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      02-15-2020, 08:06 AM   #1
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Best way to keen some music in the car

Hi

Can anybody help with a suggestion for the best way I can keep say 10-20 albums stored locally in my G05. I have Apple Music and when my iPhone is with me and connected to BT that works well enough....

But I find it irritating that I have to fiddle with the iPhone volume button to put the output up in order to get the best from the car volume control and also I don’t always have my phone with me if I just pop out. I also notice that if I’ve been listening to a non-Apple Music source (say Audible) on my iPhone I have to fish it out of the tray and select ‘Music’ in order to get things going.

I’ve dabbled with the BMW online entertainment trial, it’s okay I guess but I find it a bit of a fiddle to navigate and it can be flaky at times so I’m about to give up on that.

So how can I best extract a few albums that I always want in the car from Apple Music (ideally with Album art etc) and have them permanently saved in the car.

I thought this might be best done with an iPod of some sort but it seems silly when the car has it’s own HDD. I’m not familiar with getting music out of Apple to save onto a USB play directly from that and I don’t know if I could import tracks / albums onto the HDD if it’s come from my Apple Music subscription?

In my F15 I imported some music from CD’s which gave me a number of easily accessible and reliable tracks to play and then if I wanted something new or a more extensive library I’d swap to my iPhone over BT.

Any help gratefully received
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      02-15-2020, 09:59 AM   #2
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Pretty easy to download iTunes albums to a USB stick and transfer them (not sure about a subscription, but certainly for albums you own) - that said, I'm not an Apple guy, so have only done it on my PC. An IOS user will hopefully weigh in. You could run into problems downloading from a subscription, related to DRM. The transfer part from USB to HDD is fairly straightforward, and just involves following directions on Media:

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Last edited by Paladin1; 02-15-2020 at 10:06 AM..
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      02-15-2020, 10:36 AM   #3
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If you have the music locally on a Mac/Macbook you should be fine. I keep most of my ripped/downloaded music on a Windows box but move it to my MacBook in order to get it on a USB for import since it is easy to verify album art and other items in Music. Unfortunately, like Paladin1 , I'm not familiar with how to download music when you have a subscription but perhaps some Internet searching may yield the procedure, if available.

Once you have the albums in Music they should be stored in HD>Users>(your user)>iTunes>iTunes Media>Music. Once I insert my USB device I always use Disk Utility to erase it and make sure it is formatted MS-DOS (FAT). Once that is done I then just copy the folders for each album to the USB.
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      02-15-2020, 11:21 AM   #4
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Thanks for the replys guys. So I looked on my Mac in the music folder and albums I've downloaded from 'Apple Music' appear to be .m4p protected MPEG4 files. So I guess while I can extract them from my Mac they won't be playable once transferred to the car.

So I either purchase outright the albums I want for the car and download DRM free versions from Apple, or pick up an iPod Touch and dump all the music I want and then connect that to the car...
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      02-15-2020, 11:31 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by six View Post
Thanks for the replys guys. So I looked on my Mac in the music folder and albums I've downloaded from 'Apple Music' appear to be .m4p protected MPEG4 files. So I guess while I can extract them from my Mac they won't be playable once transferred to the car.

So I either purchase outright the albums I want for the car and download DRM free versions from Apple, or pick up an iPod Touch and dump all the music I want and then connect that to the car...
The most common way around this is to actually burn them to a CD MP3 then rip them back off to a windows desktop. Sadly another Apple thing
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      02-15-2020, 11:33 AM   #6
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Not that I'm saying it is okay to do but there are some converters that supposedly will convert the files and remove the DRM but I have not looked into them to see I they really work.
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      02-15-2020, 11:36 AM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TurtleBoy View Post
Not that I'm saying it is okay to do but there are some converters that supposedly will convert the files and remove the DRM but I have not looked into them to see I they really work.

Apple actually locks old purchased songs/albums too... Its just an apple thing. So not just "free" ones. lol
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      02-15-2020, 11:40 AM   #8
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Been awhile since I've searched this but I found this maybe some help to the OP.

https://www.wired.com/2014/03/kill-itunes-drm/
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      02-15-2020, 01:02 PM   #9
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Whilst on this subject, I’ve noticed the volume levels to be really poor whilst using CarPlay through my iPhone. I’ve got the standard audio system (which I’m starting to regret), am I missing something?

Thanks.
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      02-15-2020, 02:12 PM   #10
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I have used an old iPhone (currently use an iPod touch) that I keep plugged in the center armrest cubby. I export playlists and music to the iPod touch and play music from there. I also enable syncing the library over Wifi and join my home Wifi network so that my car iPod will update the library automatically when I pull into the driveway/garage.

It works (mostly) without issue and there is no fiddling. I would love to use the cars HDD but really haven't had the need to bother with stripping DRM from some songs in my library.
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