Best Way To Hear CDs

If the audio unit has a USB input, you can rips hundreds of CDs to a USB stick and play from that. If your computer does not have an optical disk drive, outboard onse to plug into a USB port are pretty cheap, under $20, including DVD capability.

Thanks for response Dave.

Adio unit in the car has an USB connection.

DeskTop has optical drive and free USB ports.

Can you recommend an "USB stick" ? Nothing too elaborate or big needed.

go to Amazon and type in USB memory stick. You will be presented with all shapes and sizes. Get enough memory to contain all your cds.

Why would you not rip an album to a single usb drive ? In other words, a couple of hundred usb drives, one per album.

Lynn

I am not sure that anyone suggested a single usb stick per album. That sounds a bit crazy. I have 2000 of my favourite songs on a single memory chip for my car.

This is reasonable and what I do, as well. That, of course, makes it the r easonable thing. ;-)

The reason for my reply is to point out that the Honda radios have limits a bout how many folders and files are supported. These limits are not well d ocumented and seem to be different for each configuration and model year. I have read that Honda is actually making good entertainment systems now so , hopefully, the issue doesn't exist in the new models.

I encountered the limit when I created a stick with 1,500 or so files in on e folder. The radio would select a file beyond the limit and display "File unplayable" until I removed and reinserted the stick. I went back to a fo lder per artist and the issue seems resolved. This was in my 2012 Accord E X-L.

USB music is, by far, the best way forward right now. The days of mechanic ally reproduced music are very few.

Can you put artist / album / song in the usb ?

What do you use to rip the songs from the cd ?

Thanks, Lynn

Thanks for all responses and good info.

Suppose my external drive is connectable in the car via USB, then what form does the material have to be in, to be accessed and played through the car's system ?

e.g.(s) - Files : Track**.cda or ****.mp3 ?

Firstly, a CD is about 700 MB. USB flash drives of

128 GB are available for~ $ 25. For example, see

(Sorry, I avoid/boycott Amazon, but you will find them there, too ... and in a lot of other places. You can even find them in grocery and drug stores where I live, though not the very high capacity ones). So, putting one CD on a drive is 1) anenormous waste of storage, 2) an enormous waste of money and 3) an enormously cumbersome way of doing things. Even if you allocate 1 GB per CD, you can fit more than 100 CDs on one of these drives!!

Secondly, ripping depends of what OS you use. I know nothing about Macs, but on Windows 7, Windows Media Player worked very well. I moved to Windows 10 last week and have not fully gotten used to the media things. But, one that I also like and use is FreeRIP:

It works well. You can input track names, etc. But I have not idea if the Honda display will show them. (I still use real CDs as I have a 2013 model and it has a CD player. Lucky!)

There is a question of formats, though. If do not like MP3 (due to the lossy compression) you can use the WAV format. But, an automobile is too noisy (ok, this is a Honda NG, not a Tesla one!) an environment to truly appreicate the full richness of a CD. MP3 will do just fine on most cars.

This is true so long as higher bitrates are used when ripping to mp3 -

256 is probably OK for cars, 320 if you want something that for most people is difficult to distinguish from a CD even under optimum listening conditions. With the lower bitrates you are probably going to hear the difference even in the noisy environment of a car.