[at_a_remove]

I have a Toyota RAV4, about 2016, with the built-in system. It's silly amounts of awful when it comes to bad UX. Enough so that I am considering buying a head unit.

Bafflingly, I can't find head units that recognize and obey MP3 playlists. I would have thought that functionality would be a given.

[expertentipp]

> units that recognize and obey MP3 playlists

My limited experience says it's mostly about lengths of filenames, non alphabetic characters in filenames, and nested directories. Try flat directory structure and maybe random filenames of 6-8 characters. Simply one more obfuscation step before feeding it into a car system. If lucky, the system might read correctly the ID3 tags.

[at_a_remove]

Oh, no, I tried with very simple setups. Believe me. Down to a playlist of a single song consisting of a single word. No love.

In a rather similar fashion, I managed to reverse engineer the Roku's very, uh, idiosyncratic interpretation of the, well, was it ever a standard? In any case, Roku's Media Player app had, charmingly, decided to simply ignore the order of the songs in the playlist and -- this was fun to figure out -- grab the metadata of the songs and do it by a regular sort of the track number. It's brilliantly stupid, because it'd work just fine if you had a playlist of a single album. There, it makes perfect sense. Nowhere else.