New to the forum and hope someone can help me out. I hope this is the right spot to ask since I'm using Mint on a laptop that I converted from Windows.

I can't seem to get any music files downloaded to a thumb drive using Mint to work in a brand new Sony head unit I put in my car. The new radio does recognize the thumb drive that was working in the radio I replaced. I believe the music on that thumb drive was copied using Windows before I switched over to Mint. If I add a music file to that current functioning thumb drive using Mint, the radio will not recognize the song but still recognizes all the existing songs. I ordered two new thumb drives, formatted in FAT32, and copied about twenty songs on one of them. I plugged that thumb drive into the new radio and it immediately comes back with an undetectable error message. I'm assuming it can't detect the music because it does recognize that a thumb drive has been connected. I can plug that thumb drive back into the laptop with Mint and play any of the songs with no problem.

My question:
Is there anything in Mint that would cause this to happen? In this instance shouldn't a computer running Mint be able to do the the same thing a computer running Windows does when it comes to copying music to thumb drives? I don't have access to a Windows computer to experiment with. It's becoming a little frustrating. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Let's see if I understand you correctly.
You have a new Sony radio in your car.
You insert existing USB thumb drive and the songs copied from Windows machine can play, but songs copied from Mint does not play?

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Did you copy songs in same folder where songs are from Windows machine or did you create a new folder?
Are they all same format MP3 (or other) - songs from Windows and Mint?
Open terminal and insert the USB thumb drive. cd to the folder where songs are and type:
file <song file name>
Check the result for song files copied from Windows and Mint. What is different?
Check and compare song file permissions?
If song files copied from Mint are in different folder check folder permissions also.

Issues can be one or more.

USB size.
USB format.
File type. That can be file size, file codec, container and such.
DRM could be in play.
My old car would time out after trying to index a large amount of songs.
Did it ever work?

And so forth.

I agree with jefro. Some car radios can be fairly picky as to the format, sub-directory names, file names etc.

Check the radio's manual and hopefully it has some of that information.

Even bitrate and sample rate may be a factor, to add to all above.

Appreciate all the feedback. After my original post yesterday, I realized that I had a spare laptop that I don't use very often that I also wiped clean of Windows and added Mint to. I grabbed that spare laptop and copied some of the same music files that wouldn't work on my radio with the files I copied with my main laptop. I used the same thumb drive. My mindset was I was probably wasting my time but I wanted to rule out a computer problem with my main laptop. After copying the music files to the thumb drive, I plugged it into to my car radio and lo and behold the radio recognized the music files and started playing them. Since I had a spare, new thumb drive handy (both thumb drives were identical and purchased at the same time), I went back to my main laptop and downloaded the same music files that were recognized by my radio with the files downloaded from my backup laptop onto the new, spare thumb drive. I plugged that new thumb drive into my radio and I got the same error message as before, that the music was undetectable.

Sorry for the long-winded response. At this point I can only guess that there is some type of hiccup on my main laptop with Mint when it involves copying music files to a thumb drive that will be recognized by my Sony head unit. The same version of Mint is also loaded on my backup laptop. The only difference in all of my inputs is that my main laptop is an ASUS and my backup laptop is a HP. Both are running on AMD 64 architecture, same version.

So at this point I'm assuming my problem is solved. I hope this is the case. Again, as a very non-technical person, I want to again thank all of you who took your time to respond to my issue. It was very much appreciated.

You'll get an insurance discount for focusing on driving instead of listening to jam on the radio

https://youtu.be/OEvMc-K8XHY?t=104

@mfrank84 -- it would be interesting to see reaponses to a new thread you could post in Hardware asking why this occurred, beginning with "I grabbed (a) spare laptop . . ."

Glad you solved the problem, in any case.

I don't think this is hardware related. This is one of these cases where forum support is rather ineffective. For instance, I'm pretty sure I could sort it out if I had my hands on it, just start trying with some tests and follow the leads and clues. But since there is nothing definitive to start with ...

I have similar problem as the OP's, a little bit different.
Once I copied about 50 songs, all MP3. It recognized about half of them. There is no way to find out
why it accepted some and ditched the others.
As usual I found the easy way out by copying my collection to my Android tablet and connect to it via bluetooth.

I don't buy that. If that radio can see the difference so can you.