usb pen.

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gavroche

Getting old but not past it
Location
North Wales
Can anyone advise me on how to transfer CDs on a usb pen? My new car is coming in March ( Renault Captur) and it doesn't have a cd player but just a usb port. Apparently this is the new thing on new cars. I am only computer literate with Words, Excel and Powerpoint, anything else I am out of my depth. Also the pen I intend to use is 8 gb, so how many songs can I put on that? Thank you so much you knowledgeable people in this forum .
 
A cd is ~700MB and your pen is 8,000MB so you can transfer ~10 times as much as is on one CD. Depending on the compression/format etc, you may be able to squeeze a fair bit more on there. I'm presuming your CDs are bought CDs, so you'll have to rip the songs off the CD into a mp3 or wmp format and then copy them onto the pen drive. Just about any media player will rip songs off a CD and then you just copy them onto the pen drive like a normal file. Normally, the ripped songs will be arranged by artist and album in folders.

You can try this before your car arrives by just ripping the songs onto the pen drive and them playing them from the pen drive (or computer hard disk)

Must admit, I know nothing about Renault's music system, but I'd be surprised if this doesn't work.
 

shouldbeinbed

Rollin' along
Location
Manchester way
A writable CD is 700MB, a bog standard music album CD from a shop will be significantly less full than that. Most of my MP3 music download from Amazon/Itunes or copied from CD's (know an Ripping from CD for some reason) are generally 5-15MB each. You should just be able to copy & paste from your home computer My Music file onto the Pen drive the same way you would a Word doc or powerpoint presentation.

1GB is actually 1024 MB so 8 GB is closer to 8200 MB & a rough calculation from that 8200MB /15 MB is 546.66666 songs. So you'd get give or take 500 songs at a decent quality file size or significantly more at a lower but still perfectly listenable quality with a wee bit of space left over for a new album or two before having to decide what is deleted and what is kept on the usb stick.

one thing I'd check is the capacity of the in car unit to read upto a certain sized card - its an oldish thing now but some music playbacks would only recognise upto e.g. 4GB plugged in devices. nowadays I'd be surprised if 8GB was a problem, or lots more, but maybe one to just check before going to the trouble of making your 8GB mixtape
 
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Firestorm

Veteran
Location
Southend on Sea
I have plugged in my phone and a usb drive into my renault system and neither has been recognised. Still working out how to get it to work will try the ipod next
 

drummerbod

Senior Member
Location
South Derbyshire
The in car media readers have limitations. Format the USB stick to FAT32 for best compatibilty. Also they don;t play many media formats like WAV or FLAC. Rip to MP3 for best compatibilty.

If you rip your CDs to MP3 using a bitrate of 256kbps then a 10 track album will typically be around 80MB. 8000MB (your USB stick) will hold 100 albums roughly.

Use something like Exact Audio Copy - it's free.

There are many other CD rippers out there including WIndows Media Player etc.
 
OP
OP
gavroche

gavroche

Getting old but not past it
Location
North Wales
Thanks to you all. I have 3 months to sort it out so should be ok by then. If all fails, I am sure my son will do it for me when he is at home.
 
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