A few thoughts to share after getting a new car and having some issues with this: - If you rip your CDs to a format, consider a lossless format like FLAC rather than MP3 as the quality you think is "Fine" today likely won't be in the future and you're going to have to repeat the process of ripping... - If you copy the files to a thumbdrive, make sure it meets the car makers requirements, in my case it required the thumbdrive be under a specific size and of a specific file system type (Fat32). - If you're an Amazon Prime customer check out Amazon Music - it's an included service that provides a lot of great music you can download to your phone and skip all the stuff above. - Don't forget about Pandora for your phone as well, its a song shuffler, but the more you use it the better it gets.
A few thoughts to share after getting a new car and having some issues with this: - If you rip your CDs to a format, consider a lossless format like FLAC rather than MP3 as the quality you think is "Fine" today likely won't be in the future and you're going to have to repeat the process of ripping...
I dont understand this
- If you copy the files to a thumbdrive, make sure it meets the car makers requirements, in my case it required the thumbdrive be under a specific size and of a specific file system type (Fat32).
Did you just call me fat?
- If you're an Amazon Prime customer check out Amazon Music - it's an included service that provides a lot of great music you can download to your phone and skip all the stuff above.
Im not
- Don't forget about Pandora for your phone as well, its a song shuffler, but the more you use it the better it gets.
My understanding of pandora type shit is that i have to pay to download shit and they dont have everything available i want anyway. I already have upwards of 450 cds, dont want to pay to download the shit. And i want to be able to just play whole albums.
If you have an iPhone, you can pay $25 a year to upload all your ripped CDs to the cloud and play it all through your phone to your Bluetooth in your car. You need to use iTunes to upload it. Use a good program like Exact Audio Copy to rip to MP3. You can do lossless for the best quality, which is FLAC, but converting CDs to 320 kbps is close. Don’t rip it less than this. Bitrate is important. I have a huge library but don’t do flac. Although, the songs in my library match up to theirs and play lossless for me since they don’t store my actual file. I do have a lot of live concerts that also upload.
When you "Rip" a CD you can save it to many formats - some have quality loss (MP3 for example), some do not (FLAC) - Lossy formats create smaller files allowing you to fit more songs on a drive, but at a lower quality. https://www.techadvisor.com/how-to/audio/how-rip-cds-flac-3690344/
Every time you format a disk you have to pick a file system type, as long as you stay under 32GB you're probably going to get the Windows 32bit File Allocation Table (Fat32) format
Pandora is 100% free (with commercials), the only cost to you would be the data rate to download the songs as they play.
No one will be able to tell the difference between a well-encoded MP3 at 320kbps and a lossless format. MP3 gets a bad rap for the lazy and low bitrate files that were circulating a the turn of the millennium.
I pay 4 bux a month for ad-free Pandora
Seconding here. Let me answer some of your questions and go into detail...
CDs are basically straight digitized music with no compression at a very high quality. It takes up roughly ten megabytes per minute of music, which is why a CD with over a half-gigabyte of capacity can only hold one album.
The original suggestion was, when you first rip the music, you store it in FLAC format. This uses a "lossless" compression format, which means it contains the exact same information as the CD does. Unfortunately it can only compress by roughly half, so it still requires five megabytes of space per minute of music. You'd want to keep a copy of this data somewhere, and make your working copies off it.
MP3 is what's called a "lossy" compression format. It uses psychoacoustics and essentially deletes some of the details of the music that humans are unable to hear, and only stores details for the frequencies you can. This allows you to compress it down to one megabyte per minute of music, more or less. The optimal level of compression depends on your hearing and on the equipment it's played on, and your opinions will change over time.
Further, when you make a playlist for your car, you'll probably want to do some volume equalization, so you're not constantly fiddling with the volume control while you're driving. A lot of compression software gives the option to automate this so you can quickly do this to your entire collection, but you may want to tweak those levels for specific songs or redo the equalization with different options.
By keeping the original data from the CDs in FLAC format, it gives you the ability to redo your working copy, or create different working copies for different use cases.
- Regarding being called fat: "FAT32" is an old file system used by DOS and Windows 3.1, and its legacy persists today; your car stereo may only work with flash drives that use this format. Most flash drives still come formatted to FAT32 but it's not impossible you'd have to reformat it.
Don't worry about lossless formats like FLAC except for archival reasons; the file sizes are huge. MP3@320kbps is "full quality" for all intents and purposes; you will not be able to tell the difference, and no one else will, either. You can further strip down file size using a variable bitrate algorithm that compresses various silent or white noise portions of songs to a higher degree, while utilizing higher bitrates in portions that have more musical complexity. v0 or v1 are most often used in this type of encoding. In general, I find that variable bitrate algorithms can sometimes leave something to be desired and are not worth the slight drop in file size from full 320.
Use LAME MP3 encoder. IMO, the best way to rip music is using the Foobar2000 audio player with LAME as a plugin.
He wants to play them on a modern car stero. It's 100% not going to support FLAC, a 128kbps vbr MP3 is going to be supported pretty much anywhere.
My four year old Kenwood plays FLAC without issue, so does the OEM headset in my month-old '22 CX5
FLAC is open source, if anything I would expect that to make it easier for manufacturers to include in a firmware release.
That's interesting that the OEM unit plays FLAC. That must be something recent, my 2018 will only play MP3. I'm sure it plays apple shit too, but who cares about that.
I don't really count replacement units, cars are getting to the point where you can't replace the OEM head.
I have used Spotify since 2007. The ability to create my own playlists was a huge reason why i started. That faggots leave for their own feelings is why I've stayed.
I've never had a subscription either, it's been free and has shaped how I listen (shuffle mode) which is fine because I never tire in hearing the same order over an dover.
It's also included in most displays these days...giving a cool visual on long trips.
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