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I know this seems very basic to most people but ive largely shunned technology, or change in general. I still buy cds. I dont know shit about mp3s or bluetooth or any of that. Problem is my new truck doesnt have a cd player and i want to listen to my shit instead of satellite radio. So right now im going through the tedious proccess of ripping all of my cds onto an external hard drive. After i do that, if i can copy it all onto a thumb drive, can i just plug that fucker into my dash and my shit will show up on my "infotainment screen" or do i need to put it all onto a micro sd card, put that in my phone, and hook my phone up to the truck?

I know this seems very basic to most people but ive largely shunned technology, or change in general. I still buy cds. I dont know shit about mp3s or bluetooth or any of that. Problem is my new truck doesnt have a cd player and i want to listen to my shit instead of satellite radio. So right now im going through the tedious proccess of ripping all of my cds onto an external hard drive. After i do that, if i can copy it all onto a thumb drive, can i just plug that fucker into my dash and my shit will show up on my "infotainment screen" or do i need to put it all onto a micro sd card, put that in my phone, and hook my phone up to the truck?

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[–] 0 pt (edited )

If you have a USB port somewhere, chances are it will support the FAT32 file structure, if you're really lucky it will recognize the exFAT structure. Some manufacturers enforce the iTunes model, meaning that all of your music is going to need proper tags such as album, track number, and etc. Others will allow you to play by folder, so tagging is less important. One car I remember seeing, a Honda something-or-other, read the contents off the disk in the order in which they were written, which was a pain in the ass. I assume that's because the infotainment intern at Panasonic was lazy and Honda was cheap, and they didn't want to spend the extra $0.01 allocating enough memory and program space for an alphabetizing routing.

Modern Windows machines will format a FAT32 drive up to 32GB, you can format a FAT32 drive with third-party tools up to about 200GB, which is where FAT32 becomes unworkable.

A 32GB flash drive formatted as FAT32 is pretty much recognizable in any device these days. The other option is to use the media connector on your radio and connect it to a phone via Bluetooth. Use something like Flacbox for iOS or Mortplayer for Android to get a folder play experience.

Your car MAY be able to play them right off a small hard drive but remember that car stereos are built as cheap as possible, and giving them too much to do (such as reading a 1TB directory table) could potentially cause lag and slowdowns, or even lock the thing up because it can't process everything properly. 32GB @ 128kbps is going to give you a lot of music to listen to, and they're so cheap you can keep a couple of different mixes in the glove box.