Question Playing my CD collection on my car's new audio system ?

[jhsachs]

I just replaced my old car's CD player with a new one that has a USB port instead. I'm faced with the problem of moving my rather substantial CD collection to a form that the audio system can play.

The solution seems to be to rip the CDs and store the files in directories on a flash drive. It's simple in principle but I'm not looking forward to feeding a couple of hundred CDs into a computer's CD drive one at a time.

Is there a better way to do this? I'd be willing to send my CDs to a service that rips them for me. I'd be reluctant to spend several hundred dollars for a piece of hardware that makes it easier to do myself, assuming such a thing exists. I wouldn't have any use for the thing after I finished this one task.

 

[Math Geek]

one at a time is the way it'll be no matter who does it. at one point or another most of us have had to go through the process and it's as fun as you expect it to be

keep in mind everything works off the mp3 tag. so be sure as you go it is as you want. correct song title, album title, genre and so on as this is what is read by the system. most ripping software will pull the info from the web as it goes but double check before clicking go on each disk. having to go back and edit hundreds/thousands of files is even less fun than ripping them in the first place.

does not matter what the file itself is named so don't be fooled by that. figure out how you want to organize it before you start as well. again moving thousands of songs around after the fact is a nightmare as well. decide if you want to go by genre, decade, artist name or whatever. re-evaluate after a bit in case you want to change up before you get too far into it.

think about how you'll want to listen to it and be sure you tag it accordingly. for instance if you want to be able to select all of one style be sure you can easily. tag it with the same genre so you can just select it all at once easily. often it'll tag the artist as "john featuring bob" "john featuring sam"" john featuring sarah, sam and bob" and so on for one album. this makes selecting a single artist to play as impossible as the system thinks every song is a new artist.

so tag it all as the artist, then put the "featuring _____" part elsewhere in the description if needed.

work carefully and meaningfully and it'll be easy to do. try to do it as fast as possible and you'll leave yourself with a nightmare to work with.

good luck