Direct Transfer Music From CD to USB Drive

If you are just copying songs directly from your CDs to your flash drives it is not going to work. Songs on CDs are in AIFF format. As far as I know, the only formats the Honda sound system can use are MP3, AAC and WMA. (Check your owners' manual).

IMHO the way to do this is to import your CDs into the Music app on your MBAir. Make sure your import settings are either MP3 or AAC. Once you have imported your CDs, use the Finder to navigate to your Music folder and copy the song files to your flash drives.

The default location of the Music folder is /Users/<yourusername>/Music/Music/Media.

Of course, if you have an iPhone, once your CDs are imported into the Music app it would be easier just to sync your music library to your iPhone and use your iPhone in the car.

CatholicOne wrote:

Thanks very much! I'm often in areas with no cell towers, so even if I listen to music on Amazon (on my phone ...

If that's an iPhone, just import your CDs into the Music app on your Mac, then sync to your iPhone and use your iPhone in the car. It works beautifully. Your iPhone connects to your Honda Passport audio system via bluetooth to either CarPlay or HondaLink (depending on which one your Honda has) and you can play anything that's on your iPhone. You don't need to use flash drives or any kind of cellular service to do this.

Once songs are in the Music library, you can drag-and-drop them to the Desktop, or to a drive.

Note that the Finder likes to create files and directories whose names begin with '.' on non-Mac filesystems, such as those on USB flash drives. It's trying to preserve things that the Mac filesystem might have and others might not – so that if you ever copy files back from the USB flash drive to a Mac, it can "reassemble the pieces."

The ones that cause the most problem are metadata files that have extensions like .AAC, .MP3, and .JPG. Non-Mac devices may not realize that these are metadata files, and may try to interpret them as AAC, MP3, or JPG files – with the result being that they complain about and/or choke on these "corrupt" files.

SONG1.AAC
._SONG1.AAC
SONG2.AAC
._SONG2.AAC

For .AAC, .MP3, and .JPG files, these metadata files are unnecessary even if you ever copy the files back to a Mac.

To get rid of these, just before you eject a USB flash drive,

• Go into Terminal and type dot_clean -m
• Type a space character after the end of that command
• Drag the USB flash drive icon from the Finder into the Terminal window. This is a shortcut for typing in the Unix path name of the USB flash drive and any "escape" characters needed for the command line.
• Press RETURN.
• Before doing anything else in the Finder, eject the USB flash drive

There are probably ways to create Automator workflows so that you just drag a USB drive icon onto an Automator script icon to do the cleanup, but this gives you the basics.

CatholicOne wrote:

Thanks very much! I'm often in areas with no cell towers, so even if I listen to music on Amazon (on my phone), it only works when I'm in range. I'm hoping flash drives will work better. Or maybe I can get a CD player installed in my Honda Passport/trailsport. Appreciate your advice, will give it a try.

If you import the CDs into the Mac, you can sync them to the iPhone and they are resident on the iPhone and can be played with the iPhone Music app anywhere, no cell service or WiFi needed. I have over 30GB of music on my iPhone that I can play any time, any where. Some downloaded songs but many CDs as well.