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About a year ago, I bought a new Home Theater system. When I was buying the system, I noticed that the stores no longer carry CD players in stock. Since I still wanted one, I ended up ordering a 5-disc changer online. The system comes with an IPod docking station, so I've been using it to complement the CD changer. For my cars, I've been making sure to special-order a six-disc in-dash changer whenever possible. For now, I burn my CD's and digital music files onto CD-R Music discs for the cars. Lately, I've been noticing that the CD-R discs are becoming hard to find anywhere. I've also noticed that the new car audio systems seem to be oriented toward IPod's and digital radio and not so much toward playing CD's.
Now, there are two issues I have using an IPod for digital music (as it's being controlled by the docking station) is that, first, everytime you select the "Play Digital Music" selection, the IPod always starts on the first track. Second, it plays in some pre-arranged order (I think it's alphabetical by song title) and not in an order that I can specify.
Am I stuck with this technology? Is there something else I'm not aware of yet?
This is a great question / topic. As an "old school" audiophile I have problems with the ever decreasing convient choices. My home system is massive and eats up lots of space and power. My in car systems consists of cd changers, power amps,and speaker upgrades. I've got nearly a 1000 cd's so even that presents a storage problem, I'm now gearing up to move full time onto a sailboat for a few years and go crusing so I've been looking for good solutions.( sailboat / car...same situation basically).
I"m certainly open to suggestions but at this point my plan is the following:
1: Burn all the music I want to thumb drives (full 16 bit)
2: get a cheap laptop and dedicate it to music play...in an emergency it could serve as another navigation system.
3: Take the audio output and feed it into a decent amplifier and then speakers ....such as they are given the limited space requiements.
Seems to me the same approach would work in a car.
There are a number of "jutebox" players ( some freebies) available that can be instructed to play a disc, a track listing or ,play random or whatever.
My cheap little car (2010 Kia Soul) has a USB port in the factory radio. When I plug in a thumb drive with my MP3 recordings, the radio instantly picks up the thumb drive and starts playing the first track.
It has "random play" feature, which is able to choose a track from thousand other tracks in a random order and play it. Unless I remove the thumb drive it will remember the last song and goes there the next day. Stopping the car overnight doesn't matter, it will play the last song when the ignition was turned off.
Some of the new home audio receivers also have this USB port, which makes storing music more convenient. You could add MP3 or audio CD formats, it doesn't matter. It is much more convenient than the 6-disc changer in our Honda, which won't play MP3 at all.
Rip all your CDs to FLAC.
Store the files on at least 2 different devices.
Find images of all the covers. Either scan yourself or find online.
Decide what you are going to do about liner notes and lyrics.
After completing this task -- which will take over a year -- you can move onto the next phase which to convert the FLAC files to something (probably 256+ vbr mp3) that your music player likes.
You're not serious, I am. Many audiophiles consider LPs the state of the art medium but I'm aware of no one who makes that argument for 8 tracks. Quite a few audiophiles consider open reel tape a state of the art medium though and with good reason.
Rip all your CDs to FLAC.
Store the files on at least 2 different devices.
Find images of all the covers. Either scan yourself or find online.
Decide what you are going to do about liner notes and lyrics.
After completing this task -- which will take over a year -- you can move onto the next phase which to convert the FLAC files to something (probably 256+ vbr mp3) that your music player likes.
Or rather than going through multiple steps and finding album art manually, why not just rip the CDs using any of the dozens of programs that will make them into whatever file one could want and find the album art automatically?
This is a great question / topic. As an "old school" audiophile I have problems with the ever decreasing convient choices. My home system is massive and eats up lots of space and power. My in car systems consists of cd changers, power amps,and speaker upgrades. I've got nearly a 1000 cd's so even that presents a storage problem, I'm now gearing up to move full time onto a sailboat for a few years and go crusing so I've been looking for good solutions.( sailboat / car...same situation basically).
I"m certainly open to suggestions but at this point my plan is the following:
1: Burn all the music I want to thumb drives (full 16 bit)
2: get a cheap laptop and dedicate it to music play...in an emergency it could serve as another navigation system.
3: Take the audio output and feed it into a decent amplifier and then speakers ....such as they are given the limited space requiements.
Seems to me the same approach would work in a car.
There are a number of "jutebox" players ( some freebies) available that can be instructed to play a disc, a track listing or ,play random or whatever.
The audio output from the laptop is the weak link in your proposed setup. Be sure you address that when you buy a laptop. Basic laptops put no emphasis on audio quality.
Or rather than going through multiple steps and finding album art manually, why not just rip the CDs using any of the dozens of programs that will make them into whatever file one could want and find the album art automatically?
1. Many older albums from less popular genres (classical, bluegrass...) don't have their artwork appear automatically.
2. FLAC should be your archival solution because it is lossless and not owned by any one company.
3. Lyrics take a lot of work and I never seen a program that grabs them.
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