External CD drive options?

[Sue]

Anyone who added an external CD drive. What did you purchase? I have so many it would take me forever to put them on a flash drive.

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[PaulOinMA]

Having many CDs is actually the reason to burn them to laptop and not get a CD player in the vehicle. ?

I would just burn a few CDs at a time to my laptop. Then when I had a bunch done in my music master file, recopy the file to USB.

Good winter project.

 

[Bill G]

Yup, when my old stereo started to crap out I recorded all my CD’s to my computer. When I wanted to put ‘em in car, just a “quick” copy to USB stick. Now I could drive from LA to Boston and never hear the same song twice ?

 

[HUSBANDOFBS]

Ship the lot to me and I'll, at no charge except for return shipping, rip 'em all to 320kbs mp3 with proper id tags and cover art, then copy all to your provided USB drive and ship 'em back. I'm retired and only half way joking here.

I recently, leisurely, ripped 200+ over a four day period. With some dedication, the right software and a fast PC it's really not a bad chore.

An external CD rom, even if very compact, is still going to be a headache to "mount"/fumble with and possible dangerous distraction. Plus, playing all from a single solid state device is just pure luxury.

Good luck on your journey, music remains a top 5 life pleasure.

 

[BritNowInOhio]

I’ve looked at external CD drives lately but it does seem like a bit of an over complicated faff.
I’m also considering a personal CD player with a 3.5mm Bluetooth adapter.

I have music on a couple of USB sticks but I experience an unusual and very First World problem with playback in the Bronco…and actually also in the Hyundai Kona I had before this.
All the songs in the albums just want to play in alphabetical order, instead of track order.
You may say it’s something to do with the way I ripped them, except I’ve had these sticks for quite a while and they played just fine (and as I wanted them to) in the C-Max before the Kona, and indeed a couple of cars before that too.
Odd.
Maybe infotainment software in more modern cars just reads folder structure differently.

 

[PaulOinMA]

There was an old issue of songs playing in alphabetical order. Did that on my '14 Escape. Discussed with fix on Escape forum.

You can manually go in and put numbers in the file it is reading the songs from

There aare programs that will do this for you.

But. I suspect there's something else going on. How are you ripping the CDs.

 

[PaulOinMA]

Sue, once you rip the CDs to laptop, you can also load them to your phone, too.

I have our master file of over 7k songs currently in our vehicles with USB.

My wife and I both have subsets of the master file on our phones of what we listen to more. We then use Android Auto. Our phones are Android

 

[BritNowInOhio]

There was an old issue of songs playing in alphabetical order. Did that on my '14 Escape. Discussed with fix on Escape forum.

You can manually go in and put numbers in the file it is reading the songs from

There aare programs that will do this for you.

But. I suspect there's something else going on. How are you ripping the CDs.

I ripped them maybe 7 or 8 years ago, so I really can’t remember too much. Probably just the standard ripping feature in the old Windows Media Player.
It plays in track order in my wife’s 2015 Prius C and it played okay in the 2013 C-Max I had, just over a year ago.
However, in the 2024 Bronco Sport and the 2023 Kona that I’ve owned in the past year, it wants to go alphabetically. That’s why I thought that maybe an underlying piece of software architecture had possibly changed.

I’m going to have to wait to examine the sticks or do a re-rip as my PC bit the dust, and my wife is having a new one built for me, via one of her friends.

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