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[HowTo] The CD is dead ... Long live the USB

UTE042_NZ

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Noticed that a few off-topic posts in other threads about CD players no longer being standard equipment and how people are reacting to this. Realising that my upcoming VFII purchase will relegate my CD collection to in-house only, I decided to create a USB thumb drive solution.
Thought I would share some of the discoveries I made along the way.

PRELUDE:
  • (1) I have totally screwed a few CD disks over the years. They didn't seem to cope with the repeated smacking up against the light-emitting/reading unit when my Hilux finished being airborne and bounced upon landing. A solution with no moving parts seems a good idea.

    (2) The Fraunhofer Institute has declined to renew the intellectual property it owns on the MPEG Audio Layer III technology – as well as terminating its licensing programme.
    "Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, mp3 is still very popular amongst consumers. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3."
    This poses no problem to MP3 users but, to me, signals that there will be no further developement of the MP3 codec. Basically, it is the MP3 codec's use of sonic tricks to vanish those parts of the sounds your ears won't notice are missing that gives MP3 its great ability to compress music. After some research, I decided to use an AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) codec for compression as it is a wideband algorythm enabling more sample frequencies, more efficient and accurate coding, and higher bit-rates. This means better quality than MP3 at the same or higher bitrate with a smaller file size. I settled on the .m4a file extension for wider acceptance by more devices. This includes iTunes and Apple devices. Roughly speaking, AAC can give smaller files with the same quality as MP3, or higher quality with the same size files.

TECHNICALITIES:
The first important thing to realise is that the encoding can only be as good as the encoder (and this holds true for all formats). It is possible to create AAC files that sound worse than MP3 files, if your AAC encoder/codec/settings is crappier than your MP3 encoder/codec/settings.

The second is that recompressing a compressed file can reduce quality. Converting an .mp3 to .m4a will not improve the quality. Some of us old farts remember the difference between recording a vinyl record to tape or cassette and then copying the tape or cassette to another tape or cassette. Another comparison is converting a .BMP graphic image to .GIF and then converting the .GIF to .JPG. It will not look as good as a .JPG converted from the .BMP (because the .BMP contains the full uncompressed data).

So, we want to rip our CDs in .WAV (lossless) format and then convert those to AAC files using the .m4a file extension. Here's the method I used.

RIPPER:
I have a Windows 10 computer. I moved my "Music" folder to a seperate drive as I would be needing about 80GB of space. I used the "Rip CD" function of Microsoft Windows Media Player 12 with Rip settings to "WAV (Lossless)" format and Audio quality set to "Best Quality" (uses about 600 MB per CD). NOTE: in the "Library" tab of the options, if selecting "Retrieve additional information from the Internet" make sure the "Only add missing information" button is selected. It pays to check that the album information is correct before ripping each CD as many have several versions and you can end up with incorrectly named tracks and even completely wrong albums. Once the tracks are ripped it is a difficult and frustrating process to edit the metadata of the files. Much easier to make sure the data is correct before you Rip. Rip the CDs to your "Music" folder. These will be the master files and will not be altered again (hopefully). They will be nested in folders by album name inside folders by artist name. If you have downloaded any iTunes they should be structured the same way inside the music folder (i.e. G:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Artist Name\Album Name) and should already be in .m4a format.

ENCODER:
I chose to use the free and open source Audacity (with Plug-ins and Libraries) http://www.audacityteam.org/download/
How to install FFmpeg library http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/installing_and_updating_audacity_on_windows.html#winff

ISSUES:
Some older in-car audio systems have a 999 track limit (or 1000) for USB devices. You can load more audio files on your USB, but they won't be found by the system, and you don't always get to chose which ones aren't found. In that case there is no point going larger than 8GB USB drive. The USB drive usually has to be formatted FAT32 file system. You can connect a bluetooth device but I found that to be frustrating as the music volume is halved, you can't shuffle music, and it sometimes skips if there is other bluetooth activity going on (bandwidth is restricted). Anyway, 999 .m4a music files take up less than 6GB of space and it will take 3 days of continuous play to hear them all. Not enough? Make several 8GB USB collections then.
CD2USB00.jpg

METHODOLIGY:
I created a folder named "MUSIC_OUT" on another hard drive (because reading from one drive and writing to another is usually faster than reading and writing to the same drive). I then converted the tracks I selected off each album from the WAV files in "Music" folder to m4a files in "MUSIC_OUT". I recreated the same folder nesting structure as I went along, and this helped me keep track of where I was up to. This can be time consuming (and took me several weeks) but, like many tasks, the more you put in the more you get out. One of the brilliant features of Audacity is its 'Normalize" plug-in effect which can be used on any/each track to make them all have the same output volume. There are other plug-in effects that can adjust treble and/or base, plus you can cut out those boring silences at beginning/end of tracks. You can also adjust and set the default sample rate (quality vs file size) in preferences.

No need to convert any iTunes content, just copy the folders you want across to the MUSIC_OUT folder.

Once I had my 999 .m4a tracks nested in the "MUSIC_OUT" folder, I drag'n'dropped the MUSIC_OUT folder into the "Play" tab of Windows Media Player and then saved that playlist (I named it "MASTER999").

Plug the 8GB USB drive into the computer if not already plugged in and open the "Sync" tab (may have to restart Windows Media Player for it to see the USB device in the "Sync" tab).
CD2USB01.jpg
Drag'n'drop the Playlist from the far left to the Sync tab on the right, creating a sync list.
CD2USB02.jpg
Next click on "Start Sync" and make a cuppa.
CD2USB03.jpg
You may also be able to sync a copy to your phone via USB by the same method if you have the storage space.
CD2USB04.jpg

I delete the contents of my MUSIC_OUT folder once I have synced it to my phone and pair of USB drives (one is a backup).
 
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mpower

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people still use CD?

I mean, good on you but USB/phones as music in cars has been a thing for yeeeeears now.
 

UTE042_NZ

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people still use CD?

I mean, good on you but USB/phones as music in cars has been a thing for yeeeeears now.
MP3 CD players were cool but still involved moving parts. As stated above, I believe USB > Bluetooth and MP3 is today's 8-track.
 

Adza75

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The Holden MyLink allows more than 999 files on the USB (from memory it's something like 10,000 - pretty sure I read that in the manual). Mine is happily playing with 1,971 songs on mine... and yes I can access all of them.
 

UTE042_NZ

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Oh well, guess I was misinformed and using outdated info. Sorry, my bad.
Although, in my defense, I did try a USB stick with 1500 MP3s in my 2015 (SYNC1) Ranger and it took quite a while to index then would not show all the files (around a third were not available). Haven't had access to a Holden system to test it out on.
 

dgp

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Awesome, thanks for the write up.
 
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