I wanted to share some things I’ve learned about playing lossless audio through the USB ports.
First a quick primer if you’re not familiar with these terms: FLAC is a lossless audio compression file format and WAV is an uncompressed audio file format. Both FLAC and WAV deliver CD-quality audio when played but both have file sizes that are much larger than MP3s or other compressed audio formats. Thankfully, as the cost of portable storage has come down, this is less and less of an issue. Wherever possible, I avoid lossy music formats like MP3. Even at 320 bps, the degradation of sound quality is too much for me.
So I converted my entire CD collection into FLAC files (a huge task on its own) and I’ve been using a high-resolution portable music player that can play FLAC files. With a couple of micro-SD cards in my player, I can walk around with 1000+ albums of CD quality music in my pocket. This is a great portable setup for me, but because the infotainment system in the Canyon doesn’t play FLAC files, I was struggling to get things working in the truck. I was able to figure out how to play WAV files from a 1 TB FAT32 formatted USB 3.0 hard drive, but the only way to browse through that collection was using the “Folder” view for the USB flashdrive. That’s because WAV files are not tagged with the song’s information – stuff like artist, song, album, cover art. I could set it to shuffle and it would play randomly through all the folders – and that is pretty cool in itself, but I really wanted to be able to browse through the files for artists or albums like you can for MP3 songs.
So the problem boiled down to finding an application that could tag WAV files. And lo and behold, at least one exists that will work with this infotainment system. It’s called bliss. So I bought it for $39 and had it go through my WAV file collection and tag everything. It was able to identify more than 2/3 of my albums by audio fingerprinting and the rest I had to tag on my own using bliss. But somehow bliss knows how to add these tags to WAV files in a way that other systems can see them. I use MediaMonkey or dbPoweramp for most of my audio conversion stuff, but they were not generating WAV tags that worked in the Canyon.
So when I take that hard drive and plug it onto the console USB (using a USB 3.0 drive and cable), it shows up as a USB audio device and starts indexing. From there, I can browse for artists and albums like you can for MP3s and it shows the album art. So the tagging worked. I think I read that it re-indexes a USB drive every time it’s plugged in, and if that’s the case I have no idea how long it will take to index the entire 1 TB drive. So far, I haven’t gone further than 15 minutes or so. Regardless, I was able to see hundreds of albums in a couple of minutes. So now I have the best of both worlds – CD quality audio and tagged file browsing with album art for over 1000 albums. If you're a lossless audio fan like me, give it a try!
First a quick primer if you’re not familiar with these terms: FLAC is a lossless audio compression file format and WAV is an uncompressed audio file format. Both FLAC and WAV deliver CD-quality audio when played but both have file sizes that are much larger than MP3s or other compressed audio formats. Thankfully, as the cost of portable storage has come down, this is less and less of an issue. Wherever possible, I avoid lossy music formats like MP3. Even at 320 bps, the degradation of sound quality is too much for me.
So I converted my entire CD collection into FLAC files (a huge task on its own) and I’ve been using a high-resolution portable music player that can play FLAC files. With a couple of micro-SD cards in my player, I can walk around with 1000+ albums of CD quality music in my pocket. This is a great portable setup for me, but because the infotainment system in the Canyon doesn’t play FLAC files, I was struggling to get things working in the truck. I was able to figure out how to play WAV files from a 1 TB FAT32 formatted USB 3.0 hard drive, but the only way to browse through that collection was using the “Folder” view for the USB flashdrive. That’s because WAV files are not tagged with the song’s information – stuff like artist, song, album, cover art. I could set it to shuffle and it would play randomly through all the folders – and that is pretty cool in itself, but I really wanted to be able to browse through the files for artists or albums like you can for MP3 songs.
So the problem boiled down to finding an application that could tag WAV files. And lo and behold, at least one exists that will work with this infotainment system. It’s called bliss. So I bought it for $39 and had it go through my WAV file collection and tag everything. It was able to identify more than 2/3 of my albums by audio fingerprinting and the rest I had to tag on my own using bliss. But somehow bliss knows how to add these tags to WAV files in a way that other systems can see them. I use MediaMonkey or dbPoweramp for most of my audio conversion stuff, but they were not generating WAV tags that worked in the Canyon.
So when I take that hard drive and plug it onto the console USB (using a USB 3.0 drive and cable), it shows up as a USB audio device and starts indexing. From there, I can browse for artists and albums like you can for MP3s and it shows the album art. So the tagging worked. I think I read that it re-indexes a USB drive every time it’s plugged in, and if that’s the case I have no idea how long it will take to index the entire 1 TB drive. So far, I haven’t gone further than 15 minutes or so. Regardless, I was able to see hundreds of albums in a couple of minutes. So now I have the best of both worlds – CD quality audio and tagged file browsing with album art for over 1000 albums. If you're a lossless audio fan like me, give it a try!
> Eric Clapton>
