I've searched but haven't found anything and the owners manual is useless.

I've got a bunch of songs on an 8GB thumb drive. I've got some songs, maybe 30, in the root folder because they're just random songs and I didn't feel like making a separate sub-folder for each of them. Then I've got multiple sub folders, see attached.
If I hit RDM, which I'm assuming means Random, I hoped that it would just play a random track from ANY location on the drive, but it doesn't. If I'm in the root, it will only play random tracks from root. If I'm in a sub-folder, it will only play tracks in that sub-folder.
Does the MINI not work like every other receiver I've owned in the past, or am I completely missing something?

 

Yes, when you select random, it will only play files within the current folder. Took me a while to figure that out, it is actually described in the manual. I tried putting all the files in the root folder, then ran into the 255 maximum number of files for FAT 32. That problem does not exist for a sub-folder. Sooo, I created a single sub-folder called 'music' and put all my files there. No more random problem..

You really don't need sub-folders for say, a particular album. When the thumb drive is inserted for the first time, it reads and stores all the meta data stored in each file. That way you can select by artist, genre, etc. I had a LOT of time to play with this on a cross country trip..

 

Thank you! This has been driving me CRAZY! And since I only have a 9 mile drive each way to work, I don't have much time for trial and error.

 

I just looked it up in the manual, just about any music file type is supported. Here's some more info from the manual -

USB device

To play audio tracks over the car's speaker system, connect the USB device. After first connecting, the track information is transferred to the vehicle. The time required is dependent on the USB device and on the number of tracks. Information from up to four USB devices or approx. 20,000 tracks can be stored in the vehicle.

You're welcome..