I recently got a new (well, apparently from 2012,) Kenwood Stereo. The exact model number is the KDC-X498, but from my research most of the Kenwood stereos are pretty similar. It’s a pretty cool stereo as it has a USB port on it. I can plug in any phone with a USB cable and it’ll play music from it. It will also play MP3 files from a USB Drive.
Unfortunately there are a number of caveats to make this possible;
– The USB Drive is limited to 32GB in size
– The USB Drive must be formatted in Fat 32. Most are this way from the factory, so usually not a huge deal.
– Audio files must be in .mp3 format or .wav format. Some models will accept the .acc format also.
– Some stereos can only see a certain number of MP3s per a directory on the drive. Its roughly a thousand files, but on a 32GB drive that is easy to reach. If this happens, separate the files out into subdirectories. Or as I do, by Artist then Album.
– MP3s must be in 192k format. Not 320k VBR or some other format.
Despite all of this, my stereo (and several other models,) will suddenly display “NA File” while reading a USB drive full of MP3 files. After a lot of searching on the internet, most said to make sure that it’s in the right format. Well, I run a Mac, and spent several hours downgrading all my files to 192k yet still had the problem. After several more hours of searching and no answers at all, I finally figured out the problem.
The Kenwood Stereo’s firmware does not “skip” over the Macintosh’s .DS_Store files like every other operating system has been doing for years. Modern OSes see any file starting with a . (or period,) as a system file and ignores it, or processes it as appropriately. Not the Kenwood!
So to fix this, these can be disabled in the command line using these directions I wrote years ago.
Or, it’s easy to open up Terminal in OS X, and type ‘rm -rf ._*’ (without quotes.) This will delete all the .DS Store files and everything will magically work! Make sure you cd to the correct directory first , usually /Volumes/Crucial or something similar.