Missing your in-car CD player?

[Rolfe]

I’m not sure how many people will be interested in this, but since I figured it out (and then wrote down what I had done in case I forgot it), I thought I might as well share it. It’s probably mostly of relevance to classical music fans.

Obviously the MG4 doesn’t have an in-car CD player. Maybe you have a stack of CDs you like to listen to in the car, but now you can’t? Well, you can, with a little bit of effort and ingenuity. This is a description of how to transfer CDs to a USB stick using iTunes (on a Windows PC) in such a way that the MG4 SE will play the tracks in the right order, and iTunes will still be able to handle the files in its usual way at the end of it all.

The problem is that the MG4 (certainly the SE; the Trophy may be a bit more sophisticated) doesn’t recognise folders on the USB stick. Instead it plays all the tracks it can find, no matter where they are situated on the stick, in strict alphabetical order (unless you turn on shuffle, in which case it’s absolutely random). Another problem is that it will not read .m4a files, the default transfer format for iPods. This all became clear when I plugged in my iPod just to see what would happen. It treated it as any other USB stick, ignored the huge number of .m4a files on the device, and squirrelled out the relatively few .mp3 files (which were in a variety of folders/playlists/directories) which it presented in a single list on the car’s screen, in alphabetical order.

This is fine if every piece of music you have is a discrete entity taking up only a single track, and you don’t care what order you listen to them in. It’s bugger-all use for situations where longer stretches of music have been divided into tracks, or even something like a song cycle where you want to listen to the songs in the correct order.

The trick to overcoming this is in the naming of the tracks. The tracks, not the filenames Do that right, and the tracks will play in the right order. Using iTunes has the advantage that the fields for the name(s) of the performers and the name of the CD can be filled in, and will also appear on the screen when the music is playing.

This is how it looks in the home screen and the music screen.

Here's how it's done.

1. Decide on an alphanumeric code that will allow any number of musical works to appear on the USB stick in the order you want them in. Remember, you can’t use folders to organise tracks into albums, every track has to be individually coded. I use the name of the composer followed by the name of the work, often in a shortened form. If you have more than one performance of the same work some differentiation such as the conductor’s name or initial will also be needed. If there are two composers with the same name, initials will also be needed (e.g. Bach CPE and Bach JS, who will appear in that order.) Albums with a mixture of composers can be kept together by using the album name. That code will go at the start of the name of the track, followed by the track number with the correct number of digits – 1 has to be 01 if there are more than nine tracks, or even 001 if you have more than 99 tracks in one piece of music. (Don’t laugh. The first thing I did was a 12-disc set of Wagner’s Ring, 14½ hours of music with 191 tracks making up 1.1 Gb, on the basis that if I could make that work, anything else would be a walk in the park. I got it to work, see above.)
2. You need a computer with its own CD drive, or else a USB CD drive plugged in.
3. Download iTunes, it’s free.
4. With iTunes open, put your selected CD into the drive and start it. iTunes will ask if you want to import the CD into iTunes. Say no, the first time.
5. Click on “Import CD”. This allows you to choose the format, and so stop iTunes importing the tracks as .m4a files which the MG4 won’t read. It will definitely read .mp3 files, and so will most other things, so use that. Once you’ve selected your file format, iTunes will hold the setting for future downloads unless you change it again.
6. iTunes will present you with suggested text to go with the CD. This comes from a site called GraceNotes, where people upload information about each track that they have typed in. If information relating to the correct CD is there, pick it. This will populate all the fields in the download rather than it showing up as a bare “Track 1, Track 2" etc. This is why it’s worth using iTunes – this information shows on the infotainment screen while the track is playing. and anything GraceNotes can provide is better than typing it all in from scratch.
7. Let the CD import. The iTunes window will show the entire track listing as the download progresses. Take a screenshot of this (use the Snipping tool), because this is the correct order for the tracks. Depending on how they have been named there is a fair chance the order will be lost at the next stage and it becomes a nuisance figuring out what the order should be.
8. Go into the Library screen in iTunes - it will go there itself if you eject the CD - and select the “Songs” view. You will now see the imported tracks in alphabetical order of track name, together with anything you previously imported. Do NOT do the following while you are still in the import screen, it’s essential to go to the Library.
9. Double-click on the first track name of the CD you’re dealing with and add the alphanumeric code you have decided on to the beginning of the name. Don’t delete the GraceNotes name, add the code as a prefix to that. Then do this to the rest of the tracks, in the order in the screenshot. As you do this, the tracks will rearrange themselves back into the right order. Double-check the result from the screenshot before you delete it.
10. This is all you need to do to get the tracks to play on the MG4's infotainment system in the right order. If you’re happy with the text that GraceNotes has provided, you don’t need steps 11 to 13. However, bear in mind that the infotainment screen will display this text in the car as the tracks are being played, so you might want to tidy them up a bit.
11. Edit the names of the tracks however you prefer, while leaving the alphanumeric codes undisturbed at the beginning.
12. Edit the artist field for each track if desired. For example, many GraceNotes downloads have the same text entered for every track on a CD, even if different performers are involved on the different tracks. You may want the information you see when a track is playing to be correct for that track.
13. Change the “album by artist” field if you want to. That will come up as the name of the album on the music section of the infotainment screen. If you have a multiple-CD box set you can use the same name for the entire set and it will consolidate into one album – you don’t need to designate CD1, CD2 etc.
14. Open your C drive and navigate to the folder in iTunes where the programme has placed the files you’ve been playing with. The full directory path can be found in iTunes by right-clicking on a track, then choosing “Song info -> file”. The filenames will bear some resemblance to the track names, but will have been modified to preserve the original track order.
15. Create a new folder somewhere to hold your car’s music. COPY the files from the iTunes folder into this one. Ensure that they also remain in the iTunes folder.
16. You can stop here, but it’s advisable to edit the filenames at this stage. Be sure to do this in the new folder, not in the iTunes folder. Replace whatever filenames iTunes created with your own alphanumeric code for the track in question (which should be visible to the right of the filename). This ensures that as your music collection grows you will still be able to find the files for the tracks you want – for example to delete an album or to move it to a different USB stick without messing up anything else. (It’s best to do this right at the end of the process, because it’s a pain to have to go through all the filename changes again if something has to be changed in iTunes.)
17. You’re done. Copy the files from your new folder on to the USB stick and try it out in the car. It will work. Your CD will play on the infotainment system.

There is one final wrinkle. There is apparently no feature on the MG4 equivalent to the “eject” function on the computer which lets you eject USB devices safely. When you pull the USB stick out of the car, the next time you put it in the computer you’re likely to get a message saying that there are errors on the disc. The computer will repair the disc so it’s not a huge problem, but this is yet another reason for retaining your car’s music files in their own folder on your computer. If the worst comes to the worst you can restore them.

Disadvantages?

• The alphanumeric code will scroll in front of the track name on the infotainment screen. This is unavoidable, as that’s what allows the tracks to be being played in the right order.
• Every single track on the USB stick will be listed on the left of the USB music screen individually, and eventually that’s going to be a lot of tracks. At some point it is probably going to be worth splitting your library between several USB sticks to save interminable scrolling to find what you want.
• In situations where a continuous piece of music has been split into tracks when the CD was created, there is sometimes (but not always, it depends on what the music is doing) a slight hiccup when the music moves to a new track. This is something which doesn’t happen when listening to the actual CD, or indeed when listening to an iPod. However, it did happen when I played my iPod directly through my previous car’s sound system; it’s just one of those things. It’s not desperately annoying.

This is probably the cue for someone to come up with a much easier way of doing this, but at least this is tried and tested and it works. And it’s amazing how much better the music sounds without the noise of an ICE trying to drown it out.

 

[Davn]

I’m not sure how many people will be interested in this, but since I figured it out (and then wrote down what I had done in case I forgot it), I thought I might as well share it. It’s probably mostly of relevance to classical music fans.

Obviously the MG4 doesn’t have an in-car CD player. Maybe you have a stack of CDs you like to listen to in the car, but now you can’t? Well, you can, with a little bit of effort and ingenuity. This is a description of how to transfer CDs to a USB stick using iTunes (on a Windows PC) in such a way that the MG4 SE will play the tracks in the right order, and iTunes will still be able to handle the files in its usual way at the end of it all.

The problem is that the MG4 (certainly the SE; the Trophy may be a bit more sophisticated) doesn’t recognise folders on the USB stick. Instead it plays all the tracks it can find, no matter where they are situated on the stick, in strict alphabetical order (unless you turn on shuffle, in which case it’s absolutely random). Another problem is that it will not read .m4a files, the default transfer format for iPods. This all became clear when I plugged in my iPod just to see what would happen. It treated it as any other USB stick, ignored the huge number of .m4a files on the device, and squirrelled out the relatively few .mp3 files (which were in a variety of folders/playlists/directories) which it presented in a single list on the car’s screen, in alphabetical order.

This is fine if every piece of music you have is a discrete entity taking up only a single track, and you don’t care what order you listen to them in. It’s bugger-all use for situations where longer stretches of music have been divided into tracks, or even something like a song cycle where you want to listen to the songs in the correct order.

The trick to overcoming this is in the naming of the tracks. The tracks, not the filenames Do that right, and the tracks will play in the right order. Using iTunes has the advantage that the fields for the name(s) of the performers and the name of the CD can be filled in, and will also appear on the screen when the music is playing.

This is how it looks in the home screen and the music screen.

View attachment 17175

View attachment 17176

Here's how it's done.

1. Decide on an alphanumeric code that will allow any number of musical works to appear on the USB stick in the order you want them in. Remember, you can’t use folders to organise tracks into albums, every track has to be individually coded. I use the name of the composer followed by the name of the work, often in a shortened form. If you have more than one performance of the same work some differentiation such as the conductor’s name or initial will also be needed. If there are two composers with the same name, initials will also be needed (e.g. Bach CPE and Bach JS, who will appear in that order.) Albums with a mixture of composers can be kept together by using the album name. That code will go at the start of the name of the track, followed by the track number with the correct number of digits – 1 has to be 01 if there are more than nine tracks, or even 001 if you have more than 99 tracks in one piece of music. (Don’t laugh. The first thing I did was a 12-disc set of Wagner’s Ring, 14½ hours of music with 191 tracks making up 1.1 Gb, on the basis that if I could make that work, anything else would be a walk in the park. I got it to work, see above.)
2. You need a computer with its own CD drive, or else a USB CD drive plugged in.
3. Download iTunes, it’s free.
4. With iTunes open, put your selected CD into the drive and start it. iTunes will ask if you want to import the CD into iTunes. Say no, the first time.
5. Click on “Import CD”. This allows you to choose the format, and so stop iTunes importing the tracks as .m4a files which the MG4 won’t read. It will definitely read .mp3 files, and so will most other things, so use that. Once you’ve selected your file format, iTunes will hold the setting for future downloads unless you change it again.
6. iTunes will present you with suggested text to go with the CD. This comes from a site called GraceNotes, where people upload information about each track that they have typed in. If information relating to the correct CD is there, pick it. This will populate all the fields in the download rather than it showing up as a bare “Track 1, Track 2" etc. This is why it’s worth using iTunes – this information shows on the infotainment screen while the track is playing. and anything GraceNotes can provide is better than typing it all in from scratch.
7. Let the CD import. The iTunes window will show the entire track listing as the download progresses. Take a screenshot of this (use the Snipping tool), because this is the correct order for the tracks. Depending on how they have been named there is a fair chance the order will be lost at the next stage and it becomes a nuisance figuring out what the order should be.
8. Go into the Library screen in iTunes - it will go there itself if you eject the CD - and select the “Songs” view. You will now see the imported tracks in alphabetical order of track name, together with anything you previously imported. Do NOT do the following while you are still in the import screen, it’s essential to go to the Library.
9. Double-click on the first track name of the CD you’re dealing with and add the alphanumeric code you have decided on to the beginning of the name. Don’t delete the GraceNotes name, add the code as a prefix to that. Then do this to the rest of the tracks, in the order in the screenshot. As you do this, the tracks will rearrange themselves back into the right order. Double-check the result from the screenshot before you delete it.
10. This is all you need to do to get the tracks to play on the MG4's infotainment system in the right order. If you’re happy with the text that GraceNotes has provided, you don’t need steps 11 to 13. However, bear in mind that the infotainment screen will display this text in the car as the tracks are being played, so you might want to tidy them up a bit.
11. Edit the names of the tracks however you prefer, while leaving the alphanumeric codes undisturbed at the beginning.
12. Edit the artist field for each track if desired. For example, many GraceNotes downloads have the same text entered for every track on a CD, even if different performers are involved on the different tracks. You may want the information you see when a track is playing to be correct for that track.
13. Change the “album by artist” field if you want to. That will come up as the name of the album on the music section of the infotainment screen. If you have a multiple-CD box set you can use the same name for the entire set and it will consolidate into one album – you don’t need to designate CD1, CD2 etc.
14. Open your C drive and navigate to the folder in iTunes where the programme has placed the files you’ve been playing with. The full directory path can be found in iTunes by right-clicking on a track, then choosing “Song info -> file”. The filenames will bear some resemblance to the track names, but will have been modified to preserve the original track order.
15. Create a new folder somewhere to hold your car’s music. COPY the files from the iTunes folder into this one. Ensure that they also remain in the iTunes folder.
16. You can stop here, but it’s advisable to edit the filenames at this stage. Be sure to do this in the new folder, not in the iTunes folder. Replace whatever filenames iTunes created with your own alphanumeric code for the track in question (which should be visible to the right of the filename). This ensures that as your music collection grows you will still be able to find the files for the tracks you want – for example to delete an album or to move it to a different USB stick without messing up anything else. (It’s best to do this right at the end of the process, because it’s a pain to have to go through all the filename changes again if something has to be changed in iTunes.)
17. You’re done. Copy the files from your new folder on to the USB stick and try it out in the car. It will work. Your CD will play on the infotainment system.

There is one final wrinkle. There is apparently no feature on the MG4 equivalent to the “eject” function on the computer which lets you eject USB devices safely. When you pull the USB stick out of the car, the next time you put it in the computer you’re likely to get a message saying that there are errors on the disc. The computer will repair the disc so it’s not a huge problem, but this is yet another reason for retaining your car’s music files in their own folder on your computer. If the worst comes to the worst you can restore them.

Disadvantages?

• The alphanumeric code will scroll in front of the track name on the infotainment screen. This is unavoidable, as that’s what allows the tracks to be being played in the right order.
• Every single track on the USB stick will be listed on the left of the USB music screen individually, and eventually that’s going to be a lot of tracks. At some point it is probably going to be worth splitting your library between several USB sticks to save interminable scrolling to find what you want.
• In situations where a continuous piece of music has been split into tracks when the CD was created, there is sometimes (but not always, it depends on what the music is doing) a slight hiccup when the music moves to a new track. This is something which doesn’t happen when listening to the actual CD, or indeed when listening to an iPod. However, it did happen when I played my iPod directly through my previous car’s sound system; it’s just one of those things. It’s not desperately annoying.

This is probably the cue for someone to come up with a much easier way of doing this, but at least this is tried and tested and it works. And it’s amazing how much better the music sounds without the noise of an ICE trying to drown it out.

Omg, I hope you typed that on a computer ? that's just too much work for me, I won't have the patience to rename 1200 tracks?

 

[Rolfe]

Of course I typed it on a computer! I'm saving the file for my own use. It took me several days and quite a few wrong turnings before I got it sussed, I'm not risking forgetting.

The thing is, you don't need to do all the detail I described. If you don't mind whatever text GraceNotes imports for you, all you need to do is add your alphanumeric code to the beginning of the track name, and you can make that relatively painless using copy/paste for all but the final digit. The time-consuming thing is if you get picky about the text GraceNotes imports, but that's entirely optional.

You also don't need to do 1,200 tracks at once! I'm doing a CD or two when I feel like it.

You don't need to rename the files in your car's music folder either, but that's pretty quick using the copy/paste method and pays dividends by making the tracks easy to find in the folder.

I just did Gluck's Orfeo, which was a bit more work than I had expected because although it's only two CDs and just over two hours of music, it's split into 55 tracks. And I got picky about the imported text. But works with longer movements and so relatively few tracks aren't so onerous.

 

[Rolfe]

I'll tell you something else. I'd never have the patience to do all the mods and all the cleaning that other people are doing!

 

[Spaniard]

I have just found out the problem of the system disregarding folders and it is a terrible shame. A pool of >500 files mixed altogether by title is a useless system. Even my Sandero v2 does organise files by their folders!

However offers you to display embedded lyrics. What a joke!

EDIT: I have read in another thread that pressing on "play all" you can access the folders

 

[Brusque]

Don't all you lot have Spotify?

 

[Rolfe]

My phone is too simple-minded to run Android Auto, and it's going to be a month or two before I can organise to change this. Also, I want to listen to my CDs, not dick around on Spotify anyway. Maybe when I have a phone that will talk to the car I'll change my way of thinking, but at the moment this is working.

 

[Rolfe]

I have just found out the problem of the system disregarding folders and it is a terrible shame. A pool of >500 files mixed altogether by title is a useless system. Even my Sandero v2 does organise files by their folders!

However offers you to display embedded lyrics. What a joke!

EDIT: I have read in another thread that pressing on "play all" you can access the folders

It's pretty dim, but it is what it is.

I had a lot of trouble with my previous car's system too, which actually could link to an iPod and read iPod files and playlists. The interface was so counter-intuitive that it sometimes took me five minutes stabbing at various buttons to find the playlist I wanted. And it did this hiccup thing at some of the track changes even though it was reading the iPod. (Whenever I accessed the iPod it would immediately start playing the track in the system that happened to be highest up the alphabet by name. I got so sick of that track, which was somewhere in the middle of some opera. At one point I thought about getting a file of total silence and naming it aaaaaaa.)

I think a lot of it is down to iTunes and similar systems not recognising that classical music works in a different way to popular music. Not much of it is "songs" that last for only a few minutes, and even when it is, you usually want to listen to the songs in a particular order. With iTunes I just did what I wanted with the tracks and then got them in the right order by putting them in a playlist, but of course that isn't working with the MG4.

I'll try what you say about "Play All", though the very title doesn't sound promising.

You should have seen the mishmash that came up on the screen when I put the iPod in. Ten-year-old podcasts mixed in randomly with vocal exercises and one or two things that happened to be in .mp3 format. Stuff I hadn't even remembered was there.

 

[siteguru]

The SE doesn't seem to incorporate the Play All > Folders option as far as I know.

 

[Davn]

Don't all you lot have Spotify?

Why would you pay for something you already have ? if there's a function there then it should work correctly.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm happy at the moment because I've got that Keilberth Ring on to the memory stick and it's playing. That CD set cost £75 and while I've not used Spotify much I'm not expecting to find it there. It was worth the effort because now the entire 14½ hours will play without me having to do anything about it, no faffing around trying to change CDs at 60 mph. And the expensive CDs are safely back in their box rather than kicking around in the car getting damaged. (I did scratch one CD slightly, but iTunes mended the defect when I imported the disc.)

It's cleverer than I expected in one sense. Obviously if I removed a CD and re-inserted it, it would start again from the beginning. Not so the USB drive. The other day I stopped the USB, took it into the house, got the usual "errors detected" message and let the computer deal with it, then transferred another bunch of files on to the stick, plus re-transferring some that were already there, including the track I had been listening to (which had had the wrong artist's name on it). The system absolutely seamlessly picked up the music from exactly where it had been when I took the stick out.

All it really needs is the ability to handle two layers of folders - one for the composer and then one for the name of the work. Most things could be easily dealt with like that. I live in hope that they might produce a software update that will do this, but I'm not holding my breath as it's unlikely to be a priority. It's a shame really because when you get it working with the work-round above, it's really good.

 

[Rolfe]

Although these instructions sound complicated, it doesn't actually take very long to do a CD if you don't care about the embedded text. Import the CD, whack the alphanumeric code at the start of each track (using copy-paste to save most of the typing), dig the tracks out of their C-drive folder and copy them to another folder, change the iTunes filenames to the alphanumeric codes, and copy that folder to the USB disc. Even renaming the files can be omitted if you're just doing one CD to see how it works - its only benefit is so that you can later find individual tracks by looking at the menu on the USB disc.

Come to think of it, you might also achieve the latter by organising the files in folders on the USB stick. That way you could probably find what you wanted without renaming the files, even though the MG4 will ignore the filing system.

Most of the time I've spent on this has actually been spent tidying up the embedded text. I didn't care so much when I was using an iPod because I'm not usually looking at the iPod screen while I'm listening, but I do glance at the infotainment screen while I'm driving, and seeing wrongly spelled words, or screeds of unnecessary text (I know which work I'm listening to, and which act it is!), or the wrong artists' names is going to bug me, so I decided to fix it. I didn't do much typing - I just had a web page open with the appropriate text, and cut and paste what I wanted.

The limiting factor is the number of tracks on the CD rather than the amount of music. I did Parsifal last night fairly quickly because each CD only had about ten tracks.

 

[AdyC]

I have some 78s and some 8 tracks i want to transfer how do i do this ? im missing george formby.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm sure you'll find someone to take your money if you're so lacking in taste.

 

[Torryhun]

Thank god for Spotify ?

 

[Rolfe]

You Spotify if you want to. I want to listen to the CDs I have.

 

[Torryhun]

You Spotify if you want to. I want to listen to the CDs I have.

I must have between 800 to 900 cd's and definitely not enough room in the glove box for all that ?

 

[Rolfe]

I have a lot of CDs. I've never tried to count them. Some I treasure, some should probably go in the bin. I'm just transferring the ones I'm likely to want to listen to in the car on a long journey. So far I have about 22 hours of music on that stick, which should get me a long way. I have a few more lined up to import when I get round to it.

It's actually quite quick to do once you get the hang of it. Although I'd still be pretty pleased if MG would release an upgrade to allow a couple of directory layers, simply to make finding the work I want easier. However, since I go in for long operas, oratorios and suchlike, all I have to do is find the first file and let it go.

In the interests of research I tried plugging my USB CD player directly into the car, but the car didn't recognise it. It wouldn't have been very practical anyway, because I'd have had to pull over and park every time I wanted to change the CD.

I'll say it again, I'm loving listening to music in this car, and I don't think it's because the sound system is anything special, but because the noise of the ICE is no longer interfering with listening.

 

[Rolfe]

The SE doesn't seem to incorporate the Play All > Folders option as far as I know.

It's seriously weird if the Trophy software supports folders and the SE doesn't. It's not as if it's heated seats or a satnav system! I wonder if it's simply a glitch, rather than an intentional downgrade. After all, we SE owners have the ability to toggle the A/C screen on and off at will when apparently the Trophy won't do that.

Why would you pay for something you already have ? if there's a function there then it should work correctly.

That is exactly the point. The USB music function is there. It's not unreasonable to want it to work. Yes, this is a workround that enables it to work, but MG should supply something that actually works.

 

[siteguru]

The SE Infotainment code-base must be fundamentally different to that of the Trophy (due to the significant feature differences), hence the markedly different version numbers. So perhaps different software teams have written each code-base?