Hello all,

 

We're in the process of buying a 2016 Octavia 2.0 TDI SE and it has an SD card slot for music. We considered our last car pretty modern in having a CD player so it's fair to say we're not terribly AV savvy ;)...

 

We have a boatload of CDs but don't use iTunes (although we both have iPhones) -  should we upload these to Widows Media Player and then onto an SD card? I see in these forums that they need tagging but confess to not really knowing what that is!

 

Any advice gratefully received.

 

Before I got my iPhone(s) I used WMP as a place to rip all our CDs to - just select MP3 and 320kbps (the best WMP can manage).

 

WMP "should" (and in most cases does) find the media information to tag the ripped files with - although it does add the album artwork to each file so I use a program called mp3tag to add this to every MP3 file.

 

Then just copy the whole audio library that WMP creates onto a blank SD card and you're ready to go.

 

I've currently got over 11,000 tracks in my audio library which fit onto a 200GB SDXC card which I use in my 2015 Octavia Elegance (which has a MIB1 Amundsen).

Thanks very much Dave. It’s about time we got rid of our hundreds of CDs so this might be the push we need. I’ll give it a go and see how far we get! 

I have a 200gb sd card which it reads but wont index the 50,000+ songs, it will index around 100gb worth

 

mirrolink/smartlink + spotify renders this obsolete anyway

Edited 21 July, 20196 yr by JohnnyType2

If you are going to rip your entire CD collection to digital then do not use Windows Media.

 

Use good third party software and rip as FLAC files. You will then always have a lossless backup of you music collection.

 

I use https://www.poikosoft.com/audio-converter

Edited 21 July, 20196 yr by logiclee

Thanks Johnny and Logiclee. I’ll look into other ways to transfer everything to digital. I’d assumed that once it had all been converted to WMA via WMP, it could be somehow moved to the cloud but I hadn’t really thought it through 😄

1 hour ago, TheEighth said:

Thanks Johnny and Logiclee. I’ll look into other ways to transfer everything to digital. I’d assumed that once it had all been converted to WMA via WMP, it could be somehow moved to the cloud but I hadn’t really thought it through 😄

 

The problem is if you use Windows Media or something else to rip to MP3 you will have a lower quality copy of your CD collection. That may not be important to you now but if you get rid of your CD's then in the future there will be no way to get that quality back.

 

If you are going to the trouble of ripping all your CD's then rip as FLAC.  Do it right and you will only have to do it once.

 

 

I use exact audio copy to rip my CD collection to FLAC, it will add the Tag info and Album Artwork and is perfect for my 2017 vRS with Amundsen II.

There may be other services available but google music allows you to upload up 50,000 songs (I think) for free.  you are then able to either stream or download to phone or wherever to use.  The only cost would be the data when streaming, but if downloaded when on wifi this isn't an issue.

Amazon may have a similar system but I do know that cd's bought from them give you access to the digital version through their streaming service for no additional cost.

I went through this process and came out the other side paying for google music.  I have now extended this to a family plan including my wife and dad which also includes youtube premium to remove adds.  I realise this is not what you were asking about but I wanted to share my experience.

FYI, the 'free' google system may have the ability to recognise your cd's an automatically add them to your collection with no ripping.  I.e. you put your disc in and it reads what it is and adds the album to your list.  If it doesn't recognise it then it gives you the option of ripping (may need another piece of software, not sure).  This was a while a go that I looked into it so things may have changed.  Also, I say 'free' because anything that you put onto the interwebs, even if you own it in the first place, you give to that particular provider.

On 21/07/2019 at 16:30, TheEighth said:

Hello all,

 

We're in the process of buying a 2016 Octavia 2.0 TDI SE and it has an SD card slot for music. We considered our last car pretty modern in having a CD player so it's fair to say we're not terribly AV savvy ;)...

 

We have a boatload of CDs but don't use iTunes (although we both have iPhones) -  should we upload these to Widows Media Player and then onto an SD card? I see in these forums that they need tagging but confess to not really knowing what that is!

 

Any advice gratefully received.

 

I don't know which version of Amundsen you have, but here is a thread regarding FLAC files.

 

6 hours ago, MarkyG82 said:

The only cost would be the data when streaming

...and you would need decent 3G/4G/5G coverage everywhere you drive. Far better to download and play locally if you live/drive in areas where mobile coverage is patchy.

35 minutes ago, PetrolDave said:

...and you would need decent 3G/4G/5G coverage everywhere you drive. Far better to download and play locally if you live/drive in areas where mobile coverage is patchy.

 

Actually my route has some 2g and a little dead spot and I don't have any issues.  The buffering is pretty clever.

15 minutes ago, MarkyG82 said:

 

Actually my route has some 2g and a little dead spot and I don't have any issues.  The buffering is pretty clever.

My regular route has large "not spots" with no coverage, not even 2G - that's the reality of living in rural England.

 

So I cannot consider streaming, it's local files only for me.

6 hours ago, ords said:

I don't know which version of Amundsen you have, but here is a thread regarding FLAC files.

 

 

 

Even so if you are ripping your entire CD collection with a view to selling your CD collection, as per the OP, then FLAC is the way you should go.

 

For older devices that can't use FLAC it's quick and easy to convert FLAC to MP3

16 hours ago, logiclee said:

 

 

Even so if you are ripping your entire CD collection with a view to selling your CD collection, as per the OP, then FLAC is the way you should go.

 

For older devices that can't use FLAC it's quick and easy to convert FLAC to MP3

Even if you rip you collection to FLAC you should retain the original CD as that is your licence for the Music, you can store it elsewhere in the loft where ever suits you, but the original CD is the Legal Licence that you own a copy of the music. Download purchases is a different matter.

It is a bit of a pain converting all your cds, but once it is done the benefits ate brilliant - no cds cluttering up the car, you can play either individual cds, or set the whole collection to play in shuttle mode, you have your whole collection with you all the time - I use the sd card for my proper cd collection, but I also have a usb stick full of bootleg live recordings and odd tracks I have taken off youtube. It is brilliant. When you add in connecting your phone by bluetooth and playing streamed stuff from Spotify or the myriad of radio players such as BBC sounds it almost makes the radio redundant.

Thank you so much everyone. - I really appreciate all these responses (even if I don’t wholly understand all of them...)

 

*Ords* thank you for the thread you linked to. I’m getting the impression that there’s perhaps no definitive answer!

 

We’ve now collected our car and to be honest, we’re just happy to have DAB radio at the mo so we’re getting used to the luxury of that! 

 

I think I’ll try ripping a couple of CDs to FLAC to see whether they play from an SD card, and take it from there. I’d been reading about ALAC, but given Apple’s plans to sort of phase out iTunes it might not be worth going down that route. It’s probably not worth me trying to get involved with iTunes at this late stage 🤣...

Hi all, I e been experimenting with Exact Audio Copy and it’s not been an unparalleled success so far...it’s taken ages to convert four songs to FLAC and the system keeps crashing. Out of interest I had a go with WMP (turns out you can convert to FLAC with that too) and it seemed quicker and didn’t crash. So my current plan is to do a few CDs that way, store I them in OneDrive, copy them to an SD card and then test it out in the car. Fingers crossed. Thanks to all who’ve posted!

If you use iPhones another option would be to subscribe to Apple Music, then you can get pretty much any song you want on demand. If you’re mobile provider is Three, and you’re on a Go Binge plan (most are), then the streaming from Apple Music is free and unlimited (i.e. it doesn’t come out of your data allowance). 

 

Apple Music costs £10 per month for a single membership or £15 for a family plan, which is usable on up to 6 devices. 

 

It has had its drawbacks of course. Aside from the monthly outlay, of course:

 

1) you don’t own any of the music digitally

2) the music is a lossy format

3) you generally need at least 3G reception

 

But to counter those

 

1) you already own it on your CDs. Don’t throw them away, stick them in boxes in your garage/loft. You are also able to listen to any new music, or old music you don’t already own, without purchasing a CD (and £10-15 a month is very little for that privilege IMO)

 

2) it is lossy but it’s a decent quality (256k aac) and unless you’re a massive audiophile you almost certainly wont notice a difference, especially with all the various background noises of a car (engine, road, wind, other traffic etc)

 

3) you need a 3G signal to stream, however you can also download the tracks to your iPhone as well. Obviously you’re limited on storage depending on the capacity of your phone and what you already have on their. Also, in the almost 4 years I’ve been using it it’s been pretty rare I’ve found myself unable to get anything to stream. 

 

Worth a thought and certainly easier and quicker than ripping a collection of 100s of CDs! 

Just needed to upgrade the 128GB SD card I use for music in my Octavia (Amundsen MIB1) as it was within 5GB of being full (19,393 tracks).

 

Got a 256GB SD card and copied all the music onto it - music played but album art didn't show. On comparing the cards the 128GB one was FAT32 format but the 256GB one was exFAT, so I reformatted the 256GB one to FAT32 (can't be done with Windows directly so I used Easeus Partition Master), copied all the music back on and the album art now displays too.

 

Moral? - the SD must be formatted FAT32, exFAT is no good if you want to see the album art.