Is the old infotainment on the ND bad? - Page 2 (2024)

krutsch

Join Date: Dec 2022

Location: Minneapolis

Posts: 54

Another update: I am finding that with a smaller collection of tracks (i..e under the 9,999 limit) this is not a problem.

At the end of the day, this is what seems to be working for me (and then I will stop posting about USB Audio ):

1. USB Stick partitioned w/ Master Boot Record and formatted with FAT32.

2. Size of USB stick did not seem to matter. Also, USB 2.0 vs 3.0 also does not matter - 3.0 drives are backwards compatible with USB 2.0.

3. Organize music as simply as possible: Artist/Album/N - Track Name ... to limit the depth of recursion required by Mazda Connect + Gracenote to index your music.

4. Keep the number of tracks low; for sure under 9,999 for reliable indexing.

5. .m3u playlists work fine, but keep the track count limited (I am not sure what the limits are, but I have 58 playlists w/ some of them having 100+ tracks). Also, watch out for non-standard characters in your playlists - either folder names within or the playlist names themselves.
Two that tripped me up:
Blue Öyster Cult
Emiliana Torrini (note the second 'I' in the first name)

While it is okay to have these characters in the meta data (e.g. Artist name), having them in the names of files and folders will cause problems with Mazda Connect. For what it's worth, I had these same issues with the "new" Mazda Connect on my Mazda 3 Turbo Premium.

6. Remove excess track tags from your audio files. All you really need is:
ALBUM, ALBUMARTIST, GENRE, LENGTH, TRACKARTIST, TRACKNUMBER, TRACKTITLE, TRACKTOTAL. I also have a few more, but keep the list clean to minimize the work Mazda Connect + Gracenote has to do to read your files.

7. Keep the album art size small - for me, I embed 650x650 pixel JPEGs (standard and NOT progressive scanned images).

*I use Metadatics app on a Mac for tag, naming, and embedded album art management. Works great on even large collections and can process things in large batches.

8. Audio container format: I highly recommend AAC (.m4a) encoded by a reliable tool, like XLD (Mac) using TrueVBR at max quality. Indistinguishable from the original CD and the tagging is reliable. High bit rate MP3 works just fine. You can use WAV, but I was not able to insert meta data tags that Mazda Connect + Gracenote would reliably read (usually title was ok, but album was unknown and the artist was hit-or-miss - this was after trying both INFO chunk as well as id3 chunk for meta data).

9. When using USB Audio, don't have Android Auto or CarPlay running at the same time. In other words, putting in a USB Stick into the lower port and then also plugging your phone into the upper port for AA/CP (remember: this is for MY '23 and older Mazda Connect). In my experience doing this taxes Mazda Connect and whether Gracenote finishes processing is hit-or-miss.

10. Finally... be patient, especially for a large collection of audio tracks and for the initial scan. I have two USB Sticks: one with 8.5K tracks for rock, et al., and another with 6.5K tracks for Jazz/Classical. When I restart my car, it takes about 90 seconds for Mazda Connect + Gracenote to complete indexing whatever I've plugged in for listening. When switching from one to another, it will take considerably longer to re-index the "new" collection.

Why do I bother with all of this? Simple: I find Mazda Connect audio easier to navigate with the Commander Knob than Android Auto and Apple Music. Android Auto severely limits what you "scroll through" and expects you to use your voice for everything. Good luck with that when the top is down (which is all the time, right?) or you cannot recall the exact name of an album. And, it seems to sound better w/ my collection of m4a files than the "lossless" audio streaming via Android Auto.

I hope this helps anyone trying to use their own music collection with Mazda Connect.

As always, your mileage may vary.