Playing Music From A USB Stick.

[Rory Manton]

At my works we have an amplifier/cd player that is used to play cds , obviously, but it also has a USB port that can be used to play music from a usb stick.

I have a clean, formatted stick that I’ve transferred some music onto via Music from my Mac, however, it doesn’t seam that the player at work can read it. Is there anything I should be doing other than drag and dropping music into the stick to get it to work?

Your help and advice is, as always, much appreciated.

 

[KaliYoni]

Some ideas off the top of my head:

• Make sure the USB stick is not formatted using a Mac-only file system (I think FAT 32 can be read by a wide variety of devices).
• Make sure the music files are not in an Apple-only format, such as AAC, or in an audiophile format. Most stand-alone music players can read MP3s without any tweaking since MP3 is one of the oldest and most widely used music file formats.

 

[Rory Manton]

Some ideas off the top of my head:

• Make sure the USB stick is not formatted using a Mac-only file system (I think FAT 32 can be read by a wide variety of devices).
• Make sure the music files are not in an Apple-only format, such as AAC, or in an audiophile format. Most stand-alone music players can read MP3s without any tweaking since MP3 is one of the oldest and most widely used music file formats.

Thanks, I’ll check the formatting and make it fat. I have converted each track to mp3, what a palaver that was, I’m sure there is an easy way to change multiple apple4 whateveritis files to mp3 but I haven’t found it yet!

 

[Longkeg]

As I recall they could be picky about bit rates as well. To know for sure you could try Googling the make/model of the CD player and hope you can find the operator manual. Specs for what file types and formats are supported should be listed there.

 

[Fishrrman]

Something else to consider:

Some players (such as the one in my car) won't readily play mp3 files unless they have metadata entered (such as file name, album name, track number, etc.).

I use the freeware app "Tagger" to check for this, and to enter the data if needed...