that 'mini' jack on the radio obviously is for inputting info.
running a stereo headphone cable from the phone to the radio and selecting aUX should do the trick. use the phopne to select and play files.
you should be golden now either way... adding the content to your phones, or onto the USB drive. those are unquestionably the cheapest ways to go.
one caveat is to poke the USB drive into the laptop to see its formating. often the cheaper ones still use FAT, but I've bought some lately that were all NTFS, or windows only pretty much. Apple can read from NTFS but not write to it. both OS can read/write to FAT.
regardless the formating, it can be easily changed by any personal confuser with the confuser's disk utility.. often the formating is liisted on the packaging.
as to bit rates I read that as saying 'from' yada yada to 320 which is max for compressed files.
odd that it does not support AAC, or ALAC, or AIF all Apple types.
no worries. stick with MP3 or Windows WMA. you should be golden.
as for those "... not guaranteed to work with...." these are just disclaimers nearly everyone uses to avoid responsibility yet imply they should all do just fine.
of the things likely not fully supported might be ID tags.
the names of the tracks may not populate fully or correctly.
in fact, things like 'folder' or too many folders may not be supported.
its easy enough to find out. dump some on the USB drive and plug it in!
you'll also find out how to navigate them. hopefully from the steering wheel.
several portable media players are listed and I suspect that IF they are running recent or latest IOS or Droid OS again, you should be golden.
as for what happened?
the sun kept coming up and going down.
somewhere on a few of those instances, people came up with what they thought were good ideas, which as it turned out, were good ideas.
the problem is very little of it ever crossed our radar close enough to get our attention.
catching up is not that hard.
Keeping up is.