Music File Confusion - Guru Advice Sought

[Lunar]

Any expert help on the below gladly received!

Currently using a USB connected 8GB iPod Nano (4th / 5th gen.) in the car and want to change to an SD card for greater capacity and to tidy up the armrest storage.

Need to rip my CD collection on an iMac running Sequoia, with an external ASUS drive.

Car unit (not F-Type) will only read…

.MP3 (fixed and variable to 320 kbits/s and 48 kHz).
.WMA (Fixed to 384kbit/s and 48 kHz. No DRM encrypted files or WMA Pro).
.aac files (.aac .mp4 .m4a .m4b - iTunes .m4p files not supported).

Want to have better than MP3 quality and album art.

Want to be able to play the same ripped files from iMac via bluetooth dongle to my home stereo, without having to duplicate to a different format.

I have no desire to have any music files on my iPhone.


Should I rip the CD’s using the Apple Music app or use a 3rd party iMac app?

What format and settings (where not auto set) should I use to rip the CDs to achieve the above desired outcome?


Many thanks for whoever can supply some clear words of wisdom on this.

[DEEDUZ]

Morning Lunar,

Try Installing VLC on your stick I know It works with movies and other apps but I'm not sure If will solve your problem you out as I'm In no way shape or form good at these things

Good luck,,,Davy

[Lunar]

Many thanks Davy - I remember some vlc files from work videos, so will look into its abilities.

[pirateprentice]

AAC encoded audio format is pretty universal and generally offers better quality than MP3 for the same file size.
.aac files are just the raw audio. As you want album art, you'll need AAC audio in a container format, most often a .m4a file.
.mp4 files are a similar container format but usually used for video.

I would expect .m4a files containing AAC audio, album art and other metadata to serve all your needs.
Complexities and limitations sometimes apply!

[Lunar]

Brilliant - exactly the sort of answer I was looking for and not too technical for me!

I’ll experiment with ripping a CD to .m4a and playing around with the result.

Thank you.

[pirateprentice]

No problem. I use mediainfo to examine what is inside files in terms of their audio coding etc. You might like to check the results of your ripping, to confirm AAC stream and its bitrate.
https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

[Millwheel]

If you've ripped your CDs to Apple Music, I can recommend an app called Export for iTunes to load the stuff you want from the Mac onto USB for the car. The app is highly customisable and also transfers artwork. Available in the App Store.

[Lunar]

Thanks for the info.

I’m already halfway through C of my A-Z collection and have checked that I can play the files on my Arcam stereo kit using the iMac as the controller and sending to a Bluetooth dongle into the pre-amp, so all going to plan so far.

Got a 64Gb (max. size for car media system) Extreme Pro SD card ordered for £13, so just need to successfully copy the music files to the card and check it reads and plays ok.

If I don’t hit a hitch along the way it will be nice surprise with regard to me and getting tech to do what I want, instead of what it wants to do, so fingers crossed.

[pirateprentice]

Got a 64Gb (max. size for car media system) Extreme Pro SD card ordered for £13, so just need to successfully copy the music files to the card and check it reads and plays ok.

One possible glitch is that the SD card will need to be formatted as exFAT to work in various places.
Mac OS allows special characters (such as asterisk, question mark, or pipe) in filenames that exFAT does not allow.
Ideally use a copy programme that changes those characters to be compatible.
Good luck!

[Lunar]

Appreciate the tip - exactly the sort of thing that would have tripped me up!