Moving music from Nas to SD - how?

Does your Mac have a card reader, or can you get one to connect to it? Then open both the SD card and the music folder on the NAS in the Mac Finder, and either drag and drop, or cut and paste the albums you want. Probably quicker if the Mac is on a wired connection rather than WiFi.

Yes, the iMac does have card reader. You make it sound so easy!,

ill give it a whirl later

many thanks

Gary

Fathings cat. Unfortunately this may not be a straight forward as it should be.

But you need to answer a few questions.

What format is your music in?

What is your car and what year is it?

My car is a 2015 Audi with 2 SD slots. My music was ripped my an n-Serve (from memory wav files).

thanks 

Gary

OK I had a 2014 audi A6 with the two slots (and sim in the middle)

That wont read wavs particularly well, it *could* play them but wont tell you what they are, if you know what I mean. 

The first port of call then, is to create MP3s of those files. I used to have an NS02 which I think could do that and I would assume the nserve can too.

You need to convert to MP3. Once thats done they will be stored in the 'lq' folder of the nserve which you can access from your pc or mac. 

Perhaps someone will chip in on how to convert to MP3 and I'll guid you through finding them for your memory card.

I had two x 64 gig cards in my audi, which allowed for a big old lump of MP3s, very handy!

Garyi makes a good point, particularly as you have a Unitiserve. First, if your car can handle WAV, it may or may not be able to handle the metadata in a Unitiserve CD rip. Try a couple of albums and see.

If you need to use a different format, you have 2 options. You can use the US to create a 'parallel library' of MP3s and copy these to the SD card. Personally, I find MP3 quality poor, even for car use, so I wouldn't do this, but you may disagree. Alternatively, if you need/want to use a different format, you must convert to FLAC on the Unitiserve before transferring the files otherwise the metadata will probably not be viewable on non-Naim devices. This will give you lossless files with smaller file sizes. Again, convert a couple of albums as a test before you do the whole lot.

You could be in luck with flac however and again its back in the day, I think converting wav to flac on naim devices deleted the wav, so thats a compromise you might not be willing to make.

FWIW in car driving at 70 miles an hour the ultimate quality of an audio file really wasn't a bother to me, but I acknowledge it could be to some.

garyi posted:

You could be in luck with flac however and again its back in the day, I think converting wav to flac on naim devices deleted the wav, so thats a compromise you might not be willing to make.

Yes, converting to FLAC will remove the WAV, but you can set the US to transcode FLAC to WAV on playback, so you store as FLAC for versatility and smaller file size, and the streamer still sees WAVs.

Hi Fathings Cat,

I have been trying to do the same as you for a few weeks now. I also own an Audi (Bose MMI, 2  SD slots plus sim). I’m a bit further on in that I have tried various formats on the SD cards. To date the only format that I have had any success with is MP3. WAV and FLAC will not play at any resolution. I have read the manual which appears to confirm my findings. I’ve not tried WMA, AAC, AIFF or ALAC. MP3 at 320 CBR is what I’m using now. Note if your Audi has the Jukebox facility it is similarly limited to format types and will not (as far as I’ve found) accept playlists apart from the built in ones.

If you have more success I’d like to hear.

DWO

MP3 is the way to go in cars I find.. MP3 can be encoded fantastically well, but alas the MP3 encoders in quite a lot of consumer software is dire. If you are serious, get a programme called dBpoweramp (which uses the very highly regarded LAME encoder) and convert your lossless files with metadata to the highest MP3 variable encoding rate setting.. which from memory is 320kbps VBR (variable bit rate) which you tell dBpoweramp by using the highest quality setting  -V 0. Your MP3s will sound first class. At high bitrates MP3 arguably surpasses AAC... lower bitrates it’s the other way around... but you need to use a quality encoder.. and not iTunes etc.

Also MP3 can use three different metadata formats and not all players can read all three.. so dBpoweramp allows you to select id3v1, id3v2 or APEv2 to suit your car player.

100%   MP3 for cars is the way to go.    I kept the faith with USB loaded lossless for quite a while,  but with an iPod/Phone or similar,  its far easier & user friendly.   And when driving,  at whatever speed or driving conditions,   my first concern is to drive & all that entails,   I really don't need hifi,  just something more interesting than whatever is on radio.

ChrisSU posted:

First, if your car can handle WAV, it may or may not be able to handle the metadata in a Unitiserve CD rip. Try a couple of albums and see.

 

You will need to strip out any metadata otherwise you'll hear a burst of white-noise between tracks. Use dBpoweramp, add DSP 'ID Tag Processing' and set to delete all tags

If that is the case, it sounds a very ropey non compliant WAV player. WAV files are RIFF files and are designed to contain elements which do not have to be read or understood by the file reader... and the reader just skips over the number of bytes for the unsupported element. I suggest you might be better off with MP3 if your WAV reader behaves like this... as you don’t know what else it will be getting wrong.

robgr posted:

ChrisSU posted:

First, if your car can handle WAV, it may or may not be able to handle the metadata in a Unitiserve CD rip. Try a couple of albums and see.

You will need to strip out any metadata otherwise you'll hear a burst of white-noise between tracks. Use dBpoweramp, add DSP 'ID Tag Processing' and set to delete all tags

Strange, I have never heard a burst of white noise between tracks. Are you talking specifically about Unitiserve CD rips?

I should have said my car is a 2017 A6 and exhibits the white-noise issue and I do have to say that I was not very impressed at all! I found the solution on an Audi forum. Any other Audi owners out there that care to comment?

To SIS,

Many thanks for the comment re MP3 and using VBR. I’ll now change my format from CBR to VBR - still at 320 as that is the max that the Audi will allow. As an aside I’m sourcing a cable to connect my Phone via headphone socket to the Audi Music Interface socket. My phone has inbuilt quad dac and music on it is in Flac. This method will mean that I have to use phone control for music selection so cannot be done whilst driving but may produce better sound.

Ok, given some of the other comments about the quality or lack of it with Audi multimedia software, you might want to do a quick test and confirm your Audi software can handle VBR before you batch a large volume of encodings.

Hi ROBGR,

My Audi is 2017 Q3. Even though it has the updated tech pack the audio capability appears to be somewhat behind the times. I have not experienced the white noise issue, if memory serves me well all I got was a “media not recognised” message when trying flax and wav.

Simon, Many thanks for the tip, I think I successfully tried vbr before. Not difficult to change as I am only doing a few GB and dbpoweramp is fairly fast.

Conscious that we are a little off piste now from the original post - apologies

DWO

I drive a 2018 Audi SQ5.  It has a B&O MMI system.  The CD player and SD slots are in the glove compartment.  I was listening to my A&K SP1000 from aux. in.  Sounds great, but I noticed some static or sound between tracks which, oddly enough, disappeared when I unplugged the USB power supply.  I loaded up a 128GB SD card (read speed 300 mb/sec, not sure if that matters) with FLAC files from my Core through my Mac.  Also sounds amazing.  Plus, added advantage is that the album metadata appears on the dashboard screen, so now I can quickly look to see what's playing and what's coming up.  Plus, of course, I can use all of the Audi features, like track selection and so on.  Couldn't do that with the A&K, where I had to fumble for track selection, for example.  And so far, no annoying sounds between tracks.

My 2015 Audi TTS has the B&O MMI.

i have I Mac and serv - can I transfer files from sev to I Mac to SD card?

thanks

ps thanks for all those that have contributed 

fathings cat posted:

My 2015 Audi TTS has the B&O MMI.

i have I Mac and serv - can I transfer files from sev to I Mac to SD card?

thanks

ps thanks for all those that have contributed 

 

Yes you can transfer them from the UServe directly to an SD card in your Mac's reader, but as others have said, you probably want to let the UServe make mp3 copies of them first, and then transfer the mp3's to your sd card.  OR you can copy the .wav files from the UServe to the Mac, convert to mp3 on the Mac, fix the metadata (as there will be none) and then transfer to your sd card.

fathings cat posted:

My 2015 Audi TTS has the B&O MMI.

i have I Mac and serv - can I transfer files from sev to I Mac to SD card?

thanks

ps thanks for all those that have contributed 

Further to the various issues raised above, I think you need to put a few albums on the SD card in one format and test this in the car. If that doesn't work, try another until you are happy with the result in terms of both sound quality and metadata.

The actual file transfer should be simple, insert SD card into iMac, find it in a Finder window, find the Unitiserve in another Finder window, and drag a folder from one to the other.

Grrrr....

Gave up on moving files from NAS (too hard.... ) and used the cd’s I had ripped on my iMac to iTunes. Annoyingly all the files are in M4A which play with no sound in my car..... looks like there is a solution to convert to MP3 on I tunes but that involves converting individual tracks - I’ll be there for ever......

I am now rerippong some cd’s to I tunes in mp3 format and this is working.

Such a shame I cant rip straight from Nas to SD card for my car - Bloody technology (or jus my grasp of it!)

Gary

I thought you had a Unitiserve - why not convert to MP3 on that instead of re-ripping?

Good point, how do u do this?

Gary