My 2012 F150 has this system, and there are two ports. The small hole where an iPod can be plugged into, and also a USB port.

I understand you can download music, like from iTunes onto a memory stick, put that in the USB port, and like magic, Willie and Waylon are singing away.

I have the Sony system, but not the NAV. What indications and control do you have for selecting music from the stick? What shows on the digital
radio screen? The truck manual is a little weak on this.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can explain this better then Ford.

 

Press media button on steering wheel, say "usb2" or "USB" and away you go

 

I think you have something similar to mine, I have the Sync Basic package on mine (no fancy nav or screen). If the iTunes music is set up correctly (with artist and track information) you can "drag and drop" it into a folder on the flash drive.

NOTE: the "root" drive of a flash drive can only has a capacity of a certain percentage of total storage. This means you should not just put them all on the "E:" or whatever your flash drive is recognized as. I would make a new folder on the flash drive called "Music" and put all your music in there. Open up "my computer" click the flash drive, then right click and press "create new folder" then name it music or whatever you like. You can then open itunes and drag the songs directly to the "music" folder you just created

Once you add your music to the flash drive, plug it into the truck and push the voice activation button and say "USB". Songs from the flash drive will start to play. On the screen, it will show the Artist and Song. If you press the "Text" button and use the left/right arrows, you can scroll through additional information such as album etc.

If you want to play songs by a particular artist, (or select a particular song) it's easier to have sync find it than to try using the stereo controls. You can say things such as "play artist____" or "play track_____" For a list of voice commands, look here MyFord Touch | Explore Entertainment By Voice Commands | Ford.com and scroll down to "USB/SD" commands. Even though that is for the "my ford touch" the commands still work on sync basic

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any further questions. Good luck

 

you can also plug the ipod/iphone into the usb and play music, and it charges while doing so

 

Where did you hear this? I've been dumping everything into the root directory of flash drives since I've been using flash drives (10+ years) and never run into this issue. The drive doesn't care about your folder structure, it only cares about how much capacity it has.

 

I should have written that differently, If the drive is formatted as FAT, you will have a limited root directory. If you have it formatted as NTFS, you will be fine. Screenshot below:



As I did not want to get into reformatting, I suggested the OP create a folder and place all of it in the music folder.

 

Gotcha. I just assume that everything is formatted NTFS these days.

 

Just to follow up, the SYNC software is not configured to recognize NTFS file system on flash drives. I just reformatted one of my flash drives to NTFS and this happened



2 Minutes later...



Bottom line is you will need to use FAT file system (most USB drives are formatted this way by default, as they can be used cross-platform). This means you will need to create a subfolder in the root directory and put your music in there

 

Thanks for you responses, guys. Unfortunately I'm rather lo tech, and don't have a clue as to what some of your comments are about.

I just bought a stick, stuck in the back of my iMac, and tried to download my iTunes library onto it. Didn't work; bought an 8 GB stick, and had 8.5 GBs of music.

So I dragged by artist out of iTunes onto the icon for the stick, and loaded up some tunes that way. Stuck that in the truck's USB port, and was able to
have an index show on the radio based on songs, artists, or genre.

I was not able to drag Playlists out of iTunes. Anyway, I see this is one way to take music out of the house and into the truck, but it's more limiting then
using the iPod.

 

Unfortunately, iTunes playlists are not compatible with sync. It's a bit involved to create then on the flash drive and I am still trying to figure out the most effective way. I'm glad you were able to at least get some songs on there that played.

 

Since SYNC is a microsoft product it won't read ITUNES playlists. It will read modified Windows Media Player playlists. I have a folder called F150 on my hard drive. In that folder I create the folders I want to put directly on my thumb drive. Then I create playlists in Media Player and store them in the F150 folder. If I had a folder inside of the "F150" folder called "Rock" and inside of that had a file called "ABC.MP3" The file path would be something like this:

c:\\F150\Rock\ABC.MP3

When you create a Media Player playlist this is the path it will use. Your SYNC however cannot use that path because the c:\\ portion is incorrect. Once you create and save your Playlists into the F150 folder open them with notepad.

You will see a section with track names that will look similar to this:

<media src="c:\\F150\Rock\ABC.mp3"/>

do a Replace (Under Edit on the tool bar) and replace "c:\\F150\ with ". this will leave a path that looks like this:

<media src="Rock\ABC.mp3"/>

if you do a replace all it will do the entire list for you in a second or so. Then make sure the contents of the F150 folder are dumped into the root of the thumb drive (including the playlists)

Your Sync system will recognize voice commands using whatever the file name for the playlist was.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Truckpilot1329

Thanks for you responses, guys. Unfortunately I'm rather lo tech, and don't have a clue as to what some of your comments are about.

I just bought a stick, stuck in the back of my iMac, and tried to download my iTunes library onto it. Didn't work; bought an 8 GB stick, and had 8.5 GBs of music.

So I dragged by artist out of iTunes onto the icon for the stick, and loaded up some tunes that way. Stuck that in the truck's USB port, and was able to
have an index show on the radio based on songs, artists, or genre.

I was not able to drag Playlists out of iTunes. Anyway, I see this is one way to take music out of the house and into the truck, but it's more limiting then
using the iPod.