Music Tales from the Badly Organized - Car Music

Hi, everyone, welcome to a music tale from the badly organized. This time Car music. I have been lucky enough to buy a new car recently. Buying a car today is not like buying a car a few years ago. I bought my previous car in 2009 and back then, you had an entire list of features and extras you could buy, I obviously went for the best music system I could afford at the time, this consisted of a CD play and extra speakers. The CD player could also handle MP3 and therefore playlists. I have a collection of CD burned playlists, marking many great holidays and long distances trips over the last 13 or so years. My car had an iPod dock in the glove box and a 3.5mm jack to plug in any music player (an Aux port if you like). I used my iTunes to burn playlists and away I went. Today, you get little choice, on cars, I could only choose an upgraded stereo if I chose key-less entry and no one wants that, so I went for the standard car stereo.

In older cars I have retro fitted tape or CD players to play MP3s, CDs or mix tapes and a lot of the fun was choosing the music you wanted to listen to due to limited space, either a 90 minute tape or 700Mb CD. On average I could get around 50 songs on a MP3 CD and maybe 30 songs on a tape (if they were short songs). The truth is I had one prerecorded tape at university, hits of the 80’s and I played it so much I knew exactly how long to hold the fast-forward button to skip Kylie and Jason on the tape.

I have had car stereos with pin-pad access, and ones you could take the fascia off and take it with you. I remember the days when it was car stereo fascia on the pub table and not a smart phone. Car tape players that when you heard that tell-tale slowing of the track, you quickly hit eject to avoid having all the tape mangled inside the stereo. Today I still can’t listen to human league, keep feeling fascination without twitching at the start. You listen to it, it slows slightly on one of the notes, deliberately, but it sounds just like a tape being chewed for just a second. I have had friends with mini disk players in their car, and I have even seen classic cars with record players in them. Not sure that will come back. Today, you only have digital music and either Bluetooth or USB ports to get your own music onto the stereo

I digress, my new car does not have a CD player, or tape player. Record or mini disk, and no way of fitting anything post market. I have something called an MMI. I guess the MM is multimedia, but the “I” is a mystery to me. Doesn’t matter much, I had to read the manual to work out how to play music. I still have a radio, DAB and to be fair I am quite impressed. At the start of DAB radios I heard they cut out all the time and were pretty bad at finding stations. Today they just seem to work, select you station, favorite it and away you go. It displays the show and song you are listening too. You also have method of connecting to streaming services like Spotify and apple music. I have only a Spotify account and I refuse to pay for it, so it is limited in use to me.

I am still left with a few methods, my iPhone connects to my car, but I have no music on my phone (I am too cheap to buy one with a decent amount of storage). I have Bluetooth to connect to my mp3 player, but this means connecting and then searching for what to play in the car, so I have to choose before I set off, this can be irritating if I choose badly.

Lastly I can use USB sticks. This is the method I have chosen, small and simple to load up at home with the playlist, re-writable, so I don’t have to invest in lots of blanks CDs. USB sticks take up very little room and you can buy little USB stick cases to store them in. Yes, this could be the way.

Here is my story so far on how I am now playing USB sticks in my new car. First I have two types of port, USB A and USB C. USB C is faster, but my computer only has USB A ports to loads the music. I started by buying around 5 2Gb USB type A sticks, cheap and only 2 and a bit times bigger than a CD. Simple to load, quick and limits me to about 100 plus songs, enough to be getting on with. I loaded up around 100 tracks into a playlist on iTunes and tried to find a way of burning them to the USB stick as a playlist. This appears not to be a thing in iTunes. You can burn to a CD, but not a USB stick.

Ok I thought, let’s do some reading, so I found out, you can just drag and drop straight from the playlist straight to the USB stick. This messes with the order, it plays them in alphabetical order or the order according to the track listing from the album you take the song. This means I get one group all together and it is not a playlist in the true sense. Next I thought I can change the file names to order them how I like, I tried a few programs, but it takes a while to edit and I am only doing 100 songs at the moment using the smallest USB stick I could find. I haven’t abandoned this method just yet, but still experimenting with it. I am looking for an application to do the heavy lifting on renaming files. At the moment, I put the playlist on the USB stick and hit the random button on the car stereo. Not perfect, but it plays the playlist and it does not group the bands.

Now I have a short term method of playing playlists, next I wanted to see if I can go bigger. I purchased a 256Gb USB stick, with USB A and USB C port on it, and I made sure it was fast at transferring (400Mb/s). To move large files can take hours on a slow USB stick, with this quick one I moved around 170Gb of music in 20-30 minutes. I put the music on the stick using type A and put the stick in my car in to the type C port, it took a while to load, but I could still listen to the type A port while I was waiting. I now have all my compilation albums on one USB stick, which I can select and play on demand. The MMI system just recognized the apple Tags and allows me to pick and album, there are a lot to select from and it takes time, but at least the music on there and available in the car and on the touch screen. like all music, I select the album I want before moving off for safety and I have skip capability on the steering wheel.

My next plan is to start playing with the M3U files, this is what tells the computer the order to play the playlists and add that to the USB sticks, also experiment with SSD drives, maybe I can put my entire iTunes collection in the car, but as you all know I am still cataloguing my CDs and that would be another system to maintain. This may happen by next month, and if it does I will report the joys and woes.

I hope you enjoyed this music tale from the badly organized. It looks like I found something to write about after all. As usual all my opinions are my own and nothing to do with the company I work for. Comments welcome and suggestions of software that can organize playlists on USB sticks are welcome. Till next time, thanks for reading