Earlier this year I bought a 2016 Audi A3. With any new car one of my top priorities is being able to play music: the car has two SD card sockets so I dutifully copied all of my music collection to a 64 GB SD card (formatted exFAT). (In fact I reorganised the file structure so that I had a relatively flat layout, with one folder containing all the tracks from one album.)

I was able to play the music in the car – however, while the track information for some of the tracks was fine, for some of the other tracks it showed ‘Unknown artist’, ‘Unknown album’, which was very irritating. (It also meant that you couldn’t search for them in the Album Browser or ‘Find Music’.)

I did some digging around to try and figure out which tracks worked and which ones didn’t. Some of the files were .m4a – they were fine. The problem was with the .mp3 files which had ID3 V2.3 tags – it looks like the Audi AMI is very restrictive in what it can read and is unable to read the ID3 tags produced by certain versions of iTunes. In the end the solution was easy: I opened the MP3s in EasyTAG, selected all the files and then saved them – this caused the ID3 tags to be rewritten and solved the problem.

One other niggle: originally I copied the music files to the SD card, then moved some of the files around to other directories. This seemed to cause problems with the Audi AMI – it would list certain files, but it wouldn’t open them. So I think that this is another example of the AMI being a bit limited in the input that it will accept. In the end I found the safest thing was to copy the files to the hard disk on my PC, organise the files how I wanted them, then reformat the SD card and copy them from my PC to the SD card.

Vaughan

Update: I have since discovered that this approach doesn’t work with some of the ID3 V2.2 tags – I’ll need to do some more investigation…