Ian Key
Distinguished Member
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2022
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- Location
- Derby UK
- Driving
- MG4 Trophy LR
...and why does the update remove it when the sensor must have been fitted in the first place
Losing the CD player was one of the reasons I didn't want to change my car! I realised that if I got a new car there would be no CD player in it.
However, I have a lot of CDs and would like to listen to them in the car. As far as I know it is not illegal to make a copy of a music file you have bought and paid for, for your own use. And if it is, then frankly I don't care. I used to copy CDs on to my iPod and play them in the car like that, because it saved having to change the discs manually at the end of each side. But the car stopped talking to the iPod and rather than investigate this I just went back to shoving the actual discs into the slot.
I'm not interested in "the latest music", or "songs", I'm interested in German opera, 18th and 19th century choral music and Renaissance polyphony. Among other things. I don't really know what's on Amazon Music, and I'm not an Amazon Prime member.
It sounds as if all this is dependant on having a phone that talks to the car, and since we've just established that mine won't, then it's all off until I get one that does. I suppose I also need an unlimited data plan too, if all the music is coming off the internet. And what happens when the car is somewhere without a mobile signal?
It all seems a bit unnecessary when I have the music in digital form already, and there are USB devices which surely would feed these files to the car - as my iPod did in my previous car - if only I knew how to go about it.
Well, at least the FM radio works. Beautifully.
I'm the same I have a stick with 120 albums on but I've not been able to use it as the car will not see the folders only the tracks, I think the trophy will change the settings but my SE won't.Dunno. Does it have a USB connection?
I was wondering the same, because I have something like that from decades back. I haven't used it for years and I'm not sure I even know where it is, and I'd be surprised if it was possible to feed it to a USB port, but a new one might work.
I'd rather rip the CD files to a stick or an iPod simply to save changing the CD after every side. But I've been doing that in the Golf since it stopped talking to its iPod, so it's certainly a thought.
Should be R13.My car (SE SR) is only six days out from the dealer and I was assured that the latest software had been installed like that morning. I have the outside temperature display.
Hopefully ?I'll look into it. I wonder if this is something they might improve with a software update in future?
Just a thought, could you put music on your phone and plug it in and play the music as if it’s a memory stick as such?My computer guru tells me it's not feasible to put Android 10 on the phone I have. Looks as if it's going to be new phone time. Not right now though, because having just paid for the car (unexpectedly - my insurance decided to write off my previous car on account of a couple of scraped panels) the pips are squeaking slightly.
So, no AA, no possibility to use the phone to play media. No real functionality to play from a USB stick, by the sound of this. DAB radio doesn't work.
Thank goodness the FM radio is working. It's like 1990 all over again.
At least better than you had before ??Good news, I think. Just on an impulse, I plugged my iPod into the USB port on the MG. I promptly got a message saying "iPod detected", which was a lot more than I had expected! I got a list of "songs" which was very much less than what is actually on that iPod, but what was there played perfectly, and it was prepared to go on to the next track automatically when it had played the first one. Sound quality was excellent.
The bad news is that it wasn't seeing most of what is on the iPod. This seems to be the same issue that Carl brought up with the folders, and I'm not sure if it's something that's just confined to the SE. There may be some way to find other stuff that's on the iPod that I haven't figured out yet, but even if there isn't, I'm perfectly prepared to figure out how the system decides which "songs" it's going to see and pre-load what I want into that position on the iPod before setting out on a long journey.
I'm pretty sure this will work until such time as I get a new phone that will actually condescend to talk to the car, and get to grips with what audio that can provide.
Wow a lot of work let us know if it works ?SUCCESS. I'm reporting this just in case anyone else decides to try what I just tried.
Maybe iTunes is not the best programme to be doing this with, but hey, I tortured it into submission in the end. It does have the big advantage that when you get it fixed all the information from GraceNotes displayes on the player in the car.
As far as I can see, all the CD files I had copied in the past are in .m4a format. I can't see a way to convert these to .mp3, but iTunes will let you copy the original discs directly into mp3, so I took that route. (I'm not sure if there is a way of converting m4a to mp3 that I haven't found, to save me re-copying a lot of discs, but one thing at a time.)
I copies a couple of discs, taking advantage of the GraceNotes facility to import titles and artists and track names and so on, and that was all fine. However, at first I could find no way at all to change the file names to get the alphabetical order the same as the order I wanted them to play in. I changed them in iTunes, and when I copied them to a USB device (iPod or USB stick) they reverted. I changed them in the USB itself, and that made no difference.
However, I did manage it in the end by tracking down the files to their location on my C drive and changing the filenames from there. That seems to be the only place where it can be done - iTunes itself keeps the original file names and is only letting you change the track titles. But this does work. When I then copied the files over to the USB devices they retained the file names I wanted, and we are in business.
There is a slight hesitation when the player moves from one track to the next, but the VW iPod player had a glitch there too which I think was even worse - the very start of each track tended to be slightly clipped. Otherwise it's just peachy.
I am standardising filenames with the composer's name first, then the name of the work, then the track number. I've also added the track name, for example "Mendelssohn Requiem 01 Selig sind die Toten". However, I'm not sure it's necessary to name the track in the filename, because the GraceNotes information has it. I'm going to experiment with this a bit before I start wholesale copying.
I now have a very confused iPlayer, because it has no idea where all its files are, but that actually doesn't matter for present purposes.
I think by doing it this way any amount of music can be stored on a big USB stick, and it will come up coherently arranged by composer and work.
There are many ways to convert M4A to MP3:
There are also many apps that will help you manage your music library ... one I use is MP3TAG - this offers a facility to bulk-rename files based on the track attributes (tags). There are some standard rename settings, but you can also create your own. This would then rename all the tracks in your music library based on the rules you set.