Car Stereo - SD Cards

[Munroast]

I am needing to replace the stereo in my van and was interested in one that excepts SD Cards. Presumably you load your music in MP3 format or similar onto the card and then listen to it through the car stereo.
Presumably the car stereo picks up file information from the SD card and creates a menu so as you can search through and select the music.
All my music is currently on my hard drive in WAV format and has been sourced from both vinyl and CD, so I doubt there is hidden file info for many of the tracks, now I can quite easily turn these into MP3s But where is the information stored that will show Artist and track detail, is it the extended file attributes?

The only file information currently available is the file name, size, created and modified. I have all the file names in the following format

Thin Lizzy - Rosalie.wav
Imelda May - Roadrunner.wav
Iggy Pop - Lust for Life.wav

With only this info what am I likely to see on a car stereo that accepts SD cards.

I don't have an ipod so have no idea how their file structures work

 

[ChrisFrost]

Quite honestly, the fastest way might be to rerip the CDs so that the metadata is included automatically. You vinyl rips will have to be tagged manually. Do a Google about that to work out the method that suits you best.

As for how any media player will present untagged tracks.... its usually something like "track 01, track 02" You may well get multiple listings for the same track number.

 

[Munroast]

Thanks for that - I was hoping they would take the track names from the file name in the same way iTunes does.

I will copy some tracks onto a SD card and see if I can plug it into a stereo at curry's or halfords and see what happens.

 

[ChrisFrost]

iTunes works differently. There's a separate folder with the track name info. The way iTunes does it is a real pain with some media players.

 

[Munroast]

An update: Purchased a Kenwood KDC 4751SD and it does recognise the file name, it will play them either in alphabetical order or by random, so pretty much what I had hoped for. And it is possible to scroll through the list and find whatever artist / track I want.

One annoying problem that I don't understand - All my music has file names in the following protocol

Thin Lizzy - Rosalie.mp3
Imelda May - Roadrunner.mp3
Iggy Pop - Lust for Life.mp3

The Kenwood sorts out the file names in an alphabetical order based on the first 2 letters only, and this is a real nuisance, ie "Rod Stewart" "Rolling Stones" "Roy Orbison" "Roxy Music" "Robby Robertson" are all mixed up and in no logical order. Not even in the order to which they were copied to the SD card. I can't even begin to think of a work-around other than renaming the groups by inserting numbers for the second character.
As computers never do anything by random how is the processor coming up with the order it is choosing?

 

[Sam Gangee]

Not the "processor" but the firmware. Check the User Manual. Only the firmware writer will know. Seems odd to use only the first two characters. The seemingly "random" ordering of Ro,Ro,Ro,Ro,Ro,Ro could be based on anything, including creation date of file, length of file, order in which it finds the files in the directory, first two characters of track name...