Transferring iTunes Library onto an SD Card

It'll depend on the equipment in the car. My Octavia takes an SD card, but it manages to read the metadata, so album/track order are preserved. It's just a matter of transcoding the files to mp3 and drag & drop. But other makes will work differently.

Maybe ask on a marque-specific forum? They exist for most manufacturers, and are usually good for finding info.

John

Are your albums currently in the

iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Artist Name 1\Album 1\Songs...
iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Artist Name 1\Album 2
iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Artist Name 2\Album 1
iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Artist Name 3\Album 1
iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Artist Name 3\Album 2

format?  As copying and pasting from the Music folder, to the root of the SD/USB card, this should be read and indexed correctly by the car with no issues - it is in my Hyundai at least.  No other wizardry needed.

If you can clarify the make of car and year, others might be able to chime in if there's a 'special process'.

The only thing's I have read about are

1) The formatting type for the USB/SD card can play a factor

2) Size limitations of SD/USB the car can read i.e. you can put in a 128GB USB/SD but the car can only read up to 32GB.  

3) Depending on the make, there are certain music files it can read and bit depth MP3 to 320, not FLAC etc.

Those pieces of info should be in the car manual.

Guy

I used XLD and converted to MP3 at the same time for space reasons. I set XLD to preserve directory structure. Which it did. It preserved the album and artist structure, but my car's software still had some issues. It seems to be related to whether an artist has music in "Compilations" as structured by iTunes. (itunes also put some non-compilations in that folder for some reason.) iTunes can figure it out OK and makes no difference on my home playback. But in my car only that artist's "Compilations" stuff is visible and the rest of the artists' stuff isn't recognised. The workaround was to remove the Compilations folder and put it on a different stick.

The car seems to struggle with a near-full 128GB stick but splitting to 3 sticks, including the aforementioned "Compilations" stick it seems to work OK. It may relate to limits on total directory size/structure (number of levels and total number of folders.

Weirdly, my car finds some album artwork that I've never seen on iTunes. I guess it's hidden somewhere in the metadata.

Winky do you have in edit / preferences/ store  'automatically download artwork' ticked ?  As iTunes could present differently to what is stored in the meta, depending on if it was encoded through a different source.

John

as per Guy I just copied and pasted the desired folders from file explorer onto two 32Gb cards (I split jazz & everything else).  This worked fine and the car (audi) reads them fine. More recently I've been using an Ipod classic which can hold all my music (Itunes set to auto convert lossless down to 256 lbs files on synchronisation).  iPod just plugs into the usb in the car and all files and artwork show up fine.

@Winky - our car, a Mazda 3, seems to have it's own look-up database for album art (powered by Gracenote, it says) although it is chronically out-of-date.

I've found the last couple of cars seem to struggle with memory sticks in that they can't seem to get anything like random order for the tracks - they repeat orders of groups of tracks - very frustrating. But with iPods, the technology seems maturer (or they leave the randomness to the pod) and I don't have the same issue.

@John - do you have iTunes set to organise the files? If so, the file structure ought to be all there under iTunesMedia 

Thanks for the replies folks. Like you Dave; I have an Octavia. Do I need to transcode my AAC files (I use a Mac) to mp3?

It's only about 10 GB of data and a 16 GB SD card.

John.

Further - What happens is that the iTunes library I copy to the SD card (in 'Artists' list) appear on the card with all the track 1's, then all the track 2's etc - so albums are broken up.

Any more ideas?

John.

And .............. the problem seems to be that the SD card is only picking up track titles (and ordering them by track number) and not picking up artist info  - so I can't sort the resultant list on the SD card by artist.

John.

I tried typing a few separate folders for artists/albums into the card and dragging the relevant tracks into the pertinent folders. Excellent - the list on the card was now displaying artists/albums.

Excitedly plug SD card into car. Car display reads 'SD Card Error'. So I'm now doing a straight 'drag and drop' off all tracks onto the SD card, which I can apparently only play in a random order. Or I can continue to use Bluetooth to play the music stored on my iPhone through the car audio system. That works fine, but I'm limited for music storage space (about 7.5 GB) on a 16 GB phone.

John.

Just had a quick look at the backup 'car music' folder on my NAS, and noticed that it's arranged as one folder per album.  In this case it's only per album, with no per-artist folders, just album folders at the root level of the card.  Then within each folder, the tracks all have the track number at the start of the file name.  In some folders there are extra gubbins like artwork, and that doesn't seem to affect anything.

When the tracks actually play in the car though, the artist does show up on the now playing screen, so it's definitely looking at the metadata at least a bit.

It's a while since I set it all up, and I'd forgotten that it was like that.  I think I may have set up the conversion to mp3 so that it named the files that way.  Can't check that unfortunately, as I've since moved to Mac myself & don't have the old software to check.

But if it works with the files set up like that on my 62 plate Octavia, hopefully the same trick should work for you.

One extra little trick so that when you do want to use it, random play works properly and actually does draw from all of the files on the card.  (If you don't do this, apparently it's sometimes set up by default to just play the songs in the current folder in a random order, rather than all the songs on the card.  Which is useless if you've got per-album folders or somesuch).

Go into the setup on the head unit and make sure 'include subfolders' is checked where relevant (I can't remember off the top of my head where it is, but it shouldn't be too hard to find).  Then on the SD card, put a track or two at the root level of the card, so that when you view the contents of the card on your computer, you've got all your folders visible, but also a track or two on their own - not in a folder.

Then play one of those tracks (I use Call Me Al FWIW) and press Mix while it's playing, and it'll play from all of the files on the card, rather than just the current folder.

Thanks Dave,

Maybe it's a cranky Apple thing because the card will apparently only display track names and no artist info. I cannot seem to transfer across any artist or album information.

iTunes shows the file type of all my tracks as 'AAC audio file' and they are all showing on the SD card as 'Apple m4a' files. Is that the same thing?

The Gods of Streaming Audio continue to toy with, and irk me. Now you know why I use a CD player and a gramophone for serious (stress-free!) music listening.

Thanks again.

John.

I'd try transcoding the files to mp3 and see how that works.  Or at least a few albums as a test.  Probably best to remove everything else from the SD card when testing.

Working backwards with my setup, it seems the car head unit may not be organising what it displays by metadata, but rather by file structure.  It works out ok because the files are in folders according to albums, and have track numbers at the start of the file names.

But during playback, it's definitely reading the metadata.  So if yours is refusing to do so with AAC files, it may just be that the metadata parsing is better with mp3s.  It's a much more popular format, after all, so the designers could plausibly have concentrated on supporting it more than on other formats.

Borders Nick posted:

John

  iPod just plugs into the usb in the car and all files and artwork show up fine.

 

We used to use an iPod, but our new car, stupidly, does not have a way to plug it in without a cable coming across from the console to the dash. Our old car had a USB port inside the centre-console where the iPod lived. We've had to go for physically small USB sticks instead. There is also no way to charge your phone while listening to music (and same dumb issue with cable, of course). Seems like they want you to bluetooth your audio, but that's also really, really stupid if you want/have to plug your phone in to keep it charged anyway (with same dumb cable arrangement).

Here is a link to Octavia supported files et al, interesting that FLAC and WAV are supported.

http://www.skoda-auto.com/en/m...e=1&pageId=00079

This link will allow you to change the manufacturers year at the top and open online, mobile or PDF download

http://www.skoda-auto.com/en/m...1-2013#!pageId=00078

AAC and M4A are both supported types though. 

The crux of the issue seems to be the folder format.   Are you using a PC or Mac ?

Hi John

Do you have an iphone?  If so, you can synchronise your iphone with the albums/artists or tracks that you want from your itunes music library, then connect your iphone via bluetooth to your Octavia's entertainment system.

Then, all you have to do when you get in the car each day is to let the iphone connect via bluetooth to the car and press the "Media" button on the centre console screen.  Your music will then play from your iphone as the source.

This is what we have been doing for music in our cars.

If you have a different type of phone, then I suspect that you would need a different method of transferring the music on to your phone but the phone to car connection would be the same.

Hope this helps, FT 

I think that's what John's doing at the moment FT. As suggested above, try converting the files to mp3. I've used USB sticks for music on several cars & never had that problem. No comfort to you of course!

Thanks for the interest and replies folks. Bluetooth from the iPhone works fine and dandy Ian; but there's not enough storage capacity thereon.

I have of course been trawling Google and relevant car fora for answers to my missing data issue. No real definitive answers could I find. Some of them report that SD cards won’t read Apple AAC and they have to be mp3. Apparently not so - though the tracks transferred from iTunes show up as .m4a on the card.

Anyroad; I did some messing with some title info in iTunes; deleted one duplicated track and as a belt and braces solution, created a separate ‘Missing Music’ folder on the card then dragged and dropped the 113 missing tracks into that.

Re-plug into car and the missing stuff shows up in the new folder on the card. Success.

But now for the really weird bit. All artists right through to the end of the alphabet are now showing up in the main folder, whereas before; the list definitely stopped at ’The’ in the alphabetical list of artists. Buggered if I know, but at least I've sorted it. Something to do with the system being happy with file names and types I guess.

John.