I have a huge assortment of music stored on my phone, enough that I could probably listen 2 days nonstop and not hear the same song.

My issue: while I normally like Bluetooth, I despise using it in the car. Whenever I make/receive a call, the phone always asks if I want to use the speaker, or play the conversation thru the radio.

Now, for my questions: keep in mind I am NOT fluent with phones, or modern technology in general. Just don’t have the patience or desire to fool with it.

Is there a way to put the music library on a flash drive? Or better yet, just set up the damn phone so that it plays music, and doesn’t try to conduct the phone conversation thru tge damn radio?!

My original thought, once the music is on a flash drive, plug it into the usb port on the back of the radio, eliminating the Bluetooth from the discussion. In other words, use the phone and the radio for its original intended purpose!! I was about to congratulate myself on my ingenuity, when my far more technically savvy son pointed out the music I have saved is under an Apple licensing agreement, I’d have to buy every song. Damn you Steve Jobs!!!

Maybe I’m making a far bigger deal out of this than needed, but having to go thru all these steps to make or receive a call really pisses me off. I like simplicity. Am I the only one in readerland who is annoyed by this crap?

 

So there are little universal kits for USB. I had this in my desk drawer, jacked a usb stick into my work phone, and took this picture.

USB sticks are USB A, so you need a female USB A cord going into whatever your phone does. Hooked up right, the app for file management will let you copy files from the phone to the stick.

Also, you could bounce it through a computer if you want. Hook phone to computer, use computer to see files, copy to computer hard drive, copy to usb drive, if it is easier. Do it with ONE file first because sometimes certain file structures are preferred by electronics. Most everything speaks FAT32, but not everything can do NTFS, which is what Windows likes most. I can talk you through any particulars.

Your bill will be coming along shortly in the form of my asking for valve body TH400 advice.

 

Too many acronyms, I don’t have the vocabulary for all that!! I’ll show this message to my son, hopefully he knows what all that means and more importantly, what to do with it!!

I’m much more comfortable with transmission stuff! Hopefully I can help.

 

If you have a Samsung phone, try this
Settings - Sounds and vibration - Separate App Sound Turn that on and select the music apps you want to redirect the sound or vibration to your phone so it doesn't interrupt your music.

If you have other android, instead of "Separate App Sound" use "Do not disturb". You'll have to play with the specific settings if you want somethings to interrupt the music, like your significant other.😇

 

It's as Koda says and not that difficult, BUT you do need to know some basic file transfer skills. Try plugging the phone into your computer via USB, and see if you can see the phone, first.

 

Swipe down from the right top of your screen. You will get a drop down menu. Turn off cellular data and wifi. Leave blue tooth on. Connect to your radio and enjoy uninterrupted music

 

Sorry to hear you have been welcomed into the world digital rights management (DRM) music.

These days companies like Apple and Amazon and most all the other want to rent us the right to listen to songs or watch movies. If you hate that idea, like i do, you want to buy or acquire files which are “DRM-free”. In my case I ripped (copied) all my CD’s years ago to get to exactly this result. Then you can copy them at will where ever you want to play the music, or watch the movies - home, car, phone, whatever. Record companies hate this, of course, so be aware you’re swimming upstream a bit.

Check with your car’s manufacturer to see what they require for the USB stick to work. Some have size limits and other restrictions you’ll need to pay attention to to get this working right. It’s not hard, but you have to know what to aim at. Depending on your make and model they may have limits on how large a USB stick you can use, in terms of maximum amount of storage and beyond that may have a limit on the number of files you can read in your radio.

Most car radios that accept USB sticks will need to have the USB stick formatted as Microsoft’s FAT32, and not Apple HFS or APFS. What that means is that it will be easiest to format the stick in a Windows computer, though a Mac will do it too if you want.

Once you have the stick formatted, you can create a folder system on it, typically this would be something Artist/Album/ or similar, then when you fire up the stick in your radio you can search by artist and album.

I can’t tell what phone or car you have, but it’s worth looking up in the car documentation whether the car can connect to the phone over USB instead of Bluetooth. If a wired connection is possible, that will be the most reliable inter-connection and will charge your phone as you’re driving along.

Longer run, try to store music and movies on your computer and push them to the phone from there. Getting them out of the phone onto the computer is pretty much exactly what the rental services want you _not_ to do.

Hope that helps
Chris

 

My CDs haven’t seen the light of day in probably 15 years! I suppose that’s an option.

 

That's a whole other rabbit hole! I burned all my CDs to my hard drive, then created playlists on a USB stick.

 

Gang,
I'm in the middle of fiddling around with my music library since it's interesting to me and a more or less infinite time suck. Computers make sense to me and I have a bunch of old music I like to organize into playlists. Usually played in 1966 big Oldsmobiles from my USB connected iPods or my iPhone. I'm agnostic about iPhone IOS/ Galaxy Linux, but am more or less captured by Apple and live with it.

You can copy (into today's parlance: "Rip") your CD's into computer files for free yourself, or there are services which will rip CD's in your collection to computer files for a $1-2/per CD. (I may be out of date on pricing). Getting music transferred from a CD to a hard drive is a tedious process. Specialist skills & tools help make this painless, but they cost money.

In Olds language, maybe you could replace your own bushings in your garage at home, but mechanics with experience & the right tools make this job precise, correct, & easy. Why not pay professionals? Or, o.k., you could beat on 60 year old hard-to-replace parts to remove & reinstall service parts with your hammer and a torch. I'm just saying there's times when I do it myself & times when I pay a pro. At the end it's up to you if you want to pay someone or do it yourself, at the cost of time. I did the ripping myself beginning many years ago. Like 25 or so...

If you're not interested in sitting by your computer for literal days-weeks ripping old CD's, send 'em out. What you want on the return is a disk drive, or SSD (solid state (super fast!) drive) with your music files ripped (copied) at the highest quality (bit rate, sample rate) possible. In the windows world this is a ".WAV" (pronounced "wave") format. For iPhones & in the Apple world, this is the ALAC or "Apple Lossless" format. If you want to avoid both companies, you get the files ripped to the somewhat obscure ".FLAC" (pronounced "flak") format. If a service offers you .mp3 or AAC or anything else, the files may wind up smaller because they are compressed & lose some of the sound quality your CD's had. These days storage is cheap so get your content (music, movies, old videos, etc) copied at the highest fidelity you can - assuming these memories are valuable to you.

While we're on this fairly obscure-to-Olds topic, also be aware that you can make digital computer files from old vinyl (and other plastics) records, from 33 1/3 to 45's to 78's and convert them to computer files. This is a much more involved process since you're going from analog to digital, but it can be done. Again, at a cost. And sometimes the clicks, pops & scratches from your well used records will find their way right into the computer files. Then to get rid of the noise, you wind up in computer programs that try to recognize and eliminate noise. Except they're imperfect and take out some of the sound you'd like to hear. AI will make this process better over time, but it's early days - kind of like how early aftermarket fuel injection was a good effort but took a while to get good enough for the average person.

At least to me, memories matter: when my Mom died last year, we found a 1960-era Hawaiian lounge album by a guy called Leo Addeo and had a friend make digital files from the vinyl record. It was great to play that while we distributed her & my Dad's remains in the ocean. Now I play that in the old cars and it brings a smile about all the good times along the way.

A little further afield, but for any of you out there (like me) who shot, or whose parents shot Super 8 movies in the 50's, 60's & 70's, movie film can be digitized too. Services scan each film frame at some resolution and then make files stringing them together like how Chuck Jones used to draw Bugs Bunny cartoons. Same message from me: pay for the highest resolution you can get. TV's from here will be your display devices. Their resolution will only get higher. You want your memories to look good to your kids & grandkids.

Hope that helps
Chris

 

I have an audio technica turntable with Bluetooth and USB. No receiver needed and I can rip albums directly to my PC/cdr.

Thankfully, no phone interruptions on the Bluetooth. 😇

 

Along the lines of calls interrupting your music and being intrusive, trying to share them with the world, androids do have blue tooth option to only play music and not allow calls over the connection. You can find it under the Bluetooth connection details.