[sam]

Hello,

Just wanted to let people of my experience with USB flash drives in the car, so bought an integral from Argos and it seems the car will not recognise it (says something about a power supply fault - works in computer).

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/9130610.htm

So I bought a SanDisk instead and copied everything from the Integral to sandisk and it worked first time.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/sandisk-32gb-usb-flash-drive-a82ll


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MY PROCESS FOR PUTTING iTUNES MUSIC TO USB
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I am on a mac so I formatted the disk to MS-DOS (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility) select the disk and click erase and in name I entered CARUSB.

All of my music is either bought through iTunes or imported to iTunes, there is no way to BATCH convert music to .mp3 by default so I use a program called MediaHuman Audio Convertor (http://www.mediahuman.com/audio-converter/) to convert the music to readable .mp3 for the car.

Once MediaHuman is installed click on the MediaHuman Audio Convertor menu and click Preferences select Output. The settings should look like this....

If you set this up like this the folder structure should be maintained, so mine puts the music as Artist > Album > Song Names.

So click close and leave MediaHuman running.

Now go into iTunes > Albums and drag one of your albums over to media human. If the album has the correct coverart etc this will be maintained over to the USB mp3 file, otherwise MediaHuman will try to find the correct one (not sure how accurate it is at this).

Now click Convert.

iTunes file will be converted and placed into Name of Artist >> Name of Album >> Song on the USB pen drive.





Edited by: sam

 

[sam]

Ok so to continue...

I found some album names/songs had periods in them which causes a whole load of problems for the car to read, there where also some characters they advise not to use such asé etc.

So rather than fixing these one by one we can fix them using a batch renamer called Name Mangler (http://manytricks.com/namemangler/).

This process has worked pretty well for me so far.

-Sam

 

[spinneruk]

Great little tutorial there, thanks for sharing.

Never heard of that program before, I usually use All2MP3 on mac which has always worked well...however trying this now it seems much less hassle plus the auto searching for cover art is a bonus as I used to use MediaMonkey for that before.

My Parrot in my current car was extremely picky with music on SD CARD but done a quick test with this and works fine so will be using this one from now on.

 

[T 10WE T]

This looks really complicated Sam, I also have a Mac and a scandisk USB pen, I just made a playlist in iTunes and copied it over, worked first time and with album artwork too?

 

[sam]

Hello,

Does this copy the files as mp3? Are these songs you have purchased from iTunes or imported via CD?

-Sam

 

[sam]

This looks really complicated Sam, I also have a Mac and a scandisk USB pen, I just made a playlist in iTunes and copied it over, worked first time and with album artwork too?

Hello,

I am not sure how your doing this but I tried dragging the playlist etc and it doesn't work. You can drag the files across but it doesn't automatically convert them to MP3.

-Sam

 

[T 10WE T]

Hi Sam, I'm not sure sorry, I'm not very tech savvy, maybe they are mp3's already? I just tried dragging them on to pen drive and it worked first time, guess it probably won't be as easy next time! Beginners luck?