I’m one of those people - I’ve still got my music collection on CDs. Attempting to both join the 21st century, and cut down on boxes of crap, I’ve been ripping them onto a dedicated external hard drive.
I can listen to what’s on the hard drive using an app called “ES File Explorer” when I’m at home, or elsewhere if I have a computer with internet via FTP. But I can’t figure out how to listen while driving, which is important to me.
(Did you know they don’t put CD players in new cars anymore?!? Get offa my lawn.)
I’m including a photo showing all audio source options available in my car. Can any of them connect me to my music without me having to buy another gadget or am I stuck with radio and Pandora?
Note: I own a decrepit old iPod that still works, but don’t have an Apple computer, and if I ever had an iTunes account I’d have no idea how to access. (I have a vague sense that my late husband set one up. Not much help there.)
In fact, cloud solutions might be iffy, since a lot of my CDs originated from his collection of burned discs that he & his buddies copied off each other in college. I’ve been told that cloud storage from Amazon or Apple checks for such piracy and … I dunno, deletes those tracks? Nukes all your data? Sends men in dark sunglasses & black suits to the door?
I’m not a very tech savvy person (I just play one on TV) so there’s likely some very newbie mistakes here. Please help?
(Bonus Q: if anyone can recommend a better file access program or app, I’m not finding ES File Explorer to be very user friendly.)
Is your “dedicated external hard drive” connected by USB to something on the network when you play music off your phone? Because there appears to be a “play off USB” option in the picture of the head unit’s menu (upper right icon). Unplug the external hard drive from whatever it’s plugged into at home, plug into the USB plug somewhere in the car, use that menu selection to choose music to play, play using normal controls.
ETA: I’m kind of guessing here, because you don’t tell enough about where your music is stored. If it’s all stored in this external hard drive, you’ll have to take the hard drive everywhere you want to play the music. That makes it a lot less portable, although it might work OK in the car. Nevertheless, the answer to your bonus question will depend on the details of how this external hard drive thing works. And exposing FTP to the open internet is a terrible idea.
I know you said you didn’t want to buy anything else but USB sticks are super cheap. If your car has a USB port, it would be 8 bucks and 30 minutes of your time to load a bunch of music onto the stick and just leave it in the car. No mucking about with file explorer programs or lugging an external hard drive back and forth from the house to the car.
As far as plugging the hard drive into the USB port, the catch would be that the port needs to provide enough juice to power the hard drive. I don’t think that’s an issue if you use a memory stick flash drive.
Another vote for just using a flash drive. I’ve been doing it for years and it’s your optimal solution.
Otherwise, your typical modern car stereo can connect to your phone via Bluetooth. You can upload your music to a service like Google Music and play it through your phone. This might cost you phone data though depending on your plan (I know T-Mobile allows for free data for many streaming services but YMMV)
It looks her car stereo does have a setting for Bluetooth showing up on the display, so this is a great idea. And all four big wireless carriers and many of the MVNOs offer totally unlimited data these days, so that’s not an issue.
The USB port is the way I go. I use a micro SD card with an adapter. It barely sticks out at all. (You can buy the two together.) This is a really, really easy way to do this.
As to the iPod: What does having an Apple computer or iTunes account have to do with this??? Neither is remotely necessary to load up your own ripped songs to an iPod. I’ve never used an Apple computer* or iTunes.
OTOH you would have to keep the iPod in the car, charge it, turn it on and off.
If you can spend $9.00 on a thumb drive without running afoul of the “no buying another gadget” rule, then IMHO, that’s the best solution.
Buy a USB flash drive, plug it into your computer and move music files onto it. This does involve a couple minutes of waiting for the files to move, but if you’re on the computer anyway, no biggie.
Plug the drive into your car’s music system (there’s an icon for USB in the screenshot, so I’m pretty sure you can do this), and listen away. No worries about whether your phone has connectivity or whether you’re going over your phone’s data limit or any other connection issues.
You probably won’t get a drive big enough for ALL your music, but every month or so you can spend 15 minutes swapping in new albums for variety.
As an alternate version of this, if your phone has bluetooth, you can move music files onto your phone (depending on phone memory and/or whether it can take a memory card), then connect your phone to the car stereo. Which way to go probably comes down to choosing the car stereo/USB interface or the phone music player, as far as being easy to use while driving.
You can also just copy your music to your phone. Depending on how much music you have and how much space is available on your phone. This is what I do. (Or did before Spotify, at least, now I do most of my car listening via streaming.)
USB stick or iPod would be better than your phone if you don’t like your music interrupted by pesky phone calls and notifications. The lack of a phone is where dedicated players like an iPod have an advantage in some cases. As for how much music you can put on a memory card or stick, I have a 64 GB card which is completely full but has about 500 albums ripped at 320 Kbps. That much memory is about $20 these days.
Awwww hellz no. I meant to specify in my O.P. but dedicating space on my phone for music is a no-go.
I take a lot of pictures, and have a few memory-heavy apps. Music has to be in a separate place, if nothing else than because I want to create a long-term or permanent digital storage area. This all started so I could shed some of these $%&@! discs.
I think maybe you’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. How much music are we talking? I’ve been pruning my music but I currently have 13,034 songs (700+ hours of music) and that only comes up to 46.3GB which I keep on a 64GB thumb drive I bought for under $20. I say dump the external hard drive and keep everything on a couple of USB drives. I have one in the car, which is essentially my backup, and one in my desktop.
You can buy this size memory stick for very little money. even a 16 gb will give you weeks of continuous music for $10. It will look like another button on the stereo.
I wondered about that, since that would be the default solution. Still, if you’re using FTP to transfer music files to your phone to play, and you don’t clean up after yourself (i.e., delete files as soon as they’re played), you’re already dedicating space on your phone for music. Only unintentionally.
The same one I pointed out to connect the removable hard drive (assuming it’s USB): the USB button on the top right of the menu.
