Advice to get music into the car

[robbyg]

From your experience, what is the best way to get the music on all my CDs into the car?

Use the SD slots, 32gb should cover that easily?
Use the built in hard drive?

What compression file format gives good quality but can be read by the car? (i dont want to use itunes if i can help it)

Basically, where do i start!? ( i have mmi plus on order and want my files ready to go)

discuss......

[skibuddy]

This took me a couple of attempts to get it the way I wanted it. So hopefully this will help.

I just use Windows Media Player to RIP a CD as MP3 with 320 Kbps. I have then used a 15GByte SD Card to copy music to the in Car JukeBox. The Hard Disk has a similar amount of storage. I prefer to use the JukeBox because it presents an Album Cover view of all the albums. I found no different in sound quality between a track on the JukeBox and a tract on the SD card.

Album art needs to be embedded in each and every MP3 track for it to be displayed by the MMI system. By default, most MP3 ripping tools (iTunes, Windows Media Player etc) only store it in the first track of an album that is ripped. Using iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/) it is easy enough to retrospectively embed the album art in each track (simply Google to find out how), but it does bloat the file size a little. Without doing this, the album view on the MMI Media player will only display the album art if the first track in the album just so happens to be the one with art embedded in to. No guarantees this with be the case.

The Album view is listed based on a combination of Album Name and Track Artist(s) (not the album artist), so for a single album where there are multiple artists on a track you end up with multiple folders being displayed, horrible in my view. This can be overcome by modifying the MP3 tags (I use MP3TAG) to change the track artist to be that of the album artist. Doesn't help with Now XX for example where there are various artists.

Copying 1,900 totalling 12 Gbytes in size from an SDHC card (http://shop.ebay.co.uk/?&_nkw=sdhc+card) to the Jukebox was very slow, nearly 2 Hrs.

[Timothy Nathan]

I am not bothered by album art.

I just have a 32Gb SDHC card filled with MP3s ripped from my CD collection. I forget what I used to rip them originally, but it was before iAnything, including iTunes, existed.

I play directly from the SDHC card, and have no issues at all.

[a8toa6convert]

You only want to rip all your CDs once, so the key thing is to pick a format and bitrate that will be ok for any digital media device you use anywhere. MP3 is still the most widely supported format, and 320kb/s bitrate files are, to my ears, indistinguishable from the original. I did a lot of blind A/B testing before ripping my 700 CD collection, using some decent home kit (Cambridge Audio DACmagic, Onkyo digital dock, NAD C355BEE, TDL speakers with Morel custom drivers.......) and ended up just using Windows Media Player to rip at 320kb/s to MP3.

Supposedly the biggest downside of WMP is lack of ipod compatibility, but a little add-in called "dopisp" will let ipods up to ios v4 work with WMP. Not sure when a fix is coming out to support ios v5.....

[Goatistuta]

I use the SD card and find quality of the sound pretty good, but dependent upon the compression ratio you use. I finally managed to get album art onto all tracks with relatively little effort. Download the program found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art/ then point it at the directory where you have all your music stored on your computer ( mine is in the default iTunes directory). The program will then scan the entire directory and highlight any albums that don't have art associated with them. Click on the option to automatically search for album art for those albums missing it and then follow instructions to automatically download the artwork and place in the relevant album directory. You then go into the iTunes directory, sort by album or artist and then copy the directory to your SD card - all artwork is now displayed on the MMI screen. :)

[robbyg]

sounds very clever. any idea how much extra memory the per-track artwork needs?

[Goatistuta]

Very little memory is needed as the image files are so small.

[robbyg]

Right, i have have ripped my whole cd collection into itunes and dragged the folder onto a separate folder then transferred onto an SD card. none would play in the car. Seems itunes uses m4a not mp3 as default. So i ahve converted everything to mp3 and created another folder.

I have sorted out all the odd ways itunes splits some albums into 1 album plus 3 separate tracks etc etc and made one nice organised folder with subfolders by album.

In the car this plays and drops down through menus perfectly on the SD card.

I copied the whole SD card onto the jukebox. This has decided to mess itself back into stupid itunes style crazy subfolders which means you cant listen to a whole album at once. GRRRRR.

Is it possible to make the jukebox just repicate the SD card instead of being its own special ipod? Other wise it looks like i will never use jukebox and just leave the SD card in the car.