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So my car stereo died the other week (and since it couldn't even play mp3's), I figured it was time to get a new one. I decided to settle on the JVC KD-R600for two reasons, 1) it had USB and 2) it was on sale.


I bought a 4GB Kingston USB stick to load up my music on (average 128kb .mp3's, nothing else). I've filled between 3 -3.5GB of the stick (music is seperated into 11 folders). I put it my stereo and the screen says "reading". Ok, fine, so it's reading all the metadata and what not of the songs. Problem is that it takes over 1/2 hour to do so. Now, that's 10 minutes to read 1GB of data, which is rediculous in my mind, espicially since you could write faster than that using the USB 1.1 spec. I know it's caching it for when I turn off/on the car so it'll pick right up, but this seems really slow.

Anybody else have any experience with USB car stereo's? Is this normal?

Is it doing that every time you turn the car on, or only the first time you plugged the memory stick in? Either way it could be a slow embedded processor in the JVC system.

Could you try some different USB key / brands, or a portable hard disk? Maybe the stick itself is slow.

That's a pretty cool receiver, by the way.

That is a pretty sweet receiver, I'd totally be getting a 2.5" USB HD and putting everything in lossless WMA on it if I had that. *old timey warning* I can't remember how much I paid for an in-dash CD player in the early 90s but I know it was a hell of a lot more than that.

Anyhow, have you searched for other user complaints about the same thing? What's the rated speed or exact model or your thumb drive? It may be your drive or the unit, if its internal CPU as mentioned or its internal memory is just slow there may not be much you can do.

JdL wrote:

Is it doing that every time you turn the car on, or only the first time you plugged the memory stick in? Either way it could be a slow embedded processor in the JVC system.

Only the first time that I put it in. If I turn the car off, run into Wal-mart and back out and turn the car back on, it starts playing in 1 second. So I know that it's cache'ing all the files and what not, just taking a really insane amount of time doing it.

JdL wrote:

Could you try some different USB key / brands, or a portable hard disk? Maybe the stick itself is slow.

This could be. It's a Kingston Data Traveler 101. It was the cheapest I could find and I expected it to be slow, but 3.5GB's/30 minutes slow?

JdL wrote:

That's a pretty cool receiver, by the way.

Thanks. FutureShop (the Canadian equivalent of BestBuy) had 'em on sale for $129CDN.

MadManOriginal wrote:

Anyhow, have you searched for other user complaints about the same thing? What's the rated speed or exact model or your thumb drive? It may be your drive or the unit, if its internal CPU as mentioned or its internal memory is just slow there may not be much you can do.

I haven't searched to see if there are any problems with this yet. I know, pretty shameful. But moving the files from my computer to this new USB stick I bought was comparable to my computer -> Corsair Voyager.

Sargent Duck wrote:

I bought a 4GB Kingston USB stick to load up my music on (average 128kb .mp3's, nothing else). I've filled between 3 -3.5GB of the stick (music is seperated into 11 folders). I put it my stereo and the screen says "reading". Ok, fine, so it's reading all the metadata and what not of the songs. Problem is that it takes over 1/2 hour to do so. Now, that's 10 minutes to read 1GB of data, which is rediculous in my mind, espicially since you could write faster than that using the USB 1.1 spec. I know it's caching it for when I turn off/on the car so it'll pick right up, but this seems really slow.

On page 43 of the manual we find that it's limited to USB 1.1 speeds, 12 megabits/sec, or 1.5 megabytes/sec.

3.5 Gigabytes * 1024 = 3584 Megabytes

3584 Megabytes / 1.5 Megabytes/sec = 2389.33 seconds

2389.33 seconds / 60 = 39.82 minutes.

Problem identified.

Kick to the nuts there. That's gotta hurt.

Captain Ned wrote:

Sargent Duck wrote:

I bought a 4GB Kingston USB stick to load up my music on (average 128kb .mp3's, nothing else). I've filled between 3 -3.5GB of the stick (music is seperated into 11 folders). I put it my stereo and the screen says "reading". Ok, fine, so it's reading all the metadata and what not of the songs. Problem is that it takes over 1/2 hour to do so. Now, that's 10 minutes to read 1GB of data, which is rediculous in my mind, espicially since you could write faster than that using the USB 1.1 spec. I know it's caching it for when I turn off/on the car so it'll pick right up, but this seems really slow.

On page 43 of the manual we find that it's limited to USB 1.1 speeds, 12 megabits/sec, or 1.5 megabytes/sec.

3.5 Gigabytes * 1024 = 3584 Megabytes

3584 Megabytes / 1.5 Megabytes/sec = 2389.33 seconds

2389.33 seconds / 60 = 39.82 minutes.

Problem identified.

Wow, that's some poor software if it actually reads the entire contents of the memory stick just to cache the file data. I would expect it to scan the drive, gather the file list, then read the metadata from the files. But then I have found that how I would do things and how "professional developers" do things rarely coincide.

--SS

SecretSquirrel wrote:

Captain Ned wrote:

Sargent Duck wrote:

I bought a 4GB Kingston USB stick to load up my music on (average 128kb .mp3's, nothing else). I've filled between 3 -3.5GB of the stick (music is seperated into 11 folders). I put it my stereo and the screen says "reading". Ok, fine, so it's reading all the metadata and what not of the songs. Problem is that it takes over 1/2 hour to do so. Now, that's 10 minutes to read 1GB of data, which is rediculous in my mind, espicially since you could write faster than that using the USB 1.1 spec. I know it's caching it for when I turn off/on the car so it'll pick right up, but this seems really slow.

On page 43 of the manual we find that it's limited to USB 1.1 speeds, 12 megabits/sec, or 1.5 megabytes/sec.

3.5 Gigabytes * 1024 = 3584 Megabytes

3584 Megabytes / 1.5 Megabytes/sec = 2389.33 seconds

2389.33 seconds / 60 = 39.82 minutes.

Problem identified.

Wow, that's some poor software if it actually reads the entire contents of the memory stick just to cache the file data. I would expect it to scan the drive, gather the file list, then read the metadata from the files. But then I have found that how I would do things and how "professional developers" do things rarely coincide.

--SS

Well, that's 1.5Mb is being VERY generous. It does not include the transmission overhead. Chances are that it is reading what files are on there and the organization of the drive.

I don't think it is caching the data, either. (Unless what i think of as caching is very different from what everyone else is stating.) I'm sure the deck is just verifying that all the files can be read. A sanity check to keep from playing something that it'll get stuck on. Probably generating a metadata file.

Is it possible that this could be a drive format issue? Have you tried formatting the drive in both FAT16 and FAT32? I know it's compatible with both, but there might be something there.

And the closest that manual gets to this problem is: Readout time varies depending on USB device. Real helpful.

To me it looks like the USB functionality was added by Marketing so that an open check box could be filled in. Engineering did the least possible to keep Marketing happy, so the implementation is a dog.

Sargent Duck wrote:

I bought a 4GB Kingston USB stick to load up my music on (average 128kb .mp3's, nothing else). I've filled between 3 -3.5GB of the stick (music is seperated into 11 folders). I put it my stereo and the screen says "reading". Ok, fine, so it's reading all the metadata and what not of the songs. Problem is that it takes over 1/2 hour to do so. Now, that's 10 minutes to read 1GB of data, which is rediculous in my mind, espicially since you could write faster than that using the USB 1.1 spec.

Actually, no you can't. USB 1.1 maxes out at 12 megabits/sec (1.5 megabytes/sec). At this speed, it takes ~40 minutes to transfer 3.5 GB.

The car system is clearly using USB 1.1, and reading the entire contents of the thumbdrive. End of story.

Unless they advertise a higher transfer rate, or say "USB 2.0" and "high speed" in the specs, the system is probably behaving as designed. (USB 2.0 compatibility alone does not guarantee 480 megabit speed; it specifically has to say "USB 2.0 high speed".)

Key to USB marketingspeak:
- low speed: 1.5 mbit/sec
- full speed: 12 mbit/sec
- high speed: 480 mbit/sec (requires USB 2.0)
- super speed: 5 gbit/sec (this one is new in USB 3.0, I am not aware of any devices that support it yet)