Transfer Audio CD to USB Drive

You cannot copy or export directly to a flash drive in Apple Music. You have to import the CDs, then use the Finder to copy the resulting audio files to your flash drive.

• Import the CDs to the Apple Music app. Be careful to choose an import setting that matches what your car needs. (Music > Preferences > Files > Import Settings > Import Using). Most cars that I know of require either MP3 or AAC audio files - check your car's specs.
• After you have imported the CDs, you must use the Finder to navigate to your Music library. It should be in the Music folder in your user home folder unless you changed the location. Navigate to the subfolder for each album & songs and copy the desired song files to your flash drive.

https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware has another useful utility:

EasyFind.

Without all the mess of Spotlight indexing it can find the tracks by file name, size, and other attributes. Many of the Finder issues with moving around music files are around an incomplete Spotlight index which is usually by device or folder:

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

USB DVD players at http://www.macsales.com/ offer the ability to import CDs digitally Apple's Music App will bring them in on your computer. Once on the app, you can locate the individual files on the Finder that you have imported and copy them to the USB stick. Keep in mind, you'll want to format the USB stick FAT32, or use macfuse NTFS to write to the stick the files with the Finder. Also any files compressed in MP3, use 192 kbps rate of compression and no lower, or 128 bit AAC. Keep in mind these files may not be shared with anyone else and are within your fair use copyright as long as you are the only one maintaining a copy of the file.

Alternatively, there are ways of using Bluetooth to sync phones that have had music added to them after import to your computer. Once you pair a phone with Bluetooth to your car, it usually can play your phone's audio.

Import songs from CDs into Music on Mac - Apple Support

is a great article of getting music onto your Mac.

Sync music between your Mac and iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support

explains how to sync music to your iDevice from your Mac once it is off CD.

USB sticks tend to be easier to damage their connection to your car than the phone, but you don't wan to leave your phone in plain sight when leaving your car, as thieves may want to grab it. Protect your phone with a case that protects its screen.

Those are the metadata. They are not duplicates.

You can use the dot_clean command in Terminal to remove them.

I created a Shortcut to clean and eject the USB Stick:

The Shell Script code is:

for v in "$@"
do
	dot_clean -m "$v"
	diskutil eject "$v"
done

You have to select it from Go > Computer.

If you only have the one USB stick, you could just code it to eject that drive and you would not have to select the drive:

dot_clean -m "/Volumes/Drivename"
diskutil eject "Drivename"

OMGosh!! Thank you. I did not even think that meta data would play havoc with the audio player since I never had any issues with the iPhone playing files. This gives me the path I need to resolve the problem. I'm a bit skittish about getting into Terminal but now I know the approach to take. Thank you very much.

MartinR wrote:

You cannot copy or export directly to a flash drive in Apple Music. You have to import the CDs, then use the Finder to copy the resulting audio files to your flash drive.

Once you have songs in your Mac's Music library,, you can drag and drop them from the Music window to the Desktop, to a folder, or to a drive to export copies of those songs.

After you have imported the CDs, you must use the Finder to navigate to your Music library.• It should be in the Music folder in your user home folder unless you changed the location. Navigate to the subfolder for each album & songs and copy the desired song files to your flash drive.

No need to do this navigation if you use the drag-and-drop method.

Why even bother buying a PC, when you can run Windows on a Mac:

Running Windows on a Mac, and Connecting … - Apple Community

However the original intent of this thread was copying music to a flash drive from a CD. You can do this on a Mac, as long as it isn't copyrighted material.

Music on a CD will read with a USB-CD reader on a Mac just as you could connect one to a PC.

https://www.roxio.com/en/products/toast/titanium/?alid=238930643.1720218057

Toast offers the ability to do just that with non-copy protected music that you author.

Mind you any discussion about how to do it with music that you bought from the store you won't find on this community because of how it could breach the digital millennium copyirght act.

USB sticks can be formatted ExFAT using Disk Utility on a Mac, and that's perfectly compatible with car USB connectors.

NTFS is harder because of built-in writing to NTFS which Macs don't have. But

https://osxfuse.github.io/ Macfuse offers the ability to do this on Macs, if there is some reason why your car does not support ExFAT or the capacity on ExFAT isn't sufficient.

Does the car have AirPlay? If it does you can put the music in the Music library, add them to your iPhone and play them thru the car's speakers with AirPlay. That way it's easy to locate songs by title, artist, album or genre.

I use that method to play music and audiobooks in my car.

So far so good... however, when I use the Apple Music app to export music files to a flash drive (formatted to Fat32 or MS-DOS FAT, when I insert the flash drive into the car slot I get phantom files that don't play - they are a "duplicate" of the valid file... The file name is different as it starts with a ._ then the track #. When the car audio system gets to the phantom file, it beeps and eventually the play sequence goes to the next valid song file. How do I set up a flash drive so these phantom files don't end up on the flash drive. The car is a 2022 Honda CRV. Is there a setting in the Music app to filter out creation of these phantom files or is there third party software that allows ripping tracks to a Flashdrive without creating the phantom files? Also, I had the same result exporting directly from the Music app to a Flash Drive or exporting tracks from a CD using the MP3 Encoder setting in Music to import to Music then transfer the files to a flash drive. I cannot get avoid getting phantom files showing up on the audio screen in the car. Thank you.

You can use Music to convert to AAC or MP3. Pick the format your car will recognize. Export the converted files to your USB drive.

You can set the import format in Music Settings. You can also set it to automatically import when you insert a CD.

This is just about impossible. I've just learned. It's my own cds which I copy to apple music, then want to put on a usb for travel. No. impossible. All the explanations I've seen (like above) seem to be operating on a pc. If you are on a mac you just can't find the albums unless you are in apple music. When you on apple music you can't find your usb.

joe3945 wrote:

This can’t be done. Give up. Buy a PC. You can do it there.

It certainly can be done.

Did you not read (and try) the methods @Servant Of Cats and I wrote earlier? We provided 2 ways to copy songs to a flash drive. They both work perfectly fine on Macs. I've done it that way for years.

a brody wrote:

However the original intent of this thread was copying music to a flash drive from a CD. You can do this on a Mac, as long as it isn't copyrighted material.

You can copy any material that you have a right to copy, as long as it isn't encumbered by copy perversion / DRM.

When the iTunes Store opened in April 2003, there was DRM on purchased songs. Apple started removing that in January 2009. Any audio-only song that you purchase from the iTunes Store or the Amazon MP3 Store today will be DRM-free – but will likely contain embedded metadata identifying you. Just in case you feel like uploading the song to a pirate site for widespread distribution, and playing Russian roulette with a boatload of hungry lawyers …

Apple Music subscription songs do use DRM, so that if you stop subscribing, the music stops playing. If you want to play those in the car, bring your iPhone.

Mind you any discussion about how to do it with music that you bought from the store you won't find on this community because of how it could breach the digital millennium copyirght act.

I haven't seen many threads here recently about iTunes Store songs purchased between 2003 and 2009. But yes, you won't find threads on how to break the DRM on those old 128 Kbps AAC songs.

Read the entertainment guide for that vehicle to know whether it only will play .mp3 or can handle Apple's AAC (.m4a) audio files. From personal experience, I have a 2011 Saab 9-5 that only accepts .mp3 (or .wav), so needed a converter that I could drop an iTunes music folder onto and it would convert all audio files to .mp3, writing the same folder of converted music to the mounted USB stick. That free tool is fre:ac. It has a built-in LAME 3.1 encoder for .mp3.

When I formatted a USB stick in Disk Utility, added my music, and then tried it in the Saab, it wasn't recognized. I then formatted that USB stick in the Terminal with the following syntax where the /dev/disk4 is where the UNIX df utility told me the drive was mounted:

diskutil eraseDisk -noEFI "ms-dos fat32" SAAB_MUSIC MBRFormat /dev/disk4

Because you are adding files from macOS to the USB stick, you may have dot underscore (e.g. ._blah) files on it that you can remove with the following command:

dot_clean -m /Volumes/SAAB_MUSIC

When you are done adding your music to that USB stick, two hidden folders will have been written to it by macOS:

.Spotlight-V100

.fseventsd

and a hidden file .DS_Store.

These should be removed immediately before you eject the USB stick so they cannot be re-added by macOS.

Once I took the above steps, the AUX USB input of the Saab recognized the drive and started playing music while it indexed the drive. Your experience may be different. You very likely do not want a hidden EFI partition on that USB stick as that may confuse the car audio system.

I don't know if the hidden files make a difference, but command-shift-period keys held together will make those hidden files visible and invisible again. Do not touch any system files on your hard drive that become visible, as they are necessary for system functionality.