Sd Cards For Storing Music From Cds

[chokkie]

Hi techie ABers, We have just realised that, if we want to listen to music in our car when we're abroad (and unable to get English radio), we're going to have to download music from our CD collection onto SDs - it would seem that no cars nowadays have CD players ... (much to our chagrin and sadness LOL!). So would be grateful for some advice, please. Presumably the more storage on an SD card, the more CDs it will hold. Can anyone please advise - say I purchased a 64 gig SD card - how many CDs would it hold, please? And another question, presumably I can just stick the CD into my hard drive, pop in the SD card and follow the prompts on the screen? Is that about all there is to it? I thought I would buy a low-storage SD card initially, download a couple of CDs onto that, and then see how it plays in our car .... Any thoughts? Hope you can help, many thanks, Cheers, Chox.

[barry1010]

Over 8000 tracks converted to mp3

[barry1010]

If your car has a USB connector it will be less faff if you use a thumb drive rather than an SD card.

[barry1010]

I might be old fashioned but I still like to use Windows Media Player for ripping cds. I find it easy and reliable and you can choose the format.

[chokkie]

Thanks folks - but I would still appreciate some guidance about how I actually download the CD music to an SD card. we're rather thickie about all this stuff (wrong generation), just really wanted to know how many CDs we can get on which size SD card and how to do it. we don't know if car has a USB connector and don't know what a thumb drive it. and we will be changing our car at the end of March anyway ..... and we know that what we will probably be getting will have an SD drive .... sorry to sound ungrateful for the advice .... cheers, chox.

[Buenchico]

I assume that your car radio requires the files on your SD to be in MP3 format. That's a 'compressed' audio format and it's possible to select different levels of compression when you 'rip' the files from CD. (A radio station, hoping to maintain the very best quality audio for broadcasting might choose to use a low level of compression, resulting in relatively big files. A university wishing to archive the lectures of some of its academic staff might choose to use a fairly high level of compression, as audio quality wouldn't be so important; they'd then end up with some very small files).

So there's no fixed answer to your question. However I've just examined some tracks that I've ripped from a CD using the default settings in Windows Media Player and they average out at around 1 MB per minute. So each gigabyte of memory would give you around 1000 minutes of recording time, meaning that the 64 GB card you mention would hold about 64,000 minutes, or over 1000 hours.

[Buenchico]

Instructions for 'ripping' CDs (to produce MP3 files), can be found here:
https://computer.howstuffworks.com/rip-cd-using-windows-media-player.htm

[barry1010]

What will you put your sd card in to to play it?
A thumb drive is also called a flash drive or pen drive. It is easier to handle than an sd card. It looks like this https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1588648

If you have a Windows PC you can download your cds to your hard drive using Media Player.
https://computer.howstuffworks.com/rip-cd-using-windows-media-player.htm

When you've done that, insert your sd card or thumb drive, open windows media player, drag the tracks you want in to the right hand column and then click the 'sync' button.

[chokkie]

Thanks everyone for your help with this - and Buenchico, thanks for the link, that's really helpful. In truth, this is really for our new car, and we don't know what that one will have until we get it at the end of this month. So I am going to get a cheap SD card, rip a couple of CDs worth of music and see how it works in our current car. But many thanks to everyone for their suggestions and advice. Cheers, Chox.

[bhg481]

Be careful about the size of card you buy; there may be a recommendation in your handbook. SDHC (up to 32GB) and SDXC (64GB upwards) are addressed differently and not all devices will accept SDXC cards.

[CrapAtCryptics]

I find, as a rule of thumb, that tracks tend to average at about 4mb - so 256 per gbyte.