Now that I'm driving myself, the music situation needs to be fixed. Radio in Atlanta is super bad--even those who were born here have said it--and I like to sing when I drive in the afternoon. In the morning, I'm too tired to want noise. I have a USB stick in my car, but the music is limited on there and after weeks of the same songs, I got tired of it. I checked into satellite radio, but the monthly cost was ridiculous. I decided I'd make another USB stick, but add a lot more music.
Theoretically, this shouldn't have been a difficult task. Take some music and drag it over and voila! It wasn't that easy.
First problem was that both iTunes and Amazon music sort everything by artist and then by album name so everything is in a freaking folder. That meant opening hundreds of folders, which was horrible, but then a new problem reared its head. I dragged the song over, but instead of copying, it was moved! That meant copying and pasting songs which added extra time.
I created a folder on my desktop to drag it to, and after two days, I had 600+ songs ready to go to the USB stick.
Second problem was that I couldn't find my bigger USB drives and the ones I had were too small. I ended up having to move everything off one of the larger drives (to my laptop since even those files wouldn't fit on the small drives) and then putting the music on the newly empty stick.
And that's when the third problem occurred to me. My car won't play .m4a files, only .mp3. Now I needed to convert files otherwise about half my music wouldn't play. I did an online search.
There was a free program for Windows in the app store. I downloaded it only to discover it only would convert files one at a time. There was no way I was going to do this for 300-400 songs. I searched again and found out that VLC Media Player will convert. I already have that program, but again, it seemed as if the conversion had to happen one song at a time. Grr.
Then I found out iTunes converted. I followed the instructions and then the fourth problem made itself known. All the files were imported into iTunes and resorted into files again for each artist/each album. ::sobs::
Yes, that's right--after I converted, I had to reopen all those folders. OMG! I'm on day 4 now and I still don't have new music in my car. I wish I could have found an easier way to do this.
Edited to add: The saga continues. About half the music either didn't convert or is hidden deeply inside the file hierarchy. Now I have to figure out which songs are missing and convert them again. What a PITA.
Edited again: After an hour or so of comparing songs to figure out which ones were missing, I gave up. I just copied the .m4a files onto the drive. I guess I'll find out for sure whether or not my car will play those files. I'm hoping it will even though I'm sure I remember that it wouldn't. I guess we'll see.
