Playlists and one thousand tracks limit

Try it and see...? Just a thought. Put them on an SD card to verify any nasty behavior.

I copied close to two thousand songs on SD card and made playlists containing about two to three hundred songs each. I played one playlist in my car for about half hour today and it worked fine. But the real test could be to play these playlists for longer periods of time.

I believe this thould work because Nuvi does not need to sort all songs over thousand songs limit.

Then play more to test your theory. A simple thing, right?

The nuvi will read the songs from the FAT table. It will not read past the limit. The rest will be ignored.

Playlists will not get past this limit.

Does anyone know why it's 1000 and not some exponent of 2 (like 1024) ??

I always question non-programmatic limitations...

I really like having MP3 capability, but ran into this limitation on a road this past weekend. I had 4 playlist, but total more than 1000 - it would not access all the music. Sad limitation...

I also thought the shuffle feature was pretty weak - seemed to repeat songs too often (or maybe it was because my playlist would not play all the music because of the 1000 song limitation?).

You could always carry two different SD cards and then just swap the cards.

I've done the same thing for long road trips. Compile different types of music on different cards depending upon my taste at that time.

OMG! You need to stop letting common sense get in the way!

Or you could use a program like MP3 Cutter/Joiner to splice say 10 songs into one file. Then your song limit would be 10,000. Of course you wouldn't be able to shuffle within the file so those 10 songs would always play in order.

Please try this out, and let us know if it's determined by file numbers, or file sizes.

Thanks for the suggestion. I am going to try it tonight. We are going on a long trip and need lots of music.

Save yourself a hella amount of time and get a new card. 1000 tunes is about a 1 Gig card @ 320kbps.

If you don't, I wish you good luck!

I'm thinking the same thing. Sounds like a lot of time wasted making something complex when it should be simple.

You guys must go on REALLY long trips. Cause 1000 songs at an average of 3.5 minutes a song comes out to over 58 hours of music.

This will work. (with the limitations noted)

The limit is based upon the number of files.

Guilty as charged! LOL!

You are right. I will buy another card to save time and effort.

!!

I've got over 2000 "songs" on my SD, approx 130 hours of music. No problem.

Did you check that you can play all songs? I could add two thousand plus songs on my 16 gigs sd card but it is not playing all songs.

Hmmm where have I heard that before????

I listen to audio books while driving. I rip them at 32 KB / 22.5 KHz. Its nothing for me to have my 2 gig card full of books with each book averaging from 10 to 15 hours of play time. The only time I have ever had problems playing mp3's was when I updated my 750 to v4.9 FW. I don't come anywhere near the 1000 file limit (in fact I didn't even know there was a 1000 file limit) but I will have somewhere around 75 to 100 hours of playing time.

I created a folder called Audio on an SD card for my 765. I then created 3 subfolders for different types of music. When I go into the player and select the album list I see only 2 listed. One has the exact name of a folder I created on the card, like "Greatest Hits," but the other 2 have been lumped together into an album called Unknown. All the songs seem to be there, just don't understand why it lumped 2 of the 3 together. Any thoughts, or suggestions on how to better do this?

Without knowing exactly what names you used for both the folders and the song files, I can't answer that. What I can tell you is that Garmin doesn't use folders below the first level. Garmin also will find and list any and all mp3's regardless of where they are stored. What I have had to do in order to play mp3 files in the proper order is create Playlists for each book. Without Playlists it will mix and match files from different books even though they are in different subfolders.

The GPS unit does not read the folder structure for the songs.

It reads the ID3 tags from the tracks. You need to use software on your computer to properly tag the songs in order to have the Album, Artist, and Genre data read properly by the device.

The device showing "unknown" is evidence of the files not being properly tagged.

The folders are "Petty Greatest", "40sMusic1" and "Classical." I just checked and I am mistaken. The "Petty Greatest" folder actually shows up as "Greatest Hits" when using the Album view, so I'm assuming it found an album name in the MP3s. That would not be true of the other 2. Didn't catch the difference until I read your post and looked closer at it. As far as playlists go, I'm not sure if I understand how you use them on the Nuvi. I realize the order is important for books. Are they just MP3s containing multiple tracks, so they are forced to play in order, beginning to end?

Get some kind of IPOD or put the songs on Cd's as mp3's...You can make as many play lists as you want on the IPOD...much easier to manage and more flexible....

I was never able to figure out how my 750 decided which file to play next, the order didn't seem to match any sequence based on file names or mp3 tag info. I fixed the problem when I noticed that one of the playing options is Playlist. There are several options listed when you tap playlist, I use "Open Saved Playlist" and then select the book I want.

A playlist is just a text file saved with a m3u extension. It contains info on where the file to be played can be found and the order to play them. I use a program called "mp3 book helper" to generate the playlist and then save it with the files on the Garmin. You can open them with Notepad so I assume that you could generate them using Notepad also.

Haven't played with it very long but never noticed the Playlist button. Will have to give it a try.

Regarding the display of the music available, I think it depends on what information was encoded in the MP3 file that determines what you see. For each of the Browse categories (Album, Artist, Genre) it correctly shows the corresponding info for the "Greatest Hits" album. The others are just Unknown. So, I suspect that if the 2 Unknowns each contained the correct information in the MP3 files I would see additional selections under the Browse categories. Thanks for your help.

Garmin says:
Which devices will play MP3 files and how many files can they hold?

Answer:
The following table lists the Garmin units that are capable of playing MP3s and the number of MP3 files each unit can read. These are the max number of MP3s that the unit can read altogether whether they are on the unit directly or on a SD data card.

Unit Series Maximum Number of MP3s
nuvi 300 1000 songs
nuvi 600 1000 songs
nuvi 700 1000 songs
nuvi 705 2000 songs
nuvi 800 1000 songs
nuvi 805 1000 songs
nuvi 5000 1000 songs
zumo 400 and 500 1000 songs
zumo 660 and 665 2000 songs
StreetPilot c550 and 580 500 songs
StreetPilot 2730 500 songs
StreetPilot 2820 500 songs
StreetPilot 7000 500 songs

Last modified on: 03/19/2010

Thanks for the list of all series. Does 7x5 series fall under 700? Or it is missing in Garmin list?

Thanks for the list.

Just to follow-up. I used "MP3 Book Helper" to add tags to some of my MP3 files, then loaded them into separate folders on the 765's SD card, something like this:

drive:\Garmin\Audio\Schubert

Now when I look at the Browse categories I see a separate selection based on what I put in the tag (not necessarily the name of the folder), rather than it being dumped into the Unknown category. So, under Album I see whatever I called the Album, same for Artist and Genre.