Ran into the same wall. Split our library onto two SD cards for now. Still searching for another solution.
Wish my iPod Classic worked with PCM 4.

 

I too wish iPod Classic worked with PCM 4. There are vendors at Ebay that sell iPod with huge upgrade drives, that would solve my issue of not having enough space.

My iPod is the Touch version, 64 GB. Yes, there is a 128 GB available from Apple but it's been over 500 days since a new model was released so I don't want to settle for 128 GB and then have Apple release one twice that capacity a month later.

 

I had a similar problem in relation to "missing" tracks, where I knew I had a lot more tracks on the SD card than what was being loaded in the PCM.
It was because the files not being shown were MP4 files, and some others.
Make sure that the file extensions are either MP3 or WAV.
No idea on the track limit since I haven't reached it yet.

 

Mine were only mp3 files. At least the ones missing from a particular folder. I re-checked on a PC and the files were present.

I'm going to try partitions later today. First step will be to see if the PCM even recognizes there's more than one partition on the media. If that works then I'll try 10k on the first partition and see if any on the second appear.

The hard part is not knowing what order the PCM uses to load them. Presumably it's making some kind of choice regarding which ones to load and eventually cutting off when it reaches the limit. Without knowing the order it's sort of impossible to be able to determine what's missing. I only randomly happened to browse into a particular folder (on the 128gb card) and noticed tracks were missing. It wasn't near the start nor end of the list of folders by alphabetical ordering. I don't think it was by timestamp.

I am, however, going back into the media and removing all non-essential files. Various programs add metadata files for all kinds of stuff. AlbumArt*, *.nfo, *.xml, *.png, *.jpg, etc. I have to check to see what PCM is using for folder art. I think it's the 'folder.jpg' file if there's one present. I may create a powershell script that iterates through a directory tree to remove unwanted files. I don't know if these files impact the 10k limit or not. Again, it's hard to find missing things when you don't know where to look.

 

I don't think there's a way around the 10,000 track limit per SD card. My Jeep Cherokee had this limitation as well. Never tried multiple partitions. . .

 

Hmm, the wrinkle is Windows won't allow creating a removable disk with more than one partition on it. Ohhhh-kay. Hmm.

I'm going to try and work around that and see what PCM thinks about an SD card with more than one primary FAT32 partition on it.

Meanwhile, 55 minutes to transfer 21gb to the second partition... Sometimes testing just takes sooooo long....

 

Got one partition loaded up. Fiddling around with partitions and loading the other one...

 

Initial testing seems to indicate, no, the PCM won't recognize more than just the first partition created on an SD card. Not the first one by location on disk, but 1st in the partition table. This is not the result of an exhaustive test, I may not have created them in a way that PCM is prepared to deal with. I'll test some other ways later.

I also tested connecting an Android Samsung S7 phone via USB, in File Transfer mode. This works, treating the phone's storage like a drive. So there's that angle for folks curious about it.

The Owner's Manual doesn't mention it but some .ogg audio files played fine. For all you open source format fanatics out there.

I don't have an abundance of media formats on-hand, so I didn't try FLAC or anything besides .mp3 files. Given the 'acoustics' in a car, regardless of sound system type, you're kidding yourself bothering using anything 'better' than mp3. I'll trade convenience over audiophile rants, every time. You know who you are, crawl back in that hole...

I'm not sure what windows thinks about using multiple partitions on a removable hard drive. I'll have to put that on the list of things to test. If just to determine whether PCM can even see or deal with multiple partitions at all.

I'll also add that I saw a brief message flash on screen regarding exceeding the music database size. It came/went too quickly for me to quote the exact text.

What I haven't determined is if the 10k limit is just media tracks, or ALL files total. I was under the impression it was media tracks (mp3, ogg, etc). I'm paring down the files I'm using to just the media tracks and a single folder.jpg file (for cover art) in each directory. Then I'll be able to do some more accurate tests. Because with all the various tools I've used over the years there's a ton of metadata files crammed into my media folders. Some players have had more trouble than others dealing with all that cruft. I don't know if the PCM player has those issues or not... yet.

 

I'm not sure what windows thinks about using multiple partitions on a removable hard drive. I'll have to put that on the list of things to test. If just to determine whether PCM can even see or deal with multiple partitions at all.

Ok, I tried creating an SD card with more than one partition, both of them FAT32, and the PCM would only see the 1st one created. The second one was just ignored.

I also created two partitions on a USB hard drive and plugged it into the armrest USB port. That works. The PCM saw them as USB1:1 and USB1:2 for the 1st and 2nd partitions, respectively. I successfully played media from both of them. I only copied a limited number of tracks to each partition. I did not have enough on them to test the 10k limits.

Oh, and the USB hard drive immediately spun up when plugged into the armrest USB port, and did not spin down when the ignition was turned off and when the PCM itself turned off. I'd never really see using the USB port and a hard drive as a viable option. But as a test it proved that the PCM can deal with more than one partition on a hard disk.

I'm be curious to know what kind of partitions would have to be on the SD card in order for the PCM to see them individually. Because trying to use two MBR primary partitions formatted FAT32 on an SD card does not work. I didn't try GPT (can you even use that on an SD card?) Nor did I try MBR NTFS partitions.

My goal here would be to allow dividing up a 128gb SD card such that each partition held as close as possible to the 10k limit. It'd sure be convenient to have the bulk of my media tracks all accessible in the PCM.

 

I have had no issues with MP4 files. I removed all of the MP4a files from my SD card, which got me below 10 000 files.
After that PCM update the SD card worked a lot better, it remembered the track/playlist it was last playing, and loaded faster.
I would guess that the PCM source selector is not programmed to handle partitions, so they will not be accessible.
It will be interesting to see the outcome.
I was going to try putting everything on a USB stick to see if there is any difference, but have not found the time yet

 

Did a little more testing and discovered the armrest USB port will show more than one NTFS partition on a USB thumb drive.

I also tried making two NTFS partitions on an SD card and the PCM did not see anything other than the first partition. However, if I put that same SD card into a USB reader, and plugged that into the armrest USB port, the PCM was able to see both partitions.

So it would appear the only way to use media that has more than one partition is in the armrest USB port. Otherwise the PCM slots are single partition only.

 

@wkearney99, I've been following along with your experimenting and I just wanted to chime in to say I appreciate your efforts. As I've said in earlier threads the PCM in my 2015 S is disappointing for several reasons, one of which is the 10k file limit. Because of that limit I have my music spread between two USB sticks and the Jukebox hard drive. When I get a chance I'll partition a USB hard drive and copy one USB stick to each partition, then see if all ~15k files are accessible. I wouldn't be surprised if my older PCM system can't see both partitions, but it will be interesting to try anyway.

 

I have close to 40,000 music files. Since most vehicles impose a file limit (in my experience), to their external drives, I only copy my favorites. This takes a little more effort on the front end (as opposed to a simple "copy all"), but guarantees I won't have a bunch of tracks in the car that I wouldn't want to listen to while driving. I would spend too much time skipping tracks. . .

 

Thanks @catastrofe . I tend to keep my cars for about 10 years and the Macan is my first car with hard drive / USB / SD storage, and I wasn't aware that the 10k limit was common in other cars as well.

 

I likewise tend to keep vehicles for a while. My last one had no external inputs at all. Just the ability to play mp3 files from a DVD. Talk about a tedious user interface... Thus I never used it.

The Jukebox internal to the PCM, at 10gb, is tiny and almost worthless. That fact the PCM supports SD cards up to 128gb was exciting, until I discovered the 10k limit.

Which, btw, I haven't confirmed if it's 10k limit just on media tracks or files total of any kind. It'd certainly cut into the limit if it counts folder.jpg (cover art) and directories themselves as part of the 10k total. I plan on figuring that out once I get a decent set of test files created.

One tool that helps quite a bit is 'TreeSize'. Their free version is handy. Their Pro version is worth the money too as it's good for added features like finding duplicates. I used the filter feature to limit views to just .mp3 files, or exclusions to find everything BUT mp3, wmw and m4a files. Which was very helpful in paring down my media. Their $55 Pro version is worth it as it adds some features for moving & copying that help deal with large sets like this.

My library resides on a NAS (QNAP TVS-671) and totals 126gb in 39,504 files and 2,390 folders. I copied that whole thing to a local drive and used TreeSize to manually filter as a list and then pare down to just folder.jpg and mp3, wma and m4a media files. This resulted in a reduction to 124gb in 24,876 files and 2,382 folders. That's a reduction of 14,628 files! Still, it'd be more than would fit on just two partitions. It's surprising how all the metadata files have accumulated over the years. Lots of cover art, playlists, pdfs and all manner of other cruft.

My plan is to test a partition with 10k media files WITH their folder.jpg cover art files. Then one with just 10k of media files (no cover art). I want to see if the PCM emits the limit error based on counting media alone or if it's ALL files including cover art pictures.

Slinging all these files around takes a lot of time, especially when dealing with slow access times to USB and SD card media. Even 'fast' Class 10 cards still take a long time.

 

The jukebox on my 2015 Macan is 40GB with a 5k file limit, but on the other hand I only have one USB slot. Newer Macans have a USB slot and two SD slots don't they?

I don't know if separate jpg files count toward the 10k limit, but I have the album artwork embedded in each MP3 file anyway so that's not an issue for me.

 

I can confirm that a USB partition, formatted as NTFS, will work with 10,000 MP3 tracks along with a folder.jpg picture in each folder for cover art. That is, the PCM didn't complain about it as I've seen it do otherwise. Takes a WHILE watching in "Creating music database" for around 8 minutes...

It had exactly 10,000 mp3 tracks and around 600 folder.jpg files.

Which is good in that the images didn't seem to be part of the 10k. Unless it's not 10,000 exactly but some 1024 multiple like 12,288 (1024 x 10). I'll try that later.

 

Do you know for sure that you can access every single MP3 file?

By the way, my PCM can take up to 40 minutes to create that music database from a 128 GB or 256GB USB stick (high quality name brand or cheapo generic doesn't seem to matter), and until it's finished I can't access all the tracks. I'm not sure if it catalogs them in strictly alphanumerical sequence, but 10cc always seems to be available instantly while ZZ Top is usually a very late arrival.

 

You're right, there's no way to know if you can access all of the tracks. I only stumbled on this when I loaded up a 128gb card and tried to wander into some folders. Ones which I knew had playable tracks, but were showing as empty. I double-checked the contents of the card and then found out about the 10k limit. This was after the card had been in there for at least an hour.

I'm not sure if it builds the database every time or if it keeps it somewhere. I haven't looked on the media itself to see if there's any new files. There's the built-in storage that could be used, but then there'd be housekeeping problems emptying it (and I see no menu options for that, other than factory reset).

I'm not sure what influences the database building speed. I've since moved my testing of the 10k limit to using an external hard drive. That's faster than an SD card. Still takes a while sometimes.

 

After almost two years of messing with the PCM in my Macan I'm certain that it's simply a very buggy and unfinished system. Usually when I switch between my two USB sticks it goes back to square one and treats the newly-inserted stick as if it had never seen it before, then takes forever to give me full access to it. However, when I switched USB sticks a couple of days ago it picked up playing in the middle of the last track I'd been playing a few weeks earlier on the newly-reinserted stick, suggesting that the system recognized it in some way and had stored at least some information about it. It still took 9 minutes before I could change albums (although I could skip blindly to the next track on the album), and over 30 minutes before I could see all the albums on the stick.

When I took my Macan in for its first service earlier this year I told them about the issues with the PCM and they updated the software, to no effect. On its next service in February I'm going to push harder until they fix or replace the PCM, and if they replace it and it still doesn't work I'm going to keep complaining. 10k file limits are mildly annoying but if that's the way the system is then so be it. However it shouldn't randomly almost mute the volume when I first switch on, it shouldn't forget where it was when the car is switched off for a minute then back on again (but remember everything okay if it's switched off overnight), it shouldn't randomly fail to recognize USB sticks that have been in place for several weeks then default to playing the radio or jukebox instead, etc.

 

Hmm, ok then. I'll keep an eye out for the kind of symptoms you mentioned. Thus far it's been ok. I don't plan on swapping the cards around. It was my hope at the start of this to be able to use larger cards specifically to avoid that.

One challenge with "off" is that some stuff never really gets turned "off". Sometimes it's just a "sleep" kind of mode. I'm speaking generally here, not specific to the PCM. I'm still a little puzzled by how it decides something stays powered. As in, the radio keeps going until X happens... but not always? It's hard to blame anything... yet, because I'm still learning how it behaves (note I didn't say "works"). It's one thing to be getting in/out of the car for trips, it's another to be turning things on/off a bunch because you're futzing around in the driveway. As yet my experience with the PCM is a lot more of the latter.

 

My initial goal was the same as yours - put everything on one high-capacity USB stick then leave it in place permanently. Unfortunately the 10k limit shot that down.

One of my biggest gripes isn't with "off" versus "on". Rather, it's when the PCM system arbitrarily switches the volume to whisper-quiet when I turn on the car. Because the audio system doesn't always find the source and come back on immediately anyway I might be driving for a minute or more before I realize that the track I was listening to has finished playing in the background. More irritating is when I'm listening to an audio book and have to skip backward to try and find my place again.

If you aren't seeing similar problems in your Macan then it's possible they were resolved with the newer PCM system. Hopefully that means my car is fixable too.

 

There can be a delay with finding media sources other than the jukebox, sirius or am/fm. Stuff coming from devices via bluetooth are likely going to be slowest, but a dog-slow USB thumb drive can be a problem too. I'm not sure how often the PCM does it's database building with SD cards. In theory larger/slower cards could probably cause a problem with the PCM not being able to see them "yet" during initial starting of the vehicle.

 

I'm currently using the following two USB sticks, both of which should be more than fast enough for this application:

Patriot 256GB Supersonic Boost USB 3.0, 150MB/Sec

SanDisk Extreme PRO CZ88 128GB USB 3.0, 260MB/s

I've also used older USB 2.0 sticks with capacities from 2GB up to 32GB, name brand and generic devices. The lower capacity sticks do indeed make everything visible more quickly, but of course they have much less data to find and list in the first place anyway. I don't need or expect the system to show a fully-indexed and searchable database as soon as I insert a new USB stick, but it should certainly be able to at least list all the track names within a few seconds.

 

Mucking around a bit with the internal jukebox feature.... It's indeed 10gb for 2017, and apparently limited to 3,000 tracks. This is reported on-screen when I was using a USB thumb drive to experiment with importing some holiday music into the jukebox. Didn't really try too many things as the MP3 files for my Christmas music are a mess (lots of badly named files and metadata issues). I'm going to see about cleaning them up a bit and re-doing the import.

One thing I did observe is you apparently can't create any folders for an import. Anything you want to load contained in a folder needs to be organized that way on the card already. Then you can select the folder for importing, but even then it seem to go straight to the jukebox root directory. Not really a big deal but it's something to remember to 'plan around' if you're going to do any importing to the built-in jukebox storage.

Curiously, it did appear to be polling Gracenote for metadata, iirc. Not sure if it was every song or just ones that might have been missing art/metadata. Again, my mp3 tracks for this are a mess. I'll retry once they're cleaned up.

 

I can't remember all the details now, but when I initially installed music to my jukebox I had to do it in several batches over the course of several trips and days because it took so long to transfer files from the USB stick to the hard drive. The system wouldn't remember where it was if you switched off the car before it was finished, and it went back to the beginning and started all over again when you next switched on.

I keep classical music, Christmas music, and a few other categories on my jukebox, and if I remember correctly the system copied the folder structure from the USB stick. For example, for one batch I'd copy a Classical folder to the root of the USB stick, with that folder containing sub-folders named Satie and Shostakovitch (with both those folders containing sub-folders as well), and that folder structure would be copied to the root of the jukebox when I copied the USB stick to it. For the next batch I'd delete the Satie and Shostakovitch folders from the USB stick and add Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky folders to the Classical folder, and when I copied those new folders to the jukebox its Classical folder would now contain all four sub-folders. I then did the same for a Christmas folder in the root of the USB stick, and so on, and when I was finally done I had Classical, Christmas, etc folders in the root of the jukebox, with all their sub-folders in the correct place. I'm not sure whether or not that's exactly what you found as far as folder structure is concerned. Either way it was tedious, and not very 21st Century.

By the way, I don't have a phone or internet connection in my car so my system couldn't look up Gracenotes even if it wanted to. Fortunately I'd just finished copying my entire CD collection to FLAC then converting them to MP3, and the metadata was in pretty good shape when I made the transfers.

 

I'm going to experiment with loading up some MP3 tracks with the cover art embedded in the files. No folder.jpg or other cover art. I want to see if it'll pick that up or not. I'll pop out the SIM card during the import to prevent it from pulling anything from gracenote.

 

I did just that, used mp3tag on every album and put in the album folder cover art at 800x800, the software linked each track to the artwork.

Not all albums were read correctly in the car and it had to download artwork from Gracenote.

On a side test I have some music which is FLAC, I used software to create mp3s of the same track but at different data rates. Then listened to them in the Bose equipted Turbo that I have.

Now I just use the Jukebox for FLAC format albums

 

I just loaded up the internal 10gb Jukebox with some Holiday music. Only mp3 files with their embedded metadata, including artwork. No folder.jpg files at all, and no SIM connection. They all copied in just fine (took a while from a very slow USB thumb drive). That and I also created some m3u playlist files (using ../../ relative paths) and those also work as expected. Once it was all copied I checked and each of them is showing the cover art I had embedded in them.

I did not pay much attention to how the artwork loaded between tracks. I'll watch for that next time.

 

I did not try step 6. I'll revisit that with mine. I had only used two primary partitions.

Nor have I pushed the 3k limit of the on-board PCM. So I don't know if it's possible to have 3k on the Jukebox and then 10k more on a selected SD card. It would be a pretty time-consuming test to get 3k of files copied to the PCM. I may be able to give it a try. The 10gb limit on the PCM, however, may complicate things as I might have to re-encode some/all tracks down to a lesser bitrate in order to make them fit. Fortunately JRMC makes it easier to do stuff like this, but it's still a bit of a chore.

Curiously the PCM seems to perform copying into the same directory structure as the source. I have a USB thumb drive with Christmas music on it. They're loaded with file using the d:\Holiday\Christmas\Albums_Names structure. I added a new album to the drive in the d:\Holiday\Christmas\ directory. I then took it to the PCM, browsed to it, and copied that folder to the PCM. It didn't as me for a destination during this process. (Although I may have been 'in' that directory previously). It then imported the files. Which I then found in the "Jukebox:\Holiday\Christmas\A Charlie Brown Christmas" folder. So, yay, that was were I wanted it. I don't know if 2015- units do copying the same way.

I'd be very curious to know what OEM created the PCM software for Porsche. If just to leverage what they've done for other vendors as part of the investigative experience.

 

To clarify Step 6, with Windows 10 I had to do that to make the second partition on the USB stick visible so I could copy tracks to it on my desktop computer. It didn't appear to make any difference to the PCM system in the Macan though - it saw both partitions anyway.

I've got ~4,000 tracks on my jukebox just now and ~9,700 tracks on one of my USB sticks and they happily co-exist (all the other issues with my PCM aside), so I'd be surprised if your jukebox and SD cards stood on each other's toes. Also, the PCM manual refers to the 5k jukebox limit and 10k USB limit separately.

Yes, I think PCM duplicates the same folder structure from the USB stick to the jukebox. If I recall correctly that's what happened when I loaded up my jukebox as well.

I think other members have discussed the roots of Porsche's PCM software before so you might find something useful on that with a quick forum search. It seems like it would have at least some connection to Audi or Volkswagen, but the Macan is my first Porsche and I've never owned an Audi or VW so I have no insight there.

 

Oh, you can insert a card with more than 10k tracks. But unless you see a quick message flash by on the screen you won't notice the missing ones. Unless by random chance you happen to go into a folder and find nothing in it (or tracks missing). That was what put me on this path; missing files.

Curious about the Jukebox holding more. But then you're in a '15 with the previous version of PCM. That and it has a larger internal Jukebox drive, 40gb iirc? The '17 has 10gb and I believe the PCM itself stated the 3k limit.

 

Noticing that tracks are missing can be tricky, yes, but I'm pretty sure that the 5k and 10k file limits for me (or 3k and 10k limits for you) are independent of each other. I've been using that USB stick with ~9,700 tracks on it with an additional ~4,000 tracks on the jukebox for over a year now and I haven't noticed any missing tracks yet. My guess is that as long as your 2017 PCM system lists each SD card and the USB stick as separate sources then you'll have a 10k limit on each of them for a 30k total (plus 3k for the jukebox).

Yes, my 2015 system has a 40GB hard drive in it, with a stated 5k file limit.

 

I like SD Cards for Albums. It can be tricky to move from iTunes on a Mac to an SD card. I use the Mac app titled Playlist Export, which is $5 in the App Store. I do not have a ton of music so I am able to use an 16gb SD card. My music is about 13gb. Here are some screenshots of how I do it...helpful to Mac users.

 

In iTunes I choose to export the Playlist as a .m3u file then put that in the root of the SD card.

100 of these playlists on my SD card and no problems.

 

My head is totally reeling....think I'll go drive the car.