I was curious if anybody else out there has bought a newer Kenwood HU (I have a KDC-X891). The HU actually sounds really good but I have a major problem with it in the way it deals with USB drive files. Lets say that you have a thumb drive and you copy over 10 folders to it (each folder has x amount of mp3 files in it). When you get a newer HU, Kenwood gives you something called "Kenwood Music Editor." In this first case, you are not using the Kenwood music editor s/w to do what I am describing first. This all happens in windows explorer, similar to how you might save data files. After you copy the folders over to the drive, what happens is that when you connect the thumb drive to the HU, the deck reads back the folders but only lists them in a cryptic fashion by calling them F01, F02, etc. Actually, if you have 10 folders on the drive your folder number scheme may not be from 1 -10, it may actually 11 or 12 depending on if there are any folders that it recognizes but cannot do anything with (system folders if you will). So if you had a folder on the thumb drive for the band Rush, and say you named it "Rush - Moving Pictures", you would not see the actual name of the band on the display. What is displayed is a cryptic name such as F02 T02 (which indicates that it is folder 2, playing track 2). The reason that this sucks is that if I load up a thumb drive, I have no way of knowing what albums/bands are on there until the music starts. This sucks because I don't like to mesmerize things like this. The next thing that I have found is that when you do use the "Kenwood Music Editor" s/w that comes with the HU, it will display things correctly but the downside is that when you do copy files over to a thumb drive, you end up have a big playlist that requires one to scroll through each album/song before getting to the album/song you want. So again, if you place 10 folders on the thumb drive using their s/w, you can get titles to show up but if you want to play folder 6/track 3, and you are playing folder 1/track 1, you have to go through each song on each folder before you get to the folder/song of interest. So my question is this: Has anybody out there found a way around this so that you can scroll through folder w/o any problems or cryptic names to deal with? If I would have know this, I would have never bought the deck. There was no way of finding this out beforehand because no dealers where I live carry the excelon series on hand. dennis
Interesting. I have a question concerning USB capable decks. And you may have answered one of them. I use an Ipod with my Kenwood and I use the Direct Access feature to find music that I wanna hear. I wonder if it will work with your Jump Drive. Direct Access is only available through the remote. Try this, if you want folder 4, press "4" on the remote and then press either "AM" or "FM". If you want song 12, then press "1" "2" and then press the arrow left or arrow right button. The only time I have had problems with this is when I had folders in folders. It only seems to like one level. Again I have never tryed USB with Kenwood so give it a try and post back what works.
I figured out my problem with this. The way that the unit operates is that I needed to change the display while it is in USB mode. I assumed that one mode setting is for all operation modes (tuner, cd, usb). Kind of stupid that it was so simple but what do you do What was going on is that when you set up the display on the HU, you can display certain items on each line. There are three lines of info you can display. It comes down to that I just did not set the display up right. With this head unit, you can't pick a file using the remote control (at least I don't think so) in USB mode. You have to use the >>| to move to the next track/folder. But then again, perhaps there is a command for it but I am missing that one too :lol: The next big deal is to see how it behaves with nested folders. I keep a pretty straightforward folder system and just have a band name_# (the number is based on how many albums of that band I have) and then each folder has all of the mp3's that I wanted. I was getting really frustrated with this HU. I wanted to send it back. It does sound better than my Eclipse CD8455, which took me by surprise. I thought Eclipse were the best thing going sound-wise. With the intro of a USB port, things are different. I bought the Kenwood to carry all of my music on thumb drives (albeit big ones, like 8 or 16 GB). This gives me a way to carry all of my music that does not involve moving parts. I wanted to avoid ipod due to theft issues and temp swings that may cause the gizmo to behave goofy. I did not want the thing to freeze up in the winter. dennis
