Ripping CDs to a jump drive playable on 6th gen infotainment

[jimr]

Thanks to Ross for posting about hooking up a CD player to his 6th gen 4runner. Others pointed out it might be better to rip the CDs to a medium such as a jump drive. Having never "ripped" anything in my life, it took maybe an hour to figure out how to do it right. I've now got 15 albums ripped to a 32GB jump drive, and couldn't be happier with the results. Here's a summary of the steps, followed by a set of pics outlining the procedure from ripping the CDs to playing them in the truck.

You'll probably need an external CD drive since computers rarely have internal ones these days. The one I used advertises 24X read capability. Its output is USB-2 (so is my laptop's) so a USB to USB-C converter was required in order to plug the end result into the infotainment's USB-C slot. Amazon has them for around $7.

Web searches said for Windows users to use Windows Media Player to do the ripping. I'm a Linux user and have near zero tolerance for anything Windows, but I tried the suggestion anyway. It couldn't find the metadata for the albums and songs. This metadata is VERY important for a usable end product so I gave up on Windows.

Off to Linux and there's a free tool called "asunder" that just works. I've included some screenshots below. To get the metadata, asunder goes online, defaulting to gnudb.gnudb.org I don't know what Windows Media Player tried but whatever it was didn't work.

Asunder automatically found the metadata and filled it in. I went into "Preferences" and told it to only produce MP3 files. It chose a default bitrate of 190 Kbps which I didn't dare touch. Hit the "rip" button (bottom right of 1st pic) and it took about 8 minutes per CD to complete writing to disk. Probably writing directly to the jump drive would work, but I chose to write to disk then copy to the jump drive which went very fast.

Now plug the jump drive into the infotainment (with USB->USBC converter if necessary) and enjoy your music.

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[Nodak]

other alternative is to rip them to your phone and BT to the headunit.

you could use spotify to play music off your phones storage, i use to have dedicated music apps (to play my ripped mp3's) but i moved on to spotify family plan and download my playlists so i dont have to worry about a cell connection.

in the beginning it was winamp is what i started with and moved to other app for cellphones (those llama's got spanked way to much, iykyk)

 

[jimr]

other alternative is to rip them to your phone and BT to the headunit.

you could use spotify to play music off your phones storage, i use to have dedicated music apps (to play my ripped mp3's) but i moved on to spotify family plan and download my playlists so i dont have to worry about a cell connection.

in the beginning it was winamp is what i started with and moved to other app for cellphones (those llama's got spanked way to much, iykyk)

Interesting. Does ripping to phone give all that same metadata indicated in my post? Note for e.g. Cyndi Lauper it even downloaded a picture of her.

I should also have noted when playing the songs in the truck, it automatically moves on to the next song after each tune. "shuffle play" probably works as advertised but I haven't tried it.

 

[127.0.0.1]

I THOUGHT WE WENT OVER THIS ALREADY JUST GIVE
ME AN ADAPTER SO I CAN PLAY MY FOGHAT 8-TRACK

 

[Nodak]

Interesting. Does ripping to phone give all that same metadata indicated in my post? Note for e.g. Cyndi Lauper it even downloaded a picture of her.

I should also have noted when playing the songs in the truck, it automatically moves on to the next song after each tune. "shuffle play" probably works as advertised but I haven't tried it.

it depends on the app you use to rip to mp3. if it downloads or you manually input the data for each track

1. it can either save the meta data into the mp3
2. or make a mp3 data file that the program/app will pull that meta data out of the dat file

 

[4R-Sport]

I THOUGHT WE WENT OVER THIS ALREADY JUST GIVE
ME AN ADAPTER SO I CAN PLAY MY FOGHAT 8-TRACK

TAKE IT EASY!

 

[RunnerRocks]

TAKE IT EASY!

Ah, Winslow...
One of my favs.

 

[John2112]

Thanks to Ross for posting about hooking up a CD player to his 6th gen 4runner. Others pointed out it might be better to rip the CDs to a medium such as a jump drive. Having never "ripped" anything in my life, it took maybe an hour to figure out how to do it right. I've now got 15 albums ripped to a 32GB jump drive, and couldn't be happier with the results. Here's a summary of the steps, followed by a set of pics outlining the procedure from ripping the CDs to playing them in the truck.

You'll probably need an external CD drive since computers rarely have internal ones these days. The one I used advertises 24X read capability. Its output is USB-2 (so is my laptop's) so a USB to USB-C converter was required in order to plug the end result into the infotainment's USB-C slot. Amazon has them for around $7.

Web searches said for Windows users to use Windows Media Player to do the ripping. I'm a Linux user and have near zero tolerance for anything Windows, but I tried the suggestion anyway. It couldn't find the metadata for the albums and songs. This metadata is VERY important for a usable end product so I gave up on Windows.

Off to Linux and there's a free tool called "asunder" that just works. I've included some screenshots below. To get the metadata, asunder goes online, defaulting to gnudb.gnudb.org I don't know what Windows Media Player tried but whatever it was didn't work.

Asunder automatically found the metadata and filled it in. I went into "Preferences" and told it to only produce MP3 files. It chose a default bitrate of 190 Kbps which I didn't dare touch. Hit the "rip" button (bottom right of 1st pic) and it took about 8 minutes per CD to complete writing to disk. Probably writing directly to the jump drive would work, but I chose to write to disk then copy to the jump drive which went very fast.

Now plug the jump drive into the infotainment (with USB->USBC converter if necessary) and enjoy your music.


I ripped CDs into flat format and load them into my pixel phone. I then attach the pixel phone to the USBC port on the side of the infotainment center and stream that way. That also allows you to use Android auto wired which is superior to the wireless connection. It depends on how much memory you have on your phone, I have a terabyte and the thousand songs I put on the phone didn't put a dent in that. I long ago ripped all of my CDs to hard drive and disposed of the CDs. Driving down the highway my phone can actually stream music directly from my home hard drive so that's another way of doing it.

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