My Car Radio Doesn’t Play All The Songs On My USB Thumbdrive!
Modern car radios (or Head Units oft referred to by car aficionados) these days come equipped with the ability to not only play USB media or directly from your iOS device, they also charge your USB device whilst doing so.
There are even car radios now, that don’t even ship with an optical drive anymore.
Yes, that’s right. CD’s are ‘out’.
One great car radio that offers a great bang for your buck is Kenwood’s KMM-BT302.
Despite all the bells and whistles, unfortunately most of these players tend to read everything in your USB thumbdrive. Even the hidden files.
For Windows users this doesn’t pose much of an issue but owing to OS X’s journaled architecture a slew of hidden files and folders are created on every USB thumbdrive it interacts with including:
- .Trashes/
- .Spotlight-V100/
- .fseventsd/
- .TemporaryItems/
- .DS_Store
- .apdisk
- all files starting with ._ (excluding the file ._. ; this one is essential when you’ve set a custom drive icon)
On the Kenwood KMM-BT302, these hidden files wreak havoc and kick up an “NA FILE” error even though all the music files on your USB thumbdrive conform to the file formats that the Kenwood KMM-BT302 is designed to play (MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV & FLAC).
This creates the tedious task of transferring your songs onto your USB thumbdrive from your Mac and then plugging your USB thumbdrive into a Windows machine to view and delete the hidden files created by OS X.
Thanks to JaVaWa, you can now download and install their Clean Eject app which does a wonderful job of simplifying the removal of hidden files on any external media upon eject.
You need this app to help you do this because its almost impossible to remove the hidden files even if you manage to tweak OS X to reveal the hidden files.
Hidden files and folders are constantly being used by OS X as long as the USB thumbdrive is connected to your Mac. Resulting in the hidden files and folders being in a constant lock state which disallows deletion by OS X.
Many thanks to JaVaWa for creating this fantastically simple app. Please feel free to share your appreciation by donating to JaVaWa if you find that their efforts has simplified your life.
