Audio: How to listen to CD‘s

[generaltso]

I think I go with a bluetooth cd player, easiest.
If not I can still convert them through iTunes, but that really needs time, as there are many 100‘s CD‘s...

Paying a service to covert them for you may be cheaper than purchasing a Bluetooth CD player. And then they’ll all fit on a single flash drive.

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[Shayne]

Paying a service to covert them for you may be cheaper than purchasing a Bluetooth CD player. And then they’ll all fit on a single flash drive.

Definitely agree and a good option. Get two thumb drives and keep one safe as a back up so you do not need to do it again. I am Old School also but some tech just makes things so much easier on the mind. It is perfectly legal if you own the CD .

 

[Davedough]

I ripped off my dependency of physical media band aid years ago in favor of a paid Spotify account and I’ve never looked back. I have playlists with thousands of songs that follow me anywhere

 

[trutolife27]

?

 

[Shayne]

I ripped off my dependency of physical media band aid years ago in favor of a paid Spotify account and I’ve never looked back. I have playlists with thousands of songs that follow me anywhere

The MME will be no where near the quality of my home system but I will feed it the best audio quality I can and see how it preforms. Prefer my own no data playlists just as some still prefer their Cd's. We have now hijacked another thread .

 

[Accord07]

I am also old school and have a collection of CD's, although I have not touched them since converting all of them to FLAC. FLAC is lossless and takes a bit less space than the original stereo 16-bit 44.1-kHz PCM tracks on disc.

All late-model A/V receivers with network conductivity support playback of FLAC over DLNA. I have a copy of all my FLAC files stored on a Synology NAS device that has Plex Media Server running on it. There are three pieces in a DLNA setup, a media sever where the files are stored, a renderer that delivers audio/video output, and a controller that provides a user interface. When listening to music at home, I can use the A/V receiver to browse for album/tracks, then start the playback, in this case the A/V receiver is acting as both controller and renderer, this is not my preferred method though as I would need the TV turned on as well in order to browse. My favorite method is to use the Hi-Fi Cast Android app, which turns my phone into a controller while relying on the NAS device as a media sever, or turns my phone into both a controller and a media server (I have a copy of all the FLAC files on my phone as well), and utilizes the A/V receiver as renderer in either use case. If you are an audiophile who insists on your own DAC, or have an older A/V receiver that has no network conductivity, you can always use something like a Chromecast as renderer - it outputs via HDMI but there are devices out there that extract audio from HDMI and outputs S/PDIF.

I am getting way off topic, let me circle back to your original question. For playback in the Mach-E, you can always put a copy of all your FLAC files on a USB stick and plug it into the designated USB port in the vehicle. Or you can use an Android phone that hold all your FLAC files like I do - between the built in flash memory and a micro SD I have nearly 500GB usable space (I don't have anywhere close to 1000 CD's, but that's about how many I can store in FLAC). Apple CarPlay sends PCM when wired, but only AAC-LC over WiFi; Android Auto sends PCM regardless, although as far as I can tell 44.1kHz content is re-sampled to 48kHz (by looking at bitrates of the data being transferred, it is not that my not-so-good hearing can tell any difference). I use the exact same app (Hi-Fi Cast) at home and in my minivan: when at home I select a Yamaha receiver as the renderer; when in my vehicle, playback is local to the phone which then pipes PCM to the head unit via Android Auto.

As far as ripping compact discs to FLAC, it takes only a few minutes per disc, while you work on other things on your computer. For most albums the programs that do the extraction can fill in the album/track titles using crowdsourced data, the only thing you may need to do manually is to select an image for use as the cover. With storage cost being so low now, there is absolutely no reason to settle for mp3.

 

[macchiaz-o]

Don't waste time on an in car setup that relies on the MME's 1/8" audio input port... It doesn't have one.

You'll need to rip the CDs to a thumb drive. Or for an entirely suboptimal experience, get a 1/8" audio to Bluetooth adapter for your portable player.

 

[Rotting Piñata]

I even have VHS...

I think I go with a bluetooth cd player, easiest.
If not I can still convert them through iTunes, but that really needs time, as there are many 100‘s CD‘s...

Thanks to all ???

My first car didn't have a tape deck or CD player. I bought a portable CD player and an FM radio transmitter that plugged into the headphone jack. The CDs skipped a lot. The portable CD player had a buffer to overcome a few bumps, but it was pretty small and didn't work on every road. Granted that was in 1994. It's possible that portable CD players have improved and can handle more/bigger bumps in the road. It's something to consider when shopping for one.

 

[Shayne]

I am also old school and have a collection of CD's, although I have not touched them since converting all of them to FLAC. FLAC is lossless and takes a bit less space than the original stereo 16-bit 44.1-kHz PCM tracks on disc.

Lossless (a Flac setting or another extension) is a container and does no converting. You can think of it like a zip file that compresses the wav and then extracts and serves it to the player in bit perfect (wav) cd format. You can go from wav to flac to wav and the hash of the 2 wav files should be identical. At that point you know for sure your flac setup is right.

 

[highmesa]

For the price of those devices, you could subscribe to Apple or Amazon music and have (almost) all the CDs in the world for 2 years.

 

[ab13]

There is nothing better than to rip your CD's with EAC to lossless audio (flac or AAC iphone lossless) with a front end program like foobar or something else. This will give you your entire audio collection on one thumb (hard) drive and/or on a phone. Google: Converting my CD to lossless audio files. It is free, will be well worth your time and most likely you will be happy that you did. Not sure how the MME reacts to a thumb drive of music yet but it accepts your phone. Nothing spinning, no changing and all already to play.

The question being, what formats does the Mach E support. Is it known to support lossless formats?

 

[Shayne]

The question being, what formats does the Mach E support. Is it known to support lossless formats?

The 94 gigs of acc lossless on my iphone say it will. There is absolutely no reason for it not to as it has worked in countless rental cars hardwired and ota. Lossless can be stored and played on the phone so the answer is yes. What will happen if you plug in a usb drive with flac on it I have no idea?

 

[MerryBrown]

Definitely agree and a good option. Get two thumb drives and keep one safe as a back up so you do not need to do it again. I am Old School also but some tech just makes things so much easier on the mind. It is perfectly legal if you own the CD .

Yes, I have a customer who does this type of this as his job. He converts all kinds of analog things into digital. I have not used him, but I know there are those kinds of businesses all over. Thery must be in Europe too?

 

[kennelh]

I am also old school and have a collection of CD's, although I have not touched them since converting all of them to FLAC. FLAC is lossless and takes a bit less space than the original stereo 16-bit 44.1-kHz PCM tracks on disc.

....

As far as ripping compact discs to FLAC, it takes only a few minutes per disc, while you work on other things on your computer. For most albums the programs that do the extraction can fill in the album/track titles using crowdsourced data, the only thing you may need to do manually is to select an image for use as the cover. With storage cost being so low now, there is absolutely no reason to settle for mp3.

I did the same in 2010 when I got fed up with siriusxm. There are now many good programs for ripping as you said. If you rip a few at a time while you're already at the computer, it's not a lot of effort.

The only issue I found was the wide variation of volume between albums; when on shuffle I was constantly turning the volume knob. I eventually went back through all my FLAC files using a script to "normalize" them.

 

[tomtyler23]

My first car didn't have a tape deck or CD player. I bought a portable CD player and an FM radio transmitter that plugged into the headphone jack. The CDs skipped a lot. The portable CD player had a buffer to overcome a few bumps, but it was pretty small and didn't work on every road. Granted that was in 1994. It's possible that portable CD players have improved and can handle more/bigger bumps in the road. It's something to consider when shopping for one.

i will

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