On the Radio

At the beginning of the year, my dad was involved in a bad car accident. He was unharmed (thank God!), but our three-year-old Chrysler 300 was completely totaled. Several rough months of walking and bus-riding ensued.

Our poor old car after the wreck. ๐Ÿ™

Recently, we were blessed with a new car: a slightly newer Chrysler 300. While my dad went about cleaning up and performing maintenance on the car, I tended to the most important task of all: setting up the radio. I was unprepared for how complicated the process would become.

Getting Modern

The first thing I noticed about the new car’s radio is how advanced it is. It has a touchscreen interface. It has a USB port. It can play MP3 and WMA files. I was impressed. Our previous car didn’t have any of those features.

I decided to test drive the USB port by putting some music on an old 256 MB SanDisk flash drive (aka Sandy) for my dad. I still had the Gospel playlist I had used to create his favorite mix CD in iTunes. I could add those songs, plus a few from his other CDs and some I hadn’t gotten around to burning to a disc for him.

Screenshot of Windows Media Player's Sync pane, where I've added songs to be synced to the flash drive
The flash drive is loaded up with songs in Windows Media Player and is nearly ready to be synced.

The easiest way to add the songs to Sandy was through Windows Media Player (WMP). Not only does WMP automatically import my songs from iTunes, but it has specific features for managing flash drives. All I had to do was drag the songs into the “Sync” pane while WMP kept track of how much space I had left on Sandy. Ultimately, I fit 25 songs on there.

The next time my parents went for a drive, I gave them Sandy. I was so excited. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as I had imagined. Five minutes after they left, my mom called. Sandy wasn’t working.

I walked them through the process repeatedly. I thought my parents were probably doing something wrong, like plugging the flash drive in wrong or not accessing the right section of the radio’s menu. Nothing worked. I promised to investigate and get back to them.

There’s A Surprise Inside

Later that week, I got in the car to troubleshoot the Sandy situation. I quickly learned that I had misunderstood how the radio’s USB port works. In my mind, the radio would read the songs from Sandy when I plugged it in. As it turns out, the radio can play the songs…once you import them from the flash drive to the car’s hard drive.

You read that right—the car has its own HARD DRIVE! I didn’t even know hard drives in cars was a thing. If I had been impressed by the radio before, this discovery made me fall in love with it.

To learn more about the hard drive, I found the car’s manual online on the Mopar website. After I entered the car’s make and model, the site offered downloads for numerous official manuals, including one dedicated to the car’s radio.

"HDD Available Space" screen that shows the amount of used space on the stereo's hard drive
The current stats for the radio’s hard drive

The exact specs of the hard drive differ depending on who you ask. The radio reports its capacity as 16.291 GB. The radio’s user guide says the hard drive “can hold approximately 6,700 four-minute CD-quality songs.” Meanwhile, a promotional PDF for the car says the hard drive is 30 GB and can hold 4250 songs. Who’s right?

I’m not going into the mathematical details, but I suspect they’re all correct. The discrepancies probably stem from things like the bitrate they used to calculate the amount of songs and how much space the radio’s operating system takes up. You know how it is. Personally, I’ll go by what the radio itself says.

The "Manage My Music" menu screen showing an orange flash drive icon and percentage of songs imported
Once you select the songs you want to import to the hard drive from the flash drive, the radio will display this progress icon

Anyway, the import process was painless. I plugged Sandy in and navigated to the “My Music” menu. Several selections and a couple of minutes later, the radio had copied the songs into their own playlist (which I named “Dad’s Faves 1”) on the hard drive. Mission accomplished.

Incompatible Songs

Everything seemed to be sorted out with the radio. Then my dad mentioned that he wasn’t hearing some of his favorite songs when he listened to his playlist.

What? I knew I had copied the entire playlist to Sandy. I had watched the radio import the songs from the device. What was the probl…Oh!

Remember when I said that the radio supported MP3 and WMA files? Well, it only supports those formats. Any other format you try to import, it will ignore.

I forgot to check the format of the songs before I put them on Sandy. While my music library mostly consists of MP3s, everything I’ve bought from the iTunes Store and some of my earliest CD rips are AAC files. It was highly likely that the missing songs were AACs.

I reexamined my dad’s playlist in iTunes. To identify the AAC files, I added the “kind” field to the pane. Then I clicked the same field to alphabetize the files, which organized the ripped and purchased AACs together into their respective groups on the list.

Screenshot of iTunes converting one of the AAC files to the MP3 format
I sorted the songs in the list so that the AAC files would clump together. Then I converted them in iTunes.

The results were as I’d expected. Of the 16 songs I had imported from my dad’s playlist, four were AACs—three purchased, one ripped. A smart playlist revealed that seven more Gospel songs in my library were AACs.

My solution was to convert the AACs into MP3s. I selected all of the AAC songs on the smart playlist and created an MP3 copy of them in iTunes (File –> Convert –> Create MP3 Version). Then I opened WMP and let it import the new MP3 versions.

Screenshot of Windows Media Player showing two versions of the same song with a blue label on each to distinguish between MP3 and AAC files
After I added an MP3 version of this song to my library, Windows Media Player put a helpful labels on each version

Another helpful feature of WMP revealed itself at this point: a big blue label that identifies the format of the duplicate songs. That made my job so much easier. I re-synced the new MP3 versions to Sandy. I also took pictures of the original playlist and the sync results.

Back in the car, I repeated the import process. All of the songs on Sandy copied to the car’s hard drive this time—trust me, I checked. My dad’s missing songs were finally restored.

Of course, I then had to spend an hour deleting the duplicate songs from my library.

Conclusion

I’ve been having so much fun playing with the car’s radio. I’ve added two more playlists, one for my mom and a second one for my dad. The songs haven’t made much of a dent in the hard drive’s available space.

Radio screen displaying rows of boxes for song titles
The radio displayed boxes instead of song titles in Japanese Kana when I ripped Koda Kumi’s “Kingdom” album to the hard drive.

I learn something new about the radio every day. So far, I’ve discovered that it can play DVDs and rip CDs, but it can’t display Hangul or Kana in K-Pop and J-Pop song titles and artist names. I’m sure I’ll uncover more interesting stuff as I read through the user manual.

 

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