autoxnut

I have a 2014 Z51 that I took museum delivery on 2/10/14. I had copied my music (.mp3) to a USB drive that I was using in my 2011 Silverado and I plugged this into my car expecting it to start with the first song and play to the end of the drive. NO Joy.

On a lengthy vacation last year, I discovered the radio was not playing all my music regardless of how I tried to initiate the play. Also, I discovered a lot of my songs listed under "unknown" album in the browse menu, even though when I selected one of these songs, it would display the correct title, album and artist on the screen. (none of my albums or folders was named unknown.) Lastly, the radio started skipping from song to song, pausing only long enough to play a few notes.

A trip to the dealer and having the car warehoused for 9 days resulted in being told the car was working as designed. The service technician also suggested that if I would use an IPod/IPhone all would be well. I called the GM technical support line on the entertainment system and they implied I was using bootlegged songs.

I found this unacceptable. I have determined this car will not play all music on my drive unless I create a play list. Every device that plays recorded music - record player, reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette, and CD has always started playing the music at the beginning and continued to the end by default. Good design dictates that you may add functionality to a device but never remove core functionality.

Since the dealer, GM support, and reading this forum failed to provide a solution, I set out to figure this out for myself. I have spent dozens of hours and finally achieved success. Hopefully, this information will help others.

I have always purchased the music that I wished to play, but once purchased, I have always believed I have the right to move that music from device to device. I have about 110 albums on CD that I wanted available in the car. After reviewing Windows Media Player on my Windows 7 machine, I noticed there were options to download permissions and I noticed that not all my albums displayed album art. I decided to use Windows Media Player to find or update album info and see if this would solve my problem. All of these albums have been ripped to .mp3 format using Cyberlink DVD Suite at 320kbps sampling rate (highest available). While going through the process of updating album info, I realized that 2 of my CDs had been created from copying music from my vinyl record albums. I omitted these 2 albums and only moved the albums for which I had the original CD to my USB/SD card. Upon plugging my device into the car, the "unknown" album was gone, but the car would not play the device start to end.

Someone on another thread suggested using Playlist Creater 3.6.2 to create a playlist, which I did. Last week I was on a 3000 mile trip and the car started playing the 1st song on my playlist (after selecting it) and continued in sequence until the trip was over, making it about 2/3 the way through my music. However, only about 6 of my albums displayed album art - what the hey?

I had been so careful to make sure Windows Media Player had matched my CD to the correct entry in their database and all CDs were displaying the album art in Media Player or in icon view in Windows Explorer. I had used Windows Explorer to check the metadata (song title, artist, and album) on all songs, so had ignored someones suggestion on another thread to use Mp3tag. Since I could not find a way to confirm that the album art was loaded into the metadata using Windows, I downloaded Mp3tag and used it to check my albums. Only the albums that displayed art on the car screen contained album art in the metadata. I have no clue how it got there on some albums, but not most. Anybody have any idea?

I set out to correct this. I could not find a way to capture the album art being displayed by Windows. So I did Amazon.com or google searches on each of my CDs - first by barcode number and then, if not found, by album name. I was able to find the correct album art for all my CDs and right click on the image and save it to a directory on my computer. Using Mp3tag, I was then able to paste the album art into all the songs and update the tags to save it.

I can now play all my songs in sequence and the correct album art shows on all songs!

One other thing (bug) I discovered about the Vette. If you browse by album (using the dash display) and down arrow to a specific album, you should then right arrow to the list of songs and then down arrow to the desired song and press select. If you instead, press select on the album name, it will change the word "album" in the browse menu to the name of the specific album. (This will reset after the car is turned off)

It really chaps me that I have had to spend all this time to get to listen to my music on the radio in this car. I hope somebody from GM will read this and take note.

If there is a quicker way to do all this or an on-line tutorial that would eliminate all the experimentation I went through, please post the info up here and share with others.

Vetteman Jack

Glad you finally got it to work, but I agree you shouldn't have to go through all that hassle to do so.

JerryU

Glad I didn't have to understand all you went thru! I took the "Oldies" CD's I had in iTunes, converted to mp3's and even some Youtube old songs I converted to mp3 and have about 600 songs on an SD card. I also have another larger SD Card with many more albums. I mostly listen to the "Oldies." It starts playing that SD card in a shuffle mode as soon as I start the car. Even better than XM, which I discontinued. I can do a voice search if desired. It does display the song name and artist but not any album pics.
My larger SD card with many albums has new one like Joss Stone, for example that were purchased in iTunes and well as a number of Gretchen Wilson CD's I'm sure are protected. They all play fine and I did nothing other than convert them to mp3's from where they reside in iTunes in my computer. When that SD card is inserted I do have to search, which I mostly do with voice commands.

dvilin

Quite an ordeal to go through glad you got it worked out. For me I turned the radio on once to make sure it worked and that was it.
I prefer the sound of the exhaust.

billiam01

Yeah, but it's the same song all the time; don't you want to hear something different once in awhile? What a gear head! LOL

Lawnmower7200

A few comments: The media player in the previous generation of "radios" was far superior to what's in this generation. It could play the contents of directories recursively which this generation can not. Half of the complaints about this media player stem directly from this poor implementation of file browsing.

MP3 files are notoriously easy to corrupt. Most of the time the player will ignore problems, but sometimes they're hosed in a way that causes all sort of misbehavior. I highly recommend scanning any media you intend to use in your vehicles with "MP3 Diags" which is available at SourceForge. The learning curve is a little steep, and you have to be careful with it, i.e. don't just OK everything without understanding what it's proposing to do. However, it can find and (usually) correct some show-stopping flaws such as missing headers and field over/under-runs. It's useful for diagnosing and correcting problems with internal album art too.

I think, but am not sure, that Windows Media Player is the cause of a high percentage of these file corruptions. Many times I've had known-good files that I created myself that ended up needing repair. The only intervening activity was from WMP. I recommend avoiding it; there are many good alternatives such as Foobar2000

autoxnut

I agree that Media Player may be a source of problems. I experienced a lot of difficulty with it until I turned off certain automatic features. I also discovered if I wanted to find or update an album that I had added to my computer I needed to share it with my music library, go into MP and do my find/update and then go into manage music library and remove that album from MP only. Thanks for the headsup on Mp3Diags.

Swt_86

I too have experienced similar issues with playing mp3's in the C7. I agree with you that a playlist is the way to go and am frequently adding or deleting music to or from my library on the SD card for my C7.

Here are a few tools that I found extremely helpful in the process:

Mp3tag - allows you to edit tagged information on your mp3. It also has a utility that searches the web for album art and song information. It is a free download from the web and very easy to use.

MediaMonkey - similar to Mp3tag. Perhaps a bit harder to use but may have more capabilities than Mp3tag. I have just started using it so really have little real world experience to share here. It seems like a good alternative to Mp3tag.

Mp3Gain - Volume levels can be vastly different from Mp3 to Mp3. This is a great utility, a free download, and works very well for normalizing volume across the library. It also allows the ability to change the volume of a single song.

Playlist Creation - I have found that most utilities that I have tried are by comparison cumbersome and time consuming. I have been using a command prompt in Windows to make playlists. This is certainly not for everyone, you be the judge. Here is how it works. Start a command prompt window. This is a bit different depending on the Windows version. Once at the command prompt, change to your music directory. Type this in to verify you have music files for the playlist: dir *.mp3 and press enter. (you can actually cut and past these commands into your command prompt window) You should see a list of your music files. If so, you can easily create a playlist by typing this in: dir *.mp3 /b>playlist.m3u You can change the word playlist in the command to whatever you want to name your list. Note that spaces in the name could mess things up so do not use them. This may seem complicated and cumbersome at first, but once done a few times, it is extremely fast and easy to reflect additions and deletions to your library.

Hope this helps some of you enjoy your music.

sanantguy

If your playing your music with mp3's your wrong anyhow. The quality sucks *** from those, and you only have 110 albums.

Get yourself spotify or apple music and stream 30 million albums at cd quality.

boom

golden2husky

Sadly, Spotify (and probably Apple) are far from CD quality. Lossy formats, even streamed at the highest rate, give up a lot to lossless files like FLAC. It is amazing how much larger the same file is in the lossless format. All things considered though, Spotify does a commendable job with a compromised format.

autoxnut

The point of this thread is to share information with those who have chosen to go the route of listening to their music stored as .mp3 files for whatever reasons they may have.

sanantguy

If you can tell the difference between 320kbps and a CD, then you have better ears than a german shepard

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