Playing "High Quality" Audio On Your Car's Media System

 

On another forum, a person was wondering how to play audio cassettes in his car. This can be done by either converting the cassette audio to MP3 or by pumping the cassette audio into the car's AUX-IN plug. Since it was an interesting question, this lead me to investigating this further.

In researching this person's question I ran across various post where people wanted to play high quality music in their car but were frustrated as their in-dash car CD players were limited to: MP3 and WAV music formatted files. The people posting wanted to play music files formatted in: FLAC or ALAC. That further peaked my curiosity.

I finally ran across a post that had the simplest advice on playing high quality music by avoiding the in-car CD player entirely. The answer, load your high quality music onto a smart phone or a tablet and use either Bluetooth or the AUX-IN plug.

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Garmin Nuvi650 - Morehead City, NC

FLAC and Shuttle music player

To navigate using Android Auto, the phone running Google Maps is connected to the car display/audio head unit with a USB cable.

I made FLAC audio files from CDs on the PC. FLAC is "lossless," the same quality as CDs. The metadata is included, such as the list of tracks, the group, performers, and the album cover.

FLAC files play on the phone and the car's audio system using Shuttle Music Player (and others) available at the Play Store. The Shuttle menu and album art is on the car's dashboard display.

The whole setup has sound quality equal to playing a CD in the dashboard stereo.

dobs108 smile