Regarding "metadata" in mp3 files, which I suppose is simply the ID3 tags:
I drive a 2015 Toyota Camry. I bought it used and it didn't even have a user manual with it (though I did eventually download the manual as a PDF), so I have very little idea of the internals of the "infotainment" system - though I suppose it's Linux based.
The sound system has a USB port where I can plug in a stick with up to 256 audio tracks. While the controls nominally allow me to select a few different modes of playing base upon things like from what album a track comes from or what "genre" or by track number or even "random". I don't play music by "album" because I've never seen an album where I wanted to hear every track. For music on a long drive, I want to play the audio tracks in random order. Regardless of how I set the system to play the music, it always tries to impose some order or grouping, be it by artist, by album, by genre or whatever. I finally just got frustrated and, in order to prevent it from doing that, I removed all of the metadata that I could and renamed the files as 001.mp3, 002.mp3, etc, etc. This involved making new copies of every included file, since I didn't want to wreck my extensive MP3 collection and it also means I have no idea what is and is not present on that USB stick, so adding or removing tracks becomes sheer drudgery. Recently the USB stick has become corrupted so, when I make a new one, I'll keep a little database on my PC of which "sanitized" files on the USB stick correspond to which files on my PC. This is a royal PITA, but it's not the fault of the file format so much as the fault of some really poorly designed software that's built right into the car - and as far as I know there's no way to update it.
I drive a 2015 Toyota Camry. I bought it used and it didn't even have a user manual with it (though I did eventually download the manual as a PDF), so I have very little idea of the internals of the "infotainment" system - though I suppose it's Linux based.
The sound system has a USB port where I can plug in a stick with up to 256 audio tracks. While the controls nominally allow me to select a few different modes of playing base upon things like from what album a track comes from or what "genre" or by track number or even "random". I don't play music by "album" because I've never seen an album where I wanted to hear every track. For music on a long drive, I want to play the audio tracks in random order. Regardless of how I set the system to play the music, it always tries to impose some order or grouping, be it by artist, by album, by genre or whatever. I finally just got frustrated and, in order to prevent it from doing that, I removed all of the metadata that I could and renamed the files as 001.mp3, 002.mp3, etc, etc. This involved making new copies of every included file, since I didn't want to wreck my extensive MP3 collection and it also means I have no idea what is and is not present on that USB stick, so adding or removing tracks becomes sheer drudgery. Recently the USB stick has become corrupted so, when I make a new one, I'll keep a little database on my PC of which "sanitized" files on the USB stick correspond to which files on my PC. This is a royal PITA, but it's not the fault of the file format so much as the fault of some really poorly designed software that's built right into the car - and as far as I know there's no way to update it.
