Nuvi 660 - Getting NUVI to read SD card mp3 and jpg files

Don't know what Nuvi you have but I have a 680. I have a 2gb SD card used for pictures and music. Here is what I did. Connect your Nuvi to your PC using a USB cord. Using Windows Explore (right click Start, left click explore), find the Nuvi drive (not your Nuvi but the actually SD drive). Make 2 folders on your drive called Music and Pictures. Just drag your MP3's (must be mp3's) and pictures to the appropriate directories. Your music will show up by hitting "Travel Kit" and "MP3 Player". To see your pictures, click on "View Images from Memory Card"

Do not defrag anything.

As far as deleting stuff, you should back up anything you're going to delete. Using Windows Explore, find your Nuvi device. Mine looks like Nuvi (H:). Open the Garmin directory by hitting the - sign. In the help directory, delete any languages you don't need, in the vehicle directory delete any vehicles you don't want, in the voice directory delete any voices you don't want. My jpeg and MP3 directories are empty.

I'm betting that the mp3 files just don't have their tags filled in. Therefore they don't show up under the lists of albums, authors, genres, and it just looks like they aren't there. Sounds like you've done things correctly. 660 should have no problem seeing any mp3 files you put on the card. Tags can be set in iTunes or Media Monkey and any number of other programs.

From your post I gather that you can access the mp3 files, but they are coming from the nuvi and not the sd card. If that is the case, perhaps when you inserted the SD card into the unit, you inadverdly pressed "yes" when it asked if you wanted to copy the contents. If you did, then the nuvi will read those files from it's internal memory and not the sd card.

As far as defraing.. I don't think so. I don't think the nuvi has a typical hard drive. You can however, delete unwanted files.

I rarely use MP3 files, but figured since I had the ability I would try it. I'm not sure what you mean by "Tags"? As for the photo files - I did transfer over some jpeg files and I can see them. Do you concur that I need to make folders and label them "music" etc?

The manual said something about MPU files? I saved my playlist as that, but I still couldn't get it to work.

I'll go back into itunes and see what I can find. I thought those were saved as MP4 files which the 660 says it can't read? I do have a conversion to MP3 which I did.

Short of deleting all of the music files on the Nuvi itself and only putting the files on the SD- is there a way to tell which drive is being read?

So defragmenting is not advised? I've added and removed so many files trying to get this to work that I'm concerned about the nuvi drive being a mess.

Thanks for the help.

Actually the only way to get the files onto my SD card was via the Nuvi device since I don't have a separate card reader/writer for the SD card. I put the SD card into the Nuvi and then copied over the files using my PC and accessing the drive thru there. I made sure I chose the SD card .

Should I remove the card and then re-insert it? I know - sounds dumb - but this is the only use I have for the SD card. I purchased it specifically to add stuff to the Nuvi.

The MP3s should show up automatically. However, the source button doesn't switch between the unit and the card. All the songs on both will show up together.

First of all, double check to ensure that they are in fact actually MP3 format and not some other format.

Next, what happens when you go to the MP3 player and touch "Browse"? Do the songs not show up?

If they show up when you hit Browse but don't show up under Album, Artist, Genre, then they are valid files but aren't properly tagged. The track tags are the data that the nuvi reads to assess the Album, Artist, Genre and track name. The nuvi doesn't pay any attention to the file names.

JPG files should also show up automatically when you go to the Picture Viewer.

If the files are all valid and they still aren't being read by the nuvi, you might have an incompatible card. Try a different one.

And as stated above, don't defrag. The nuvi has solid state memory not a hard drive. Defragging isn't necessary and won't help anything and repeated writing and rewriting unnecessarily will shorten it's useful life.

I think I've got it using your commentary. I guess I'll need to resave them on the card with the "tags"?

I used windows media player to tag them. I hope I'm doing it right. I took all the music off the Nuvi and only put it on the SD card. I can now be sure it's coming from the SD card and not the Nuvi.

I wish it worked more like the jpeg viewer and asked you where you wanted to source the files! That would have made it much easier.

I'll play around with again tomorrow. I really appreciate all the help.

One more quick question? what is the maximum size of SD card that can be used in the 660?

Susie

The 660 will support up to a 4gb card.

Right click on one of your iTunes files and choose Get Info. Under the Info tab, you will find fields for Name, Artist, Album, genre, etc. It is by these tags that you can search/sort the files on the 660. The music need not be in its own folder, but organization is not a bad thing. You can choose the default format for storing your files in iTunes, and mp3 is one choice. At any point in time, you can change the default and by right-clicking on a file at that point, you can convert the file to the current default.

If you made a proper playlist (mpu) file, that should have worked. Did you not see the playlist, or did you see it and it wouldn't play?

As for telling the drive from which the files are playing, I'd recommend you keep them in one place only. I guess if you wanted, you could change the name to include the drive and that name would then show in the player.

Defragging is of no use for solid state storage -- it is aimed at mechanical hard drives where you want the data to be contiguous.

YOu have all been a great help. I found everything and now know where it is. My plan is to keep all of my misc files on the SD card. I now see all of the music, and all of the jpg files. I did leave 1 jpg file on the nuvi because I made that the splash screen and it seemed to make sense to leave that where it could be always accessed. Not quite sure what would happen if it weren't there and the SD card wasn't selected.

I can now organize everything. Remove what I don't want - rename the "track 01 etc" to a real name, and put everything on my SD card.

I did find a great place to buy an extended 3 year warranty for $19. The place checks out so as long as I do that within the specified time frame I should be good to go!

Thanks to everyone!
Susie
aka AVATRX

One final? question.
I saved my playlist as MPU. It only shows it to be 4.00 KB.

I guess I don't really know how to work with Playlists since I know the songs total many megabytes.

In order to organize - what are the steps to take?
make folders
put songs in folders
do I need to "tag" them as album?

And her I thought I had it!

Susie

Playlist files have to saved with the file name extension m3u. Something like list01.m3u

Playlist files are simple text files and will only be a few KB in size, depending the length of the list. I have one playlist file with 120 songs in it and its only 5KB.

There is a great discussion here about organizing your music files.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/6706

It turns out a lot of sub-folders are not needed and can sometimes only complicate the process. I created only one folder on my SD card for music files called mp3 and put all the mp3 music files and m3u playlist files in that one folder. My nuvi finds them and plays them just fine.

So to clarify: The playlist is strictly to identify the songs as opposed to making available the actual songs? I know how that works on the computer - I'm surmising that it works the same on the Nuvi? The M3u is the file that directs you to a specific collection regardless of where they are located?

I don't know why I'm having such a hard time with this. I tend to overthink things making them more complicated than they actually are.

I appreciate the patience of everyone. I'm typically a talk radio person. I hope saving a Podcast is possible and relatively easy to do.

Susie

I'm not sure what you mean by the phrase "making available the actual songs," but a playlist does nothing more than define the sequence in which songs will be played back.

For example, if I rip 14 tracks from a CD, it will create 14 mp3 files, which depending on the CD ripper program, will probably create the filenames made up of a combination of the Artist and Title. If I want the songs to be played back in the exact same order as they were recorded on the original CD, I would create a playlist which lists the songs in order, track 1 through track 14.

It is not necessary to create playlists for playback. You can still select by Artist, Album or Genre, or select All to playback all mp3 files. In addition, you can also select "Repeat" or "Shuffle" modes from the mp3 player screen.

If the card works, it could be any folder, any name, no tagging needed.

I ran into similar problem w/ nuvi 350 yesterday. I tried a sandisk 512 mb which I had been using in my treo--didn't work. Tried a 2gb sandisk ultra II sd from my sd800--didn't work. Tried a 4gb snadisk extreme III that i'd also been using in my SD800--worked perfectly (though it did crash the nuvi once). For the other two cards, i tried formatting in windows, formatting w/ the camera, etc and still no go. strange.