To store the music in the car I decided to use an external SSD hard drive as it would be a lot faster to copy the music onto rather than using a higher capacity USB stick drive. I did a lot of research on various Ford official and unofficial forums and there was a lot of confusion on how to get the Sync 3 system to index and read playlist files for your music. The drive must be formated in FAT32 format. There is a limit of 50,000 files per device in the handbook but it doesn’t make it clear if this is a limit of 50,000 files overall or mp3/flac files. Sync 3 has support for USB drives but the Ford help pages do not seem to have any mention of maximum storage capacity and playlist formats.

I have a large music collection of around 14,000 tracks and I wanted to be able to use this in the car as I had previously done via an iPod Classic in my old Landrover via an Alpine head unit. Our new Ford Focus arrived on Thursday this week and the 2016 model in the United Kingdom is now shipped with Fords latest Sync 3 multimedia system which has been available in the USA for some time.

Mac format usb drive for playing music