Drew, Drew, Barney McGrew#CarAudio #Suzuki #Vitara #Music #TaskParalysis
I play music in my car via a USB stick (no carplay, and buggy bluetooth). For the longest time (years!) I've had problems with certain song files and I just couldn't figure out what was wrong.
I finally forced myself to pull my finger out of my arse and diagnose it properly. I found a Suzuki spec sheet for file types and started a process of re-encoding and re-tagging with the help of MediaHuman Audio Converter and Kid3 on my Mac.
After several rounds of testing I eventually established:
1. Bitrate is crucial
2. Encoder is also crucial
3. Tag length is also crucial
4. Filename length is also crucial
5. Punctuation in filenames is also crucial
6. Filesystem path length is also crucial
7. Having a stick that doesn't overheat is also crucial
So now on my computer, aside from my main music library which is part FLAC and part MP3 320, I now have a "car stick" folder which has everything as AAC (M4A) files, bitrate 196, no MP3 tags at all, and a simple folder structure with filenames that include artist, album and track but have no non-ASCII characters in them.
Finally I can play all the albums that were mysteriously refusing to play in the car. #Slint, #SecretMachines, #Mogwai, #Mono, to name but a few.
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