Got a 2015 RAM Truck. Got a lot of CD's. No CD Player (anymore).
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Location: Northeastern Michigan, where Carhartt is a Designer Label
Distribution: Slackware 32- & 64-bit Stable
Posts: 3,541
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Got a 2015 RAM Truck. Got a lot of CD's. No CD Player (anymore).
The truck electronics has Blue Tooth (I don't have a phone I can load up with recordings). It has a USB jack (for a flash drive).
Does anybody have any idea whether it is possible to load up a flash drive and use that for playing what's on it? And, if so, what sort of recording to use? MP something or other?
A lot of new vehicles do not have a player (my '07 had a six CD changer built in to the radio -- load 'em in, punch a button and there you go.
I don't know diddly about Bluetooh, I really have no idea what to do (haven't tried burning a flash drive). There isn't much in the truck manual about what to do or how to do it. Do I need to buy a MP player and load it up somehow? The truck has a large screen with all sorts of choices, non of which are actually explained (it doubles as the display for the back up camera).
I would expect some basic information in the owners manual and/or a separate manual for the information center/radio or whatever Dodge calls its. If not then I might call your local dealer and ask since features can vary widely between models and year manufactured. You might find some info just by searching ye old internet.
If the radio can play songs from the USB port there should be an AUX selection that you can choose. I would guess it can read more then one format but I would try MP3s first on a FAT32 formatted drive. As suggest you can rip the CDs to MP3s on your computer.
I would expect with a 2015 model that the Bluetooth capability would include attaching a phone for hands free use and that you could play music using it as a source or possibly a Bluetooth capable player.
As michaelk stated, it is almost guaranteed that it will support mp3 files on a FAT32 formatted usb drive. Many will also support NTFS and exFAT filesystems, and wma audio files. Where it gets trickier is with different formats. Some might do m4a and flac, but I'd probably just recommend trying 1 file of each and see if it works (that way, you only have a few known songs on there and if one or two are missing, you know it doesn't support that extension).
It is likely at least the basics of this would be covered in the owners manual.
As for ripping your music, you'd need to find what file formats are allowed first, then just ensure your program supports that.
It might also be worth testing various tags. I know my car only supports the ASCII charset for mp3's id3 tags (metadata). So I needed to go through and remove all accented characters from song titles, albums, and/or artists. Luckily, if it contains a character that isn't supported, it just won't display that character rather than not displaying the tag completely.
My vote goes for the cdparanoia frontend ripperx, its relatively light on dependencies, has the reliability of cdparanoia (Never seen anything else resurrect a dead cd-r) and is dead simple to use.
+1 vote for ripperX, which in my eyes has only one minor drawback: If your CD isn't found in the freedb database, you can't submit the data you entered to freedb.org.
If you are using mp3-files, some other programs you might be interested in are easytag
a frontend to mp3gain, which allows you to modify the loudness over different mp3-files, so you won't have to turn the volume up and down again for different mp3-files. As far as I understand, this is also done by using a kind of tag, so that the original data is not modified. But it might be that your radio is not aware of this kind of tags.
For editing tags, I personally prefer puddletag (very similar to mp3tag for Windows). However, depending on the optional dependencies you select, it can have quite the dependency tree (but it reads just about any tags).
Last edited by bassmadrigal; 04-25-2017 at 03:00 PM.
I use dbpoweramp and mp3tag through wine, I know that seems odd considering how many free alternatives there are, but I have always loved dbpoweramp and it works flawlessly through wine. As others have stated its almost a guarantee that it will play MP3. I just wish car makers would start supporting lossless formats. I don't know of any stock stereo that yet supports flac or ALAC. I know pioneer makes some aftermarket decks that support flac. I use an old ipod on my 2011 GMC Terrain that has most of my songs in ALAC format which allows me to play lossless files that way, but even I have to admit I can't hear the difference between a 320kbs MP3 and a lossless file.
I know I said this above, but puddletag is quite similar to mp3tag. The developer created it specifically because he was sick of booting a VM to run mp3tag. So if you aren't booting the VM to use dbpoweramp and need to edit a tag, it might be worth looking into puddletag. It might be close enough that you don't need to resort to mp3tag (it was for me -- although, I'll still use mp3tag on my Windows machine).
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