hi folks,

 

Have Columbus unit with Canton in my new facelift Octavia. I was amazed how much better playing a CD via the CD drive sounded over something like extreme quality setting on spotify (360kps). So I'm contemplating copying some lossless music onto the hard drive of the Columbus. I'm assuming it has a hard drive? What is the process for copying files on? Can you copy .flac files on in a folder?

 

Cheers,

Mick

 

 

Canton really does bring out the best in higher quality sources. Not sure if it's possible to rip from anything other than CD to Columbus but the storage available isn't massive and you'd fill it pretty quickly with flac.

 

With Columbus you get 2 SD slots so I'd fill them with 64GB+ cards and play directly from them.

7 minutes ago, ahenners said:

Canton really does bring out the best in higher quality sources. Not sure if it's possible to rip from anything other than CD to Columbus but the storage available isn't massive and you'd fill it pretty quickly with flac.

 

With Columbus you get 2 SD slots so I'd fill them with 64GB+ cards and play directly from them.

Thanks,

Would you recommend two 64gb cards or can you go bigger? 

Any recommendations or cards to avoid? For instance can you use 128gb?

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B014IX03CE/ref=mp_s_a_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1500918638&sr=8-13&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=Sd+card

I'd recommend the biggest SD card you can justify/afford/sneak past the Mrs etc. And go for a 2nd in the future if you fill it and don't want to remove anything from the existing card.

 

128gb might have come down in price recently, but I went for 64gb on a price/capacity balance. I don't use FLAC though so even at 320kbps WMA/aac/MP3 etc. It will take me ages to fill it.

 

As long as the card conforms to SDHC or SDXC (which has a limit of 2TB) then I don't believe there is a limit to what the Columbus will read. Therefore 128GB is fine.

Edited 24 July, 20178 yr by ahenners

1 minute ago, ahenners said:

I'd recommend the biggest SD card you can justify/afford/sneak past the Mrs etc. And go for a 2nd in the future if you fill it and don't want to remove anything from the existing card.

 

128gb might have come down in price recently, but I went for 64gb on a price/capacity balance. I don't use FLAC though so even at 320kbps WMA/aac/MP3 etc. It will take me ages to fill it.

 

As long as the card conforms to SDXC (which has a limit of 2TB) then I don't believe there is a limit to what the Columbus will read. Therefore 128GB is fine.

Thanks, 

Do you know if it will play flac files? Also does it find album art and tags etc etc? 

Cheers, 

Mick 

It has Gracenote capability but apparently this only works with CDs not removable media.

 

Personally I'd tag everything at source on my computer though before putting it into a media card to ensure its all there.

 

Yes it plays FLAC.

Edited 24 July, 20178 yr by ahenners

Unless they have made significant changes in the facelifted OS, flac files will play but album art is not displayed if the image file is large. In my case many of the jpgs attached to recently bought music were of good quality (ie big) and the car would not display them. I used a program to reduce their quality and then reassigned album art and it has worked flawlessly ever since.

120x120 jpgs for album art. An Ultra is perfectly OK with 128GB on my 2016 car. Bit hard to find stuff if it's not correctly tagged, though... and even then, the directory structure can leave something to be desired.

 

SD Flac sounds pretty good in my car.

 

- Bret

2 hours ago, brettikivi said:

120x120 jpgs for album art. An Ultra is perfectly OK with 128GB on my 2016 car. Bit hard to find stuff if it's not correctly tagged, though... and even then, the directory structure can leave something to be desired.

 

SD Flac sounds pretty good in my car.

 

- Bret

I used to use a program called tag and rename before but more recently have been using spotify through android auto for convenience. I might try an small sd card first with a couple of albums to see what the experience is like before investing too much!

If you are looking for software to rip CD's to FLAC or AAC I can recommend the Sony MediaGo program, its a free download. 

This is a good idea because I find with a large SD-card scrolling through so many albums or artists can be difficult as the touch-screen is not the most reactive (I have MIB1 not MIB2). So I split my music between two smaller SD-card.

You can also just use a USB stick or even a portable hard-drive via the USB slot to play music.

 

The maximum image size seems to be 300x300 for the Columbus MIB1 but its maybe better to go smaller (like 250x250) as often the images on Amazon are not symetric & cause problems (like 300x302).

I use a program called mp3tag which grabs the tag information from several freeDB sources & also downloads the cover-art from Amazon.

mp3tag is awesome and makes it really easy to embed the art into the files. I would also use something like foobar2000 and accuraterip to make sure the rips are actually good. You'll need flac.exe, too. 

 

I have found very, very few albums where mp3tag can't find the titles, either.

 

 - Bret

Edited 25 July, 20178 yr by brettikivi

Quote

Do you know if it will play flac files? Also does it find album art and tags etc etc? 

 

 

Yes, you can copy FLAC files with out any problem, if....

 

you have the right level of compression on the FLAC file. I found this out when some FLACs would play and some not. In Media Monkey I transcoded the failing files to compression level 4 ( Tools -> Convert Format, select FLAC, click on settings, change compression level to 4 ).

 

After that they played OK.

30 minutes ago, Danbury_Collins said:

 

 

Yes, you can copy FLAC files with out any problem, if....

 

you have the right level of compression on the FLAC file. I found this out when some FLACs would play and some not. In Media Monkey I transcoded the failing files to compression level 4 ( Tools -> Convert Format, select FLAC, click on settings, change compression level to 4 ).

 

After that they played OK.

Thanks - copied on some albums last night, have to say there's a marked improvement in quality over say spotify 320 kbps streaming. I can see it getting a bit hard to browse albums etc if you copy on loads. I'll probably try and keep it at around the 20 or so mark and move on/off as I change moods... have a 100 plus albums probably isn't going to be a great experience. I think Google play music might play flac files to.. that might be an option to play them via android auto

I think I have around 6000 tracks on my card - the Columbus works OK with a 128Gb card.

 

Then again, I tend to stick the player on random and just skip any tracks that don't suit the my mood/the moment.

I have transferred my entire iTunes library onto a 256GB card and they all come up on Columbus complete with cover art. Simples!

Interestingly enough I did some back to back testing last night. A flac album via SD card and same flac album via android auto using google play music to play from my phone.. the SD card version seemed to be the clear winner. I don't know if that's a android auto issue or if the Columbus is optimized for sd card playback.. for instance in can see dolby pro logic on the media screen when playing from sd card but not when playing via android auto...  think ill keep a subset of music on the sd card for my own listening and probably keep using spotify for chart music etc when kids in the car..

1 hour ago, Micks_address said:

.. the SD card version seemed to be the clear winner. I don't know if that's a android auto issue or if the Columbus is optimized for sd card playback.. for instance in can see dolby pro logic on the media screen when playing from sd card but not when playing via android auto... 

 

Android auto is pushing the music across a Bluetooth connection so perhaps this accounts for the difference. 

The sound quality of your Columbus+Canton must be much better than my MIB1 Bolero - its OK for general listening but I seriously doubt I could tell the difference between FLAC and a 64kbit MP3 though it.

5 minutes ago, TDIum said:

Android auto is pushing the music across a Bluetooth connection so perhaps this accounts for the difference. 

 

It depends on the phone and the settings. I don't know the exact rule, but I've seen Android push audio to Android Audio through USB Audio, and then there is no difference in sound quality whatsoever. In many cases though it indeed sends audio through bluetooth resulting in a crappy quality.

 

You can test this easily by disabling bluetooth on your phone while having Android Auto connected. If the music stops, it was through bluetooth.

46 minutes ago, Mati said:

 

It depends on the phone and the settings. I don't know the exact rule, but I've seen Android push audio to Android Audio through USB Audio, and then there is no difference in sound quality whatsoever. In many cases though it indeed sends audio through bluetooth resulting in a crappy quality.

 

You can test this easily by disabling bluetooth on your phone while having Android Auto connected. If the music stops, it was through bluetooth.

I went in to sound setting and ticked off Bluetooth audio - music didn't stop playing so I assume its playing over USB

Phone is HTC 10

Oh OK. I don't have Android Auto myself so didn't know. 

So I guess then when its playing from SD card its the Columbus rendering the FLAC, and when its Android Auto  its the phone doing it? 

SD card does sound better than USB in my car... 

 

 - Bret