How can I play music off a Micro SD into a car stereo, via USB?

[Ghostmaker]

Hello.

I currently have an iPhone, but am considering switching back to an Android phone. I dislike the lack of customization, limited apps, and compatibility issues with the iPhone. However, one thing that I do enjoy very much about it is that I can simply plug it into my car's stereo via USB and it is immediately ready for me to guide through my music collection.

I tried plugging my Droid 4 into my car stereo head using the USB cord, but it seemed like it was picking out random MP3 files from the internal storage, including sound effects from apps such as Facebook and downloaded games. I would like to be able to put my music on a Micro SD, and guide through it by playist/artist/songs, similar to an iPod/iPhone. I know that using an audio jack is an option, but I would prefer to be able to control my music through the stereo controls, rather than have to pick up the phone and guide through it while I am trying to drive.

Long story short: I would like to be able to make a Music folder on my micro SD, and be able to play music and guide it through my car stereo similar to an iPhone/iPod.

 

[raptir]

Well, the issue you're running into boils down to "your car was designed with the iPhone in mind, not Android phones." Your car stereo is just acting like a USB Host (computer) and reading the internal storage of the device. The phone is designed to work with a computer and so it presents the MicroSD and Internal Storage as two different partitions, which any computer can handle without an issue. The car is "dumb" and only sees the first partition presented, which is the internal storage (this is by convention, since the removable storage is considered to be secondary since it's well, removable).

That's the first half of the problem. The second half of the problem is that the iPhone does not allow applications to write data to wherever they want and instead manages the application data completely separately from the user storage. Android on the other hand allows applications to write to their own directory within /data/ as well as on the /sdcard/ partition. I'm not going to get into a discussion of the merits of each approach, but the end result is that applications can save some of their data files to the internal storage or SD card. Android won't pick these up as media files because they drop a .nomedia file into each folder, but your car is not respecting that and is instead grabbing every MP3 it can find.

Essentially, you're experiencing one of the cases where Apple's locked down approach gives you some benefits over Android's open approach.