USB stick - do I need to format

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Hi,
New to Mac and not great with technology!....bought a new car that takes a memory stick instead of plugging in my ipod. Bought a 4 GB stick and loaded 500 songs on but it wont play in car. Manual says that Fat and Fat 32 are acceptable. Now computer doesn't recognise memory stick at all. ( No icon appearing) Bought new 8GB yesterday and loaded a couple of songs on and it wont play either. Do I have to format stick before I put anything on it. the port does work on car as salesman tried his on it and it was ok. I hope someone can advise me.

Thanks::
 
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Welcome to the Forum. If you run Disk Utility in Applications > Utilities folder and memory stick should show up in left pane, select it and then choose erase which will then allow u to choose Format and the MS-DOS (FAT) selection.


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chscag

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The memory sticks or thumb drives are all pre-formatted already to FAT so there's no need to format them again. And using Disk Utility may actually do more harm since it will place two partitions on the memory stick.

I'm thinking that it's possible your car audio is not receiving the correct music format it needs to play. Some auto systems will play MP3's without a problem, some won't and need full audio. However, most new cars nowadays can play MP3s. What music format are your songs in? How did you copy them to the memory stick and where did you copy them from?

Assuming you copied from iTunes, are you sure they're not in MP4 music format? (They need to be MP3)

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Assuming you copied from iTunes, are you sure they're not in MP4 music format? (They need to be MP3)
That's my suspicion as well. If the OP didn't know, all music bought through iTunes is in ACC (.m4a) format and not MP3. You would have to convert them all to .mp3 using iTunes. Many music players can't use ACC format.
 
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chscag - if that is the case then mine may have 2 partitions - any way to check/sort that?
 

chscag

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chscag - if that is the case then mine may have 2 partitions - any way to check/sort that?

Best way to check Collin is by trying to use them on a PC. If the PC only "sees" 200 MB and not the full formatted drive, then you know that you have the EFI 200 MB partition in addition to the main partition. It won't show up when plugged into a Mac but will on a PC.

If that's what happened to your USB thumb drives, reply back and I'll post a method for removing the EFI partition.

Regards.
 

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