Missing the CD Player. How to copy & convert songs from CD to flash drive for playing in Maverick

[Red Eyes - Wide Shut]

Most new PCs don't have physical drives anymore. I had about 300 albums a few years ago. It took me almost a year to digitize all of them, then ad album art and correct file names. I have hundreds of CDs, most I never converted. They are easier to do. I have a few thumb drives with around a thousand songs each. Fords infotainment system is slow to handle that much. I have an eight year old Pioneer DVD radio in another truck that handles them with ease. Watch movies. They have had DVD audio discs for years now that sound better than any MP3 or MP4 digital file on any top flight car audio system. Some in surround sound. Digital music has a lot of fidelity sound loss that most don't notice or have never heard good analog versions.

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[Escapologist]

Xglysmyc (I know, odd name) seems to work well.

I have a theory that some Chinese government agency is assigning brand names based on what letters are left on discarded sheets of rub down transfer letters or sheets of letter stickers (Letraset and similar)

 

[dbbii]

I agree with the OP. I tend to want to use actual CD's when driving as opposed to my phone/tablet/etc. I bought a CD player for around $10 off Amazon a year or so ago. USB plug in. For some reason (mostly because I'm old) I have trouble keeping my tablet connected via Bluetooth.

 

[Carlitos_92]

I agree with the OP. I tend to want to use actual CD's when driving as opposed to my phone/tablet/etc. I bought a CD player for around $10 off Amazon a year or so ago. USB plug in. For some reason (mostly because I'm old) I have trouble keeping my tablet connected via Bluetooth.

You can also put music files from CDs onto a $10 USB drive, and plug it into that same USB port in the truck, and not worry about having to carry CDs around. No Bluetooth needed.

 

[FordDiehard]

Ditch the CDs and convert everything to digital and thumb drives. Gigabytes of storage and no need to worry about scratches.

I spent roughly 4 hours this evening copying CDs to a 64GB flash drive and have only used a fraction of the storage space. If you're like me, many of my CDs only have 4 or 5 songs I really like so selected only those to copy to the flash drive. I could probably put my whole collection on this one flash drive, just a matter of doing it a little at a time.

 

[Red Eyes - Wide Shut]

I spent roughly 4 hours this evening copying CDs to a 64GB flash drive and have only used a fraction of the storage space. If you're like me, many of my CDs only have 4 or 5 songs I really like so selected only those to copy to the flash drive. I could probably put my whole collection on this one flash drive, just a matter of doing it a little at a time.

That's all good to put on a drive. The only problem and most won't notice is that when you convert to MP3 or MP4 you lose more than 90% of the audio data. In order to shrink the file, supposed sound that humans can't hear is removed and lost. Put on a decent sound system you will notice a flatter sound. You may not notice on a phone or Bluetooth boom box. Once converted that file can't be changed. You can convert the original music to Wav or Flac a form of lossless uncompressed digital format. Save yourself from the digital low quality throw away era.

 

[FordDiehard]

That's all good to put on a drive. The only problem and most won't notice is that when you convert to MP3 or MP4 you lose more than 90% of the audio data. In order to shrink the file, supposed sound that humans can't hear is removed and lost. Put on a decent sound system you will notice a flatter sound. You may not notice on a phone or Bluetooth boom box. Once converted that file can't be changed. You can convert the original music to Wav or Flac a form of lossless uncompressed digital format. Save yourself from the digital low quality throw away era.

They are WAV files.

 

[Pointyears]

I spent roughly 4 hours this evening copying CDs to a 64GB flash drive and have only used a fraction of the storage space. If you're like me, many of my CDs only have 4 or 5 songs I really like so selected only those to copy to the flash drive. I could probably put my whole collection on this one flash drive, just a matter of doing it a little at a time.

Rip and manage your music with iTunes, create a Maverick playlist, and set iTunes to sync only the songs in that playlist to your usb. Easy Peasy.

That's all good to put on a drive. The only problem and most won't notice is that when you convert to MP3 or MP4 you lose more than 90% of the audio data. In order to shrink the file, supposed sound that humans can't hear is removed and lost. Put on a decent sound system you will notice a flatter sound. You may not notice on a phone or Bluetooth boom box. Once converted that file can't be changed. You can convert the original music to Wav or Flac a form of lossless uncompressed digital format. Save yourself from the digital low quality throw away era.

To be pedantic, when you say "once converted that file can't be changed" is not true; you can convert between AIFF to Apple lossless to MP3 to AAC, or whatever (with crappier results each generation) What is true, is that once music file is compressed, you cannot get the discarded data back.

 

[BigLog7]

When I got my 25 Lariat AWD it seems my dealer had more important things than how to explain things to an "old fart" . Mostly it was trial and error I know about 20% of what options the computer, car, thinks I should know.

One of the things that pissed me off was the elimination of the CD drive, while I travel I always listened to "books on tape". After trial and many errors I figured out that I can copy the CDs onto my Mac computer, one at a time, to an empty folder than change the names of the files to something simple like if the "BOT" has 12 disks I list the file as 01 (disk # 1 than each file on that disk with an alphabet A. It should look like this disk 1 file (1 0A) through disk 12 file 13 (12M).

Once you have all the disk files renamed. Save it to the music program on the Mac. highlight all the files you entered, Go to the "file" tab in the top line drop down to the "convert" sub menu and select "Create an AAC Version". after that you will have two of each file names. Highlight only the files that do not ens in AAC and delete only those files. you will now have your "BOT" files ready to copy on a flash drive and play on a USB A or the USB C. One last thing is to make sure that your flash drive is formatted as a "FAT32" , Ex Fat or MS-DOS (FAT)

That sounds way more complicated than my experience. As a Mac user since forever, all you need do is copy contents of your disk to the thumb drive. No need to rename anything. Pretty straightforward.

There's a free app called Clip Grab for downloading music from YouTube. In that case it allows you to download at whatever quality you want and any location on your Mac.

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