USB drive with aac in Sony car stereo

[ganamant]

Hi folks,

this is not an issue with Mint, but maybe somebody has a clue about it, because I don't.

I have a Sony car stereo that's about 10 years old, don't remember the model. The front panel claims compatibility with mp3, wma and aac music files and has a USB port on it. It has no problems reading mp3 files, but it won't read aac files encoded on my computer. I know it can actually read aac files, because it once did, but unfortunately, I no longer have the files that used to work so I can't study them. They had an m4a extention, that's all I can remember for sure. Maybe they were ripped with iTunes on a Mac, not sure, but that could explain it. I no longer have that Mac to make experiments on.

I've tried different settings on my new rips, raw aac and m4a container, tags and no tags, aac-lc, aac-ld, he-aac, constant and variable bitrates with different values, but to no avail.

I've tried converting flac files with ffmpeg and libfdk_aac encoder, and I've tried the fdkaac standalone frontend with wav as a source: nothing works.

Of course, the filenames are pure ascii with no spaces or special chars in them (as I always do anyway), and I've also tried to keep the names short, but even going below 8 chars won't help.

That being said, I don't think there's a problem with the filesystem, but rather with the codec, since mp3s usually work.

[phd21]

HI ganamant,

That's an older car stereo, so it may only accept certain bit rates for certain music (audio) file types, like 128 vs 320. If you can find the manual for that make and model car stereo, it should have the information on what file type and bitratres are accepted.

There are a few great multi-media and audio converters available to use. My favorite is "SoundKonverter" (Converts files and rips CD's) which is in the Software Manager or Synaptic Package Manager (SPM), and I would use "Synaptic Package Manager (SPM)" and right-click that and install all recommended and suggested packages. You can easily convert most audio files into mp3 that would work well in that stereo. There are others too, like "sound converter", "Freac", curlew, winFF, FF Multi Converter, etc ... And, a lot of good music applications like Amarok can easily convert audio formats from one format to another. The superb DVD/CD application "K3b" can do this too (install all recommended and suggested packages).


Hope this helps ...