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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

You can move files off and back on the drive and they’ll be in alphabetical order. If FAT, fatsort can do it afterwards.

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Yes, I can move the files, but it's also ridiculous in the 2020s that I have to resort to doing this workaround instead of the software reading ID3 metadata and sorting by one of the well-known fields.

Thanks for the tip on fatsort, it does save me a bit of trouble.

Embedded controllers of that class are usually not able to do such things. And if they are, it becomes a bottleneck when you plug in say a 64GB device. Five minute drive? No music because the stereo takes six minutes to sort the files on startup.

Another drawback of the death of DIN aftermarket stereos is that they stopped innovating there, I last updated my stereo in ~2015 and not found a more advanced replacement since. So never got one to accept a >256GB drive, though trivial elsewhere today. Raspberry Pi level tech.

>>never got one to accept a >256GB drive<<

My car stereo, in theory, cannot accept a drive over 32gb in size. In practice, I have a 128gb drive in there. I used a third party utility to format it as a FAT32 filesystem to be 128gb in size. The car stereo only claimed a 32gb limit only because that’s the largest fat32 filesystem Windows will make from the GUI.

Yeah, that's often the case. It's not really the size of the filesystem I think, my description was simplified. Believe when I got over N thousand songs it stopped working, which defeated the whole purpose of having my entire music collection on a drive. Still works on the home stereo though.

Fun fact: the FAT32 limit - which, by the way, was literally just added by Dave Plummer because he thought anything larger would have too much wasted slack space - made its way into the SD card spec. It is perfectly valid behavior for a device to refuse to read a >32GB card with a FAT32 file system, or a <32GB card with exFAT, or a card with multiple partitions, etc. None of those are actually SD cards as they are formatted.

In practice, nobody in their right mind would design a device's firmware that poorly, unless they were deliberately trying to force users to stay within the bounds of the device's QA test procedures. I don't have any examples of this. There are devices that will misbehave with such a card, however: for example, the Nintendo 3DS will happily use an oversize FAT32 card, but the Data Management screen will take way longer to load for some reason.

Also fun fact: the first time you plug a correctly formatted SDXC into a Nintendo Switch, it "downloads an update" and restarts. Presumably Nintendo wanted to save money on exFAT licensing fees so Nintendo is only paying for each unit that actually uses the exFAT library?

3- Yup, nailed it, same reason WMA and Flash require "activation" on the PSP and why newer MPEG codecs like H.264 and AAC require an "optional media update" on the Xbox 360

2- The slowdown usually comes from scanning the FAT to count the free space, with the PSP being notorious for this

Another related point is the varying support for the "semi-official" 64K cluster size, which gives a curious effect on the 3DS: in GBA mode (officially only used for 10 games only distributed as compensation to those who bought the original model at full launch price), a strip of "junk" (coming from the virtualized GBA's VRAM, IIRC it's just wraparound) will be shown at the bottom of the screen...

64GiB of storage would house around 10-15k MP3s: sorting these with ESP32 will likely take less than half a second.

I seriously doubt compute is an issue for a music player in the last 20-30 years (and more).

I’m talking about flacs and pioneer stereo from 2015, which don’t seem to have been updated since except cosmetically.

I understand — I am only counter-pointing the following statement:

> Five minute drive? No music because the stereo takes six minutes to sort the files on startup.

With FLACs, you'd have even fewer files in 64GiB, so sorting a full list should be even quicker — Raspberry Pi HW (any generation) would do that instantly for all intents and purposes.

I don't have a raspberry pi in the car, I have an older DIN car stereo. RPI was used as example that this isn't hard technically. Also left 64GB behind many years ago for non-car applications.

Ok: still, no car stereo runs such poor compute that it can't handle loading and sorting 15k songs if it supports them at all. Any size you moved to is still at most an order of magnitude more and 10s-20s is not six minutes that was mentioned.

It sounds like you never tried, my car stereo does indeed work just like this. If you look at the specs of car stereo brands at crutchfield you’ll find similar limits like X000 songs.

It’s more likely poor programming than lack of cpu power. I personally prefer filename sorting rather than metedata sorting for this reason.

There’s very expensive stereos that might do it but they tend to come with Android etc, and those companies don’t want you to be self-sufficient.

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