Thus & So: Driving with your favorite music (or podcasts)

I’ve enjoyed several longer road trips over the years, including to New England and Ontario, down the East Coast to Florida, and as far west as central Illinois. I’ve not yet undertaken a road trip to the West Coast, but if I did, I would be sure to have my music with me. FM radio has limited range, and it’s my luck to lose reception just as the program gets interesting. AM radio is mostly devoted to screaming talk meisters and not interesting to me. For a while, I dabbled in SiriusXM, but found that the audio quality was unacceptable for most music, the service was undependable in mountainous areas, and the cost exorbitant. So, I mostly listened to music on my car’s CD player. Remember those?

Back in 1986, I shelled out over $300 for my first CD player (an exorbitant price for a recent high school graduate working an entry level retail job). CD players and the discs themselves became less expensive over time. I still have my very first CD, RCA Red Seal RCD14585 – Horowitz at the Met, and it still plays fine. To that I’ve added about 4,500 discs over the decades – mostly Classical, along with Film and TV scores, a bit of Jazz, Pop, and Spoken Word. The vast majority of these discs continue to play just as well as when they were new, so despite the constant drone of news about the death of the CD format, I have no plans to discard them – despite periodic culls from my collection.

But though I am a stubborn luddite, I am faced with the fact that new cars don’t have CD players as standard equipment or even an option. Newer cars do, however, have USB ports. That, plus the hazard of trying to change a CD while driving, has led me to rip about a thousand of my favorite albums to my laptop. These, in addition to the few dozen albums I purchased as audio files and never had on CD, I’ve copied onto one of three thumb drives (one each for piano music, one for non-piano instrumental/orchestral/chamber/opera, one for non-Classical) that I take with me in the car. (At this point, some would also point out apps like Pandora and Spotify one can use in the car, but they are dependent on having a clear signal – and they are notoriously unfriendly for Classical music.)

At this point, I should mention that I am not particularly hung up on audio quality when listening in the car. I don’t drive a high-end automobile – my spouse and I are Honda loyalists – one CR-V and one HR-V. There is a certain amount of road noise that makes information heavy formats like FLAC a waste of thumb drive space. I go with MP3s and find they are adequate for use in the car.

I use a Dell laptop, so when I rip the CD I use Windows Media Player. Usually the track and album information (known as metadata) auto-populate. Sometimes the provided metadata will contain mistakes or anomalies: Chopin albums described as Early Music, titles questionably spelled, occasionally with Japanese characters. I usually correct these before I tick on the “rip” indicator – it’s faster fixing up front than addressing later.

If you don’t verify and correct the metadata in advance, it can be changed later. Here’s how to do so:

MP3 titles are shown in two places: the file name and the title within Properties. To open Properties, right-click on the file name, select Properties, and the box will appear. Select the Details tab and enter the appropriate information into the available fields. When adding/modifying the track title, consider the character limit. I noticed this early on when one of my files neither played nor was viewable in the track list: “03 Sonata for piano in B-flat major, D. 960: III. Scherzo: Allegro vivace con delicatezza – Trio”. I shortened the file name to read “03 Sonata in B-b major, D.960: III”, copied it over to the title field within Properties, and that did the trick. That’s all the title information I need and considering the way track info is displayed on my car’s audio display, this format made the most sense. (Subsequently I determined that for me, Schubert’s heavenly last sonata is not the best music for driving, considering road noise and the need to stay alert.)

Track/file names are automatically numbered: starting with 01, 02, et cetera. If you’re fine with the tracks playing in the same sequence as on the CD, you don’t need to change it. If you want to change the order, simply right-click on the file, select “rename”, and change the leading numbers on the file names to create the playing sequence you prefer. The files in an album will be played in this order, unless they were changed in a different order. Thus, if you modify a file, it will be moved to the end of the track list. You can restore the desired order by opening Properties, clicking Select All, changing some random information (like album artist or album title), and applying the change – you can always change the info back if you don’t like it. (Changing the track number via the “#” field in the Properties box will not work, as I learned the hard way.)

WMP will usually create a folder for the album artist/performer when you rip the CD, and you can organize those as you please. The default for organizing performers is first name, then last name. I rename these folders to show last name, first name for ease of indexing.

The first time I played music from my thumb drive, I was surprised to see the album cover on my car’s display. Some albums showed the correct art, some had none, and some had the wrong art – e.g., from other albums including other performers’ recordings of the same music. This can be overridden, although it can be time consuming. If you have the CD and a printer, scan the cover to your computer, and edit the scan to remove excess border and correct other issues. It may be easier to find a copy of the cover online, so I generally try that first. Once done, open the photo, right-click and select “copy”, then manually paste it onto the album in WMP – voila, your album will display the correct art.