USB/CD Music help please

FiestaRed

FiestaRed

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Mike
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I picked up a new car yesterday and I didn't realise til I got it home there was no CD player, apparently most new cars don't come with CD players any more. My problem is I have a number of CDs that I'd like to get onto a USB stick so I can play them in the car, I've tried copying the CDs through iTunes but that seems to remove all the track information and the screen in the car just shows "No Artist".

I looked on YouTube and one of the videos showed to do it using Windows Media Player which led to a further problem in that my version of Windows 10 does not have WMP installed. Any help or advice with getting the CDs to play in the car would be greatly appreciated.
 
I use dbPoweramp CD ripper to rip all my CDs to FLAC & stream them from a usb drive connected to my TP Link router in the house, no reason you couldn't rip & copy to a USB thumbdrive. BTW all the track IDs & even album art are preserved.
 
When you rip the CD, do you see the album, artists and track titles displayed correctly within iTunes? If not, either iTunes is not connecting to an online database for some reason or (much less likely) you have obscure CDs that database does not recognise. Check the CD options under Preferences, and make sure that iTunes is set to retrieve track names automatically, and that the import settings are compatible with whatever your car's audio system needs (one of the higher quality mp3 settings is usually a safe option).
 
Hi Mike
WMP disappeared when I updated Win 10 to creators edition, however Control Panel, Programs and Features, Turn windows features on or off, media features was not ticked. This reinstalled WMP after restart. May take more than one try at keeping the box ticked and saved.
Hope this helps
 
Have a look at this web page:

https://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-cd-ripper.htm

There are many free cd rippers available for download and use and the majority of them do a really good job. Virtually all of them retain the tracks and many of them allow you to produce your own ID3 tags, and even playlists. For use in a car I have found that mp3 files with a bitrate of 128kbps and a samplerate of 44100Hz are more than adequate due to the engine, road and other traffic noise that is always present when travelling. At this level it produces relatively small files so you can fit a lot of music onto a flsh drive or a SD card.
 
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Thanks for all the help, really appreciated. I'll have a good read through the posts and probably have a play with the ones mentioned.
 
fazer said:
Hi Mike
WMP disappeared when I updated Win 10 to creators edition, however Control Panel, Programs and Features, Turn windows features on or off, media features was not ticked. This reinstalled WMP after restart. May take more than one try at keeping the box ticked and saved.
Hope this helps
Click to expand...

Thanks for that John, everything was where you mentioned. Pleased to say I now have Windows Media Player working well.
 
I've now tried a number of different ways and I can get the CDs onto a USB that plays great in the car.

The only problem I have now is all the track information that I added, title, artist etc, disappears when I copy to the USB stick. The CDs I'm copying from are all compilations I made some time ago and when they played in the last cars CD player all the track information showed up in the player.
 
When you rip for a shop bought CD, the ripper can read an ID on the CD and retrieve the track info from one of the CDDBs on the web and add the track info to the MP3.
However, if it's a home written compilation, there won't be an entry in the CDDB for your CD, thus the ripper won't be able to write the info.
You'll need to add the ID3 tags manually. Most rippers have a GUI for this, or as a last resort, right click the file in Windows and amend it in the properties tab.
 
FiestaRed said:
I picked up a new car yesterday and I didn't realise til I got it home there was no CD player, apparently most new cars don't come with CD players any more.
Click to expand...
My parents found this out when they changed their car a few months back. I've set them up with a USB stick and every time I go around I'm going to have to transfer a few more of their CDs to MP3 files on the USB stick so they play ok in their car.
 
I copy and paste tracks from Itunes to a usb stick and all the track info is there - could it be the car unit doesn't read it?
 
FiestaRed said:
I picked up a new car yesterday and I didn't realise til I got it home there was no CD player, apparently most new cars don't come with CD players any more. My problem is I have a number of CDs that I'd like to get onto a USB stick so I can play them in the car, I've tried copying the CDs through iTunes but that seems to remove all the track information and the screen in the car just shows "No Artist".

I looked on YouTube and one of the videos showed to do it using Windows Media Player which led to a further problem in that my version of Windows 10 does not have WMP installed. Any help or advice with getting the CDs to play in the car would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
I have win 10 and I got WMP is under W in the menu
 
CDs don't commonly have track information stored on them (this is why online databases are used to tag mp3s by software like iTunes then a CD is ripped). If yours do, you might have burned them with software that supports 'CD-Text':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text

To go in the other direction - using CD-Text to tag mp3s - you need to use a ripper that specifically supports this (and a compatible dirve). I don't think iTunes does, but some of the packages listed in the Wikipedia page above do. Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is one that does, but the setup and configuration options are pretty complicated if you've never used it before:

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
http://www.howtoanswer.com/exact-audio-copy--70.html
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,104734.0.html

I would have suggested CDex, but some people have reported malware in recent downnloads and I see my antivirus package blocks some of their pages. Apparently you can use Windows Media Player if you install the plugin below (don't know if this works with the curent version of WMP):

http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/moreprogs/wmpcdtext.htm

Mediamonkey looks like another option:

http://www.mediamonkey.com/
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30150
[Edit: That last link works if you copy/paste it into a new browser tab, but doesn't seem to be clickable.]
 
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Chaz Photos said:
I have win 10 and I got WMP is under W in the menu
Click to expand...

WMP doesn't come as part of the bundle in Widows 10 Pro. It's in there but needs to dug out of the menus to be installed and thanks to Fazer in the post above, I found it.
 
Many years ago I copied all of my CD's into my computer using Windows Media Player. When memory was expensive, and capacities were smaller, I copied at 128kbs, but then I've copied them again at 320kbs, which I find is good enough for me.

Over time I rated them as I heard them again. Every so often I get a new device I want to add music to. When the songs are rated it is a quick process to find all my favourites as I can reorder by rating. I then highlight the songs I want and make into a Playlist. I then synchronise the Playlist with a connected device or memory card. Obviously you don't have to rate the songs and can add any track to the playlist. ;) Synchronising the Playlist is much quicker than copying groups of songs from different albums/folders to a device.

Although it depends on how many songs you are copying. I am normally doing 8Gb+.
 
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Thanks to everyone for all the help, I finally managed to sort the problem out.

After trying many different ways, all of which were only partly successful, in the end I used WMP and synced the albums to the USB stick. This now lets me choose through the cars touch screen what album I want, single track or a variation of other ways. Also after trying different USB sticks, I settled on the Sandisk Cruzer Fit which now sits in the USB port that is tucked away inside the cars armrest box. The Cruzer Fit only sticks out of the USB port by about 5mm so hopefully it'll not get knocked inside the armrest box.
 
We just have a load of tracks synced to a usb stick via wmp and set to play on shuffle.

Years ago some prat rear ended our car because he was messing about with his radio cassette player.
Just another unwanted distraction and seeing as we copied it to the stick every chance we will like it
 
WMP is pretty simple it will RIP the albums to its own database folder and you just need to copy the folders on to your USB stick.
providing the player can traverse the folders you should be fine.

thing to check is what WMP is set to RIP them as and does your car player support a better quality.

I think WMP as default uses 128kb/s as default which is kinda ok but not great.
Your car might supper 256kb/s which would sound a lot better.
also check the file format WMP is using as MP3 will sound worse than WMA files etc.
 
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