Foggy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 27, 2023 2:50 pm
Earthlings are so weird, so dangerous, so crazy.
Anyway,
keith wrote: ↑Sat Aug 26, 2023 8:56 pm
But it prolly has a USB port that you can insert a messge stick into as aux input to the audio instead. Just 'rip' your CDs to the message stick and go! You can carry 100's of CDs on every trip.
I have a couple 256 gigabyte USB thumb drives (my first PC had a 125 megabytes hard drive). I'm pretty sure one will hold all my music.
So I guess here's the plan - I search the computer for all the mp3s in my music folder and copy them to the thumb drive. But I have a LOT of music. How do you sort and search and find what you want to play, if there are no folders or anything?
Or can you have folders on the thumb drive?
Ah, I now you enter into the realm of one of my pet peeves. The short answer is read the owner's manual to find out but if its like mine you have to go a lot of trouble to organize it. The shorter answer is it a right royal pain in the ass.
My car is a 2013 (geeze how did it that old already) Honda Civic. The audio system doesn't know about folders as an organizing concept - it just descends through them looking for music. It knows mp3 and a couple other formats. It doesn’t know NTFS or any other modern disc format, so you formatting big USBs can be tricky if you dont pay attention.
It knows how to find metadata. It knows how to find artist name, album title, track title. It can sort on track title. Thats all. If you tell it to play from the top, the top is the first track written to the device. If you add a Beatles album to your device, it goes to the bottom, after ZZ top.
The system can list albums or tracks for you to select. If you are in album mode, you select an album and it will list the tracks in that album for selection. If in track mode it will list all tracks in alpha order. You cannot list by artist or anything else.
I wrote a program to build my car USB sticks in a predictabe order and write a report telling me where they are. I just rebuilt my cars message sticks last night. I've got 60gig on the 'general pop' and 18gig on 'Jazz/Blues/Classical.
Here' what I do:
Prerequisites -
1) music library with metadata in good shape artist, album title, track title. Library folders should be organized by ...\artist\album\
2) a music catalog program that can dump selected catalog entries to an XML file. I use "collectorz.com music collector" (MuC). I am not sure if Discogs can dump an XML file or not or how you would select which one to dump.
3) my program which knows how to parse the MuC XML file and copy the entire artist folder to the USB.
Method:
1) ensure the USB has no music on it. Formatting to FAT32 is fast, but deleting is fine.
2) fire up MuC, select the albums you want to put on the USB. Hint, MuC can link music files to entries, has various ways to categorise genre, location, or whatever. Eg, select all albums in location CD jazz or LP jazz that are not various artist.
3) export the selections to XML (oh yeah, track names should not have foreign alphabet characters in it - my program will choke).
4) fire up my 'musicstick' program, tell it where the XML file is, tell it where the output should go, and tell it to do its thing. 'Bad' characters in the XML will choke at the XML loading stage. These will be reported by a crash, so you need to find them and fix them.
5) if you are putting, say, 400 albums on a USB 2 message stick, go make yourself a cup of covfefe or go to bed and leave to overnight.
6) print the report and keep in the car. Recommend printing in booklet.
You can do all that, right?