Questions about playing music from USB

[CooterK]

Unfortunately all my music on iTunes is M4A format. Dragged and dropped onto usb and my ford touch wouldn't play them. Looks like I'll have to buy a batch conversation program to convert to MP3 or wave files as converting within iTunes creates duplicate files (m4a and MP3) unless someone has a better suggestion I'm all ears

You might find what you need herehttp://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201616. Basically the MFT won't play DRM files, so you'll have to go through the Itunes plus proccess to get rid of the DRM while also getting higher quality audio tracks. I reccomend it even for tracks that aren't DRM.

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[HalfMoon]

The highest codec anyone is using is 256 kpbs songs

I have plenty of albums I've ripped at 320kbps CBR MP3. Many more in VBR with peaks at 320kbps. ;)

 

[CooterK]

I have plenty of albums I've ripped at 320kbps CBR MP3. Many more in VBR with peaks at 320kbps. ;)

Welp you're still good to go

 

[HalfMoon]

Welp you're still good to go

Yeah, to be honest I've about given up on worrying about the ultra high quality in car.

The catback + road noise or any other rattles overrides the audio system in most cases. In my living room or office though, I still care.

 

[CooterK]

Yeah, to be honest I've about given up on worrying about the ultra high quality in car.

The catback + road noise or any other rattles overrides the audio system in most cases. In my living room or office though, I still care.

Yea for sure, I use a pretty decent quality DAC/Amp with HD650's at home and barely notice the difference between really high quality tracks and slightly lower ones. So I'm not really concerned with quality in the car.

 

[HalfMoon]

Yea for sure, I use a pretty decent quality DAC/Amp with HD650's at home and barely notice the difference between really high quality tracks and slightly lower ones. So I'm not really concerned with quality in the car.

Yeah, I bought a set of HD650s for work, quite nice.

 

[Husker]

Thank you. So it sounds like best case for streaming for Pandora over a smartphone is 64kbps no matter what. so using a USB connection cat increase that quality. I'll go read up on XM and Spotify for their specs.

What did you find out?

 

[CooterK]

What did you find out?

Spotify premium streams at 320kpbs for premium users and 160 kbps for free. Even if you have premium the spotify app on your phone defaults to 160, so you have to change it to the higher setting.

Sirius streams over the internet at 128k and over the air its a little more complicated than that. The actual compression is something like 160-320 depending on the source, but they use a codec that anticipates packet loss and compensates. So what you hear at your ear is generally a pretty low quality audio, but you can almost never tell what quality it is at any given time.

 

[texag70]

Hey everyone! I have never owned a car that was capable of playing music from USB or an SD card (though my car will have nav, so that's irrelevant), so I had a couple questions.

1) Will any flash drive work, or do I need a special kind? Does USB 2.0 matter versus 3.0? Are some faster than others? I have heard that it needs to be formatted a special way--is that true, and if so, how do I do that (on a windows based computer)?

2) What is the best way to put music files on the flash drive? I would like to get the best quality possible.

3) Does the album art and track information show up on the screen?

4) Is there any difference in quality or ease of use between playing music from an iPhone versus a flash drive? I assume I can have my iPhone connected by Bluetooth and still listen to files on a flash drive, correct?

Sorry for my tech ignorance, and thanks in advance for the help!

Have a 4GB USB drive with over 100 songs and it sounds great. All I had to do was format the USB stick on my PC. FAT32 is the standard when formatting on a Windows based PC. Then downloaded the songs directly to the USB stick and that was it. No problem.

 

[Chaos_Being]

I bought this http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/drives/cruzer-fit/
It's insanely small so practically no chance of braking it. It has 2 USB ports so you can use that and still charge your phone in the other. You can also get an adapter to plug into the power outlet that has 1 or 2 USB ports just for charging. In total doing it this way I have 4 USB ports, 2 for data and 2 for charging. That still leaves one power port if you need it.

USB 2 or 3 doesn't matter. The port is USB 2 but if you have a USB 3 drive it'll be backward compatible.

It needs to be formatted as FAT32. Some are by default when you buy them. If not it's just like formatting any drive in Windows. (I'm anti Apple so don't know how it works there).

As for the music on your phone comment above ^. You will get better quality sound by ripping with as little or no compression as possible and with a direct connection. You lose some sound quality using Bluetooth. There's also the freedom of having up to 64GB of music always connected without using up the space on your phone.

My entire music library is on that little flash drive but I probably have 200 songs on my phone.

I think I might have to get one of these...I have my library on my phone as well but found playing music from it via Bluetooth to be kind of "fiddly," in that I had to mess with the phone too much. Sound quality was "ok" but it definitely sounded muted.

 

[Laztug]

I just put down an order for THIS SANDISK ULTRA FIT

Will the car try and index every time I try and use the usb? Or will it just be a one and done kinda thing?
My car tries to index my phone every time I plug it in to charge. Fails miserably every time, it gets to about 1600 songs then gives up.

 

[bstreet5.0]

I just put down an order for THIS SANDISK ULTRA FIT

Will the car try and index every time I try and use the usb? Or will it just be a one and done kinda thing?
My car tries to index my phone every time I plug it in to charge. Fails miserably every time, it gets to about 1600 songs then gives up.

My USB drive just does the one long index. Then after that each start up checks for any changes, but done quickly. If you remove it and put it back in it will index all over again though.

 

[Herr Squid]

I just put down an order for THIS SANDISK ULTRA FIT

Will the car try and index every time I try and use the usb? Or will it just be a one and done kinda thing?
My car tries to index my phone every time I plug it in to charge. Fails miserably every time, it gets to about 1600 songs then gives up.

I use a 32 GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit, and it works brilliantly. I just dragged the iTunes music folder off onto the USB drive from my PC. One long index operation when I first stuck it in the car, and it plays right away when I leave it in. It's way less fiddly than either playing from an SD card or streaming from bluetooth. It just works. The only drawback is that the SanDisk device is so small, it's kind of hard to pull out of the slot!

 

[Stig]

Does anybody know if the shaker pro supports flac?

 

[souprmage]

Does anybody know if the shaker pro supports flac?

I do know, and it doesn't support it. Nor OGG.

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