, click on "Add Folder" and point it to the folder where you put the *copy* of your music files -- don't hack your original files. It then loads in all of the music files (I just dumped all of mine into one big directory/folder).

Then all of your tracks should be listed under "Unmatched Files" (with a track count in parens). So just click on Unmatched Files to highlight it.

Then click on "Tools" and select "Tags from File Names".

It pops up a window and there's a line that looks like "%artist%/%album - %tracknumber% - %title%" (or some such thing)

In my case I just changed this to %title% (basically, use the entire file name as the track name). Then click "ok".

To make sure things look right you can then select individual tracks and look at the "New Medadata" area.

Your song titles should now have a 2 digit track number prefix -- which the Volt will then use alphabetically to properly order the tracks.

Last step: click "Save" -- you will then see in the lower right corner of the Picard window that it is ticking down the file count as it actually makes the changes.

That's it -- I copied the tracks to my Volt HDD and now I finally have things in track order.

So it's not perfect, but hey it's better than what I had! :-)

Hope it helps folks out there.

And BTW: I've only used 18.7 gal of gas over the last 3500 miles in my Volt -- so yeah the music player has been annoying -- but I *love* this car! Truly the best car I've ever owned in my life :-)

Drew