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throwway120385

My truck will actually play MP3s off of a data CD. Maybe I should try that.

Nearly every automobile MP3 player (USB-based or CD-based) I've used was defective in some way. Usually something stupid like only playing tracks in alphabetical order, or inserting audible gaps between tracks that are meant to flow into one another, or not supporting tags correctly, or not handling UTF-8 text... Car companies don't know how to do consumer software.

Mine would cut the last few second and first few seconds of each song with some terrible "meld together" business, like the world's worst DJ.

The system in my car (2018 Ford Fiesta) will play mp3s from a usb stick but, as with your experience, it has only a basic understanding of ID3. It completely ignores the "position in media set" tag, for example, meaning that it plays the 1st track from each cd in a set, then all the second tracks, etc.

I wrote [1] to post-process my (slightly obsessively) neatly tagged mp3 collection for use in my car.

[1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser

Obligatory note: destructively edits tags, so run it on a copy of any mp3 files.

This is what I do with my 18 minivan that has a 6 disc player. That's a lot of mp3s and it's fun to guess what's next (my rando mp3 discs tend to always be in alphabetical order

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