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

 

[futureman 101]

You could buy an External CD player for your car. It uses usb and you can play them like you did.

 

[USAFRet]

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.

An external CD drive to do this would be $25 max.
Add a $10 flash drive (64/128GB) to transfer to the car.
The only other thing it will take is time.

 

[Lafong]

Think of it as a long term project.

200 CDs; that's ripping 1 CD a day for 7 months. Presumably in order of most importance to you. Ripped to WAV or MP3. Originals kept on a hard drive and copied to a USB flash drive for car playback as you see fit. Don't even think about leaving yourself without any of them on a hard drive and then backed up to at least one other hard drive.

Your playback habits matter.

Are you the type that wants to listen to an entire CD, track for track as originally released on the retail CD?

Or are you the type that really only likes a couple of songs on a given CD and would prefer to listen to 1 song each by Dylan, Presley, Sinatra, and whoever, back to back. Maybe in random order.

At one time, I had 15,000 MP3s on a single USB stick for car playback, all in a single folder playing in random order. I gave up on that and reduced the total to about 1800 because with 15,000 I could easily go an hour without hearing a real favorite. But the 15,000 remain on multiple hard drives. The 1800 is very slowly rotated as I identify "new favorites".

Regardless, get one of those "mini" USB sticks. If you get a full-length stick, it's only a matter of time before you accidentally wack it with your hand as it hangs out of the port. Any speed will work, even 2.0. Format it correctly. Figure 200 to 300 songs per gigabyte on average. Subdivided on the USB stick as you see fit.

You might get in a bind if you have a lot of subfolders, which can be difficult to navigate as you are hurtling down the road at 65 mph while fishing for the tiny controls on your car player. That's a primary reason why I use only 1 folder.

 

[USAFRet]

Regardless, get one of those "mini" USB sticks. If you get a full-length stick, it's only a matter of time before you accidentally wack it with your hand as it hangs out of the port.

I discovered that my car has onboard storage.
Don't know the extent of it, but at least 64GB. I have about 1/2 of my current collection stored...in the car.
I need to finish digitizing my vinyl collection.

 

[Lafong]

I need to finish digitizing my vinyl collection.

I had that in mind myself at one time.

I was intimidated by my collection of 6000 LPs plus thousands of 45s and 78s. And a few hundred CDs. They are all still sitting here in "storage", probably for the duration.

But I gave up on the idea 20 years ago and glad I did. Fact is:

1; I don't care to ever again hear perhaps 80 percent of the songs in my 45/78/LP/CD collection. You like 2 or 3 songs on this LP and maybe you won't miss anything at all on the next LP. Lots of unnecessary "filler" on virtually all of them.

2; the beauty of digital files is that you can keep ONLY individual songs if you want...and never again hear the unwanted. All it takes is 5 seconds of listening and then reach for the DELETE key.

And I now have 35,000 mp3s...many of which I had NO chance of ever hearing through non-mp3 means and all of which I like one extent or another.

I have not used a turntable or CD player in 15 years.