I've put about 1500 songs on to a usb memory stick to use in my 2012 Fiesta. However, when I play the tracks in shuffle mode, the first two or three seconds of most tracks are missing. This is something of an irritation as I know how the song is supposed to start. Has anybody else had this problem and if so have you been able to fix it?

I do know if you put a lot of tracks onto a stick that there isn't enough memory in the car system to access certain features. Try splitting the number into two or 3 folders and see what happens. If no change, try 500 tracks on a stick. I have about 250 tracks in each folder, with a few folders with single albums on. No problem with missing anything.

Of course, you could try not using shuffle.

I've got nearly 1800 on mine with no problems

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Another thing to consider is the speed of your memory stick. Try another one that has good speed writeups. I use one of these.

http://www.mymemory.co.uk/USB-Flash-Drives/SanDisk/SanDisk-64GB-Ultra-Fit-USB-3.0-Flash-Drive---130MB_s

Takes up almost no room at all, and works well.

Not sure if this is related, and it doesn't really bother me so much as everything on my USB is dance music mixes, but the beginning of every track/mix skips for a few seconds.

128GB SSD formated to Fat32 with no problems and plays without error :)

Just a note about MP3s. There's always a 1/2 second pause between tracks which would explain your problem MPX309

Just a note about MP3s. There's always a 1/2 second pause between tracks which would explain your problem MPX309

well no it's not the pause I mean it actually sort of stutters for like 3-5 seconds before playing. Like I say because I only have dance mixes on it (from soundcloud so the whole mix is one track) it doesn't really bother me, but I was just thinking if I had album folders on where each track is like 3-5 mins long, that could get frustrating.

Make sure its FAT32

It sounds like you may be getting some clipping.

Have you tried playing the tracks on a program like Nero Wave Editor to see if you are getting excessive wave patterns that may be distorting the music?

I use wave editor to tidy up blank start/end points of tracks to remove annoying pauses between music tracks.

http://m.download.cnet.com/Nero-Wave-Editor/3000-2170_4-76086551.html