Scirocco Central

can anybody reccomend a good and quite small (dimensions) hard drive to go in the roc?

I bought one of these eagletec usbs for my previous fiesta which i will transfer over to my scirocco when it arrives. Mines only an 8gb but they go up to 16gb i think. Never had a problem with it.

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/i.html?_nkw=eagl ... 86.c0.m283" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In the fiesta the USB port was visible, but this is so small that i was never worried about leaving it in the car.

thanks mate! the usb prot in the roc is under the armrest so no worries about the thieves seeing it!

Thanks for the link, as best I can tell they are hard disks with a mini usb connector rather than a standard USB. If you want to use the cable that comes with the roc you need a hard disk that connects to it via a standard USB cable??

Not sure if your talking about the eagletec USB link, but it is definately a standard USB not mini USB so should work fine in the roc. I'll let you know on the 23rd when mine is delivered!!

I've just bought an Icy Box HDD enclosure to go with a 150GB 2.5" SATA drive out of an old laptop. It fits very snugly into the centre armrest cubby hole.
Don't worry about mini USB connectors - the enclosure came with a short mini to full USB cable which plugs in to the media in lead in the armrest.

Your big problems come later
1. In order to work with the VW head unit your HDD needs to formatted to FAT32. But XP, Vista & Win7 don't allow for formating to FAT32. YOu need special software to force FAT32 formatting. Also FAT32 doesn't like large capacity drives either.

2. When you copy your music on to the drive you need to organise it by artist / album / track. Mediamonkey does a good job of this but has to be configured carefully first. Even then album tracks will play in alphabetical order unless you include the track number before the title. I also had to use mp3tag to change track numbers 1, 2, 3 etc to 01, 02, 03 otherwise tracks 10, 11, 12 etc come before track 2

3. Access to the music seems to work better if all the artist folders are in the root directory on the drive.

4. Beware - Windows will insist on inserting a Recycle bin on your hard drive. This will inherit the contents of the Recycle bin on the PC you attach your drive to. It will also receive all the hundreds of tracks you might delete while you are trying to set up your drive. Empty the Recycle bin when you have finished setting up your drive otherwise the presence of all these various files will screw up the way the drive works with your car's head unit.

5. After doing all that I find that it take 20 - 30 seconds for the head unit to recognise and initialise the drive each time the car is started up - that's more than twice as long as my old 8GB USB stick . Not sure whether that's down to the size of the disk or the 2500+ tracks that are on it. However once running access times / searching seems to be a lot quicker than the USB stick and I have got all my music in the car with room for loads more.

Wow thats an epic challenge just to get some choons on, although 2500 tracks ZephyR you either a DJ or thats a long drive!

I regularly update my sounds, so what about a simple USB stick, 2-4GB say - I can get plenty of music on that to copy over? Will I have the same issues you mention above re FAT32?

Thanks for your help, I must confess this is really rather poo.

I use a spare SanDisk 8Gb stick to which I have copied the contents of the My Music folder from my laptop and I have had no issues. The files were ripped in Windows Media Player in wma format, and you will get at least 10 Albums per Gb in the Best Quality setting. So far I have had no issues.

Yeah, I've been using a 8GB USB stick for the last year without any problem just changed some of the tracks now and then.
I did get a bit frustrated by the lags when searching etc and sometimes wished I had some different tunes on it.
Had an old laptop hard drive and heard it could be done so thought I'd have go.

Samsung S1 Mini 120GB as found on another thread here. Was about £55 from amazon at the time. Used for about a year now and great for storing all my music. Plays from where it left off, even if you remove it from the car and add some more music to it. Only thing it won't do is random play. I've just copied my music straight from iTunes, put it on the drive and saves me having to keep putting the iPod in the car.

Maddogdave...

When you copied your tunes from iTunes did you have to convert it to fat32 to allow it to work or was it simply just copy it to the memory card and simply plug and play ?

Cheers

Just copied the music onto the drive and plugged it in. Did not need to re-format. Your music will show up by artist and then album, exactly as per the directory list when you copied it. So it's fine for choosing artist, then playing one or all albums by that artist. It will play in the normal album track order without having to edit the names. It's only the random play that won't work and I'm not sure whether you can set up playlists. If playlists don't work then you may have to do that the hard way by creating another folder / directory and copying the individual songs into that folder. In this case then it will play the tracks in alphabetical order unless you re-number them.

Couldn't get iTunes to recognise my drive. Am I missing something ?
Used Mediamonkey instead which was easy enough.

madogdave - iTunes likes to convert .wma files to .aac files. Does the Roc's head unit play .aac files?

Yes it will play them via the USB connector, but not if you put them onto an SD card and plug directly into the head unit (that only supports MP3).

maddogdave wrote:Yes it will play them via the USB connector, but not if you put them onto an SD card and plug directly into the head unit (that only supports MP3).

Thanks

Do only certain models come with the USB? Looked in centre console of mine and I only have the media in connector.

Regards SJ

the MDI connection comes with 2 cables, 1 with a USB connection on the end, 1 with an ipod connector on the end, you should have both.

I don't have either as the car was second hand.

ah ok, they are available from the dealer then but generally cheaper on ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/VW-USB-Media-Cabl ... 41589c4caf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/VW-MDI-IPOD-CONNE ... 3a653111c3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

trix wrote:ah ok, they are available from the dealer then but generally cheaper on ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/VW-USB-Media-Cabl ... 41589c4caf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/VW-MDI-IPOD-CONNE ... 3a653111c3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thanks for that. I shall have both on payday.

Regards SJ