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[Uneasyrider]

I am looking to play music thru the Zumo. I have a micro sd card with music on it and I ma not sure how to get it to work. I am working from a PC laptop

thanks

[Peobody]

Greetings and welcome to the forum.

You don't say what device you have but AFAIK, Garmin devices with a built-in music player require that music on a card be .mp3 files located in a folder named MP3 at the root of the card. You can create a subfolder structure within the MP3 folder (eg:\MP3\Artist\Album\.mp3 files). The music player will crawl the entire structure with \MP3.

[Nortoncommando]

OK. I have the ZUMO XT. I wiil figure out what I have to do. I don't have a music app on my PC. I have to take care of that first I guess.
On long cross country rides I listen to serous/xm thru the app, When I have no internet I want to use the ZUMO music.

Thanks

[Peobody]

The only thing you need on your PC is a program that will convert your music files to .mp3 if needed. VLC Media Player is a freebie that has done the trick for me. https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[rbentnail]

It wasn't very clear but the song files MUST be in mp3 format. Looking at File Explorer on my PC, what I have is zumo XT/Memory Card. I created a Folder on the card called Mp3. Others say MP3 but I have Mp3 and it works fine. I have 2102 files (songs) in 241 folders.

XT SD Card 1.png (25.36 KiB) Viewed 2016 times

I then created an Album folder for each artist.

XT SD Card 2.png (75.82 KiB) Viewed 2016 times

I placed each album in the appropriate folder

XT SD Card 3.png (38.78 KiB) Viewed 2016 times

And then each song in the appropriate album folder.

XT SD Card 4.png (47.98 KiB) Viewed 2016 times

[twowheelstom]

are those biker riding tunes? something that will get me going full blast to avoid trucks and tailgaters, ,

[rbentnail]

are those biker riding tunes? something that will get me going full blast to avoid trucks and tailgaters, ,

There's 2100 songs, surely something will work for you

[jfheath]

Welcome @Uneasyrider.

The songs, tracks, album and artist are all obtained from the MP3 file itself, not from the folder structure.

However, it makes sense to put all of the tracks in one album inside a folder titled with the album name. And perhaps, like I do, to have the albums as subfolders of the artist name. That makes it much easier to keep things organised - but the XT takes no notice of the folder structure.

But if you happen to have two tracks the same in different albums in different folders, you may find the XT plays the same track twice!

Programs like Windows media Player and itunes can alter the data in the mp3 file. They can also get the correct track number, artist name and album title just from the tune and internet lookup. It is pretty good at getting it right, but not always. They once used the number of tracks and the track lengths to identify an album, but that has probably changed now.

MP3 in capitals used to be a requirement for the Zumos, so it is worth mentioning for people looking in with older Garmin devices. I can't recall when it changed, but any case - upper, lower or mixed - has always worked fine with the XT. I continue to say MP3 - so that it covers all Zumos that have a media player - and we don't know which Zumo the OP is using.

[edit]Ok - so now I know. The 595 - and I assume any made after it (the ones with Foursquare in the "Where To?" section) - accept lower case mp3.
The 590, 660, and 550 that I owned do not accept "mp3". It has to be "MP3".
(I still have a 590 and 595, and I have just tested it on both of those - and I remember the issue with the 550 and 660.)

Note if using Windows. Windows is not 'case sensitive'. It is 'case conserving''. In some circumstances, it recognises mp3 and MP3 as being the same. So if you edit 'mp3' to make it 'MP3' it treats them as the same - so in effect you haven't changed it - even though it keeps the modified capital letters.
This can be most irritating until you know about it - but it explains why I just did something automatically without giving it a second thought, because it is what you need to do to be not caught out by it (again). I changed 'MP3' to 'xxx', then I changed 'xxx' to 'mp3' - just so that Windows recognised that I had changed the name.