USB music for the car without a CD player

Most new vehicles no longer have a CD player. My car has a USB port into which I’m supposed to plug in a media device, controlling it with the media/music app on the dash console. I have dozens of CDs I wish to rip to a thumb drive to play them in my vehicle. I want to see the exact same design, background and playlist as though I were playing a CD in VLC on my PC. I need each CD to show up separately, so the tracks aren’t jumbled together. How can I do this? GERALD GIBSON

Gerald and his wife have two relatively new 4x4s, both of which have touchscreen displays and accept voice commands. With this in mind, the best approach to take when preparing music on a USB thumb drive is to stick to some universal rules that should work across these and other similar vehicles. For use in a car, format the USB thumb drive in FAT32 format, and avoid using sticks that are larger than

32GB – Windows doesn’t like formatting larger drives to FAT32, and the cars might not read them. Second, check your owner’s manual for compatible file formats. If in doubt, be sure to rip your CDs to MP3 format. If your files are already in another format, use MusicBee’s conversion tool (browse to the parent folder, then select MusicBee > Tools > Convert Format to convert to MP3). Voice commands also rely on music files being correctly ‘tagged’ with metadata – Windows Media Player and

MusicBee should add this while ripping, but you can verify and edit metadata using MP3Tag ( www.mp3tag.de/en/) if necessary. NICK PEERS