Music sources. What are you using?

[ember1205]

13 hours ago, dieselfan1 said:

 

What has the best sound quality? 

 

When you're talking about quality like this, whether audio or video, you have to sort of "follow the path" from source media and see where the limiting factor is to know what you'll get. Example: Take a quality-mastered audio CD, rip it to lossless FLAC-encoded files, and then store it on a USB drive. Put that drive into the truck and play them back and you'll get about the best sound you can hope for from the audio system - you're providing the best quality source material you can.

 

If you take that same exact CD and rip it direct to MP3 with too low of a sampling rate and it's going to sound bad. The same high quality rip broadcast to the truck through a phone app that re-encodes on the fly to lower quality as a way to save bandwidth, and the sound will suffer.

 

The fewer the steps between the original material and how it gets "into" the audio system combined with the highest quality methods of storing / converting that material get you the best sound.

 

For me, I rip all of my own CD's using a high sample rate direct to MP3 and stash the files on USB drives. It's possible to store things based on artist/album/song title for search and sort purposes and you can also make playlists if you know the format the system is looking for. I can carry a TON of music in just a few small pluggable devices and the sound quality of it generally on the higher end of what's possible with the audio system because I kept the quality better while ripping from the source in the first place.

[diyer2]

It's simple. The bigger the file size for a song the more detail= better sound.

[Swamp Dweller]

Anybody have suggestions about how to arrange and label mp3 files to be read as "Playlist".

 

i have about 3000 songs on thumb drive labeled as 60s, 70s, 80s like XM does. Each song file is labeled in the meta data as well as folders labeled. On my previous vehicles, I could choose genre or "folder" to play what I wanted.

 

On this truck, only options are songs, artists, albums, playlist. I relabeled my folders as Playlist 70s etc., .......still won't recognize any playlist.

[Silverado4x4]

For me its what ever is on the radio, if I don't like the song I change the station. 

[KARNUT]

OH GOSH, not me. It’s been 30 years since I listened to FM. I’ve belonged to music clubs since CDs came out. Once I could start burning I developed a 7K song library. I have a couple of iPods and all my albums are backed up to mp3 CDs. Now with pandora, IHeart, and Amazon Prime. You pick an artist and instantly create a playlist. You don’t like a song hit thumbs down, you don’t hear it again. I can throw a good set of earbuds in and my iPhone, couldn’t be better. In my old truck with the wore out speakers a good Bluetooth speaker problem solved. 

[ember1205]

9 hours ago, Swamp Dweller said:

Anybody have suggestions about how to arrange and label mp3 files to be read as "Playlist".

 

i have about 3000 songs on thumb drive labeled as 60s, 70s, 80s like XM does. Each song file is labeled in the meta data as well as folders labeled. On my previous vehicles, I could choose genre or "folder" to play what I wanted.

 

On this truck, only options are songs, artists, albums, playlist. I relabeled my folders as Playlist 70s etc., .......still won't recognize any playlist.

 

I built some playlists for a couple of SD Cards I had in the Camaro. I have to find the cards so I can pull specific examples, but this is the premise: https://www.cruzetalk.com/threads/how-to-build-a-playlist-for-your-usb-input.6071/

 

The important thing is to modify the text file (playlist) to use "relative" paths to the media. Example:

 

If your USB drive on your computer is X: and you have a file/folder structure like: "Boston\Boston\More Than A Feeling.mp3", you would place your playlist at X:\MyPlaylist.m3u and inside of that file you would put "./Boston/Boston/More Than A Feeling.mp3" to reference the media file. No drive letters.