I think the best solution is to give you my Gen 1 volt in exchange for your husband's Bolt. The gen 1 has a CD player in it. The only used my CD player gets is that the CD slot is used to hold a CD slot phone mount for my iPhone. It's a perfect trade.
LOL. I have a Gen1 Volt as well, with a CD player, so I could indeed trade with him. It's just that the Bolt was supposed to be his new car
The earlier idea wasn''t to put your server in the car, but to stream everything from your home server to the car as needed.
Oh, you mean over the internet ? Yeah, I suppose that is a possibility. I don't keep my server up 24/7 with the electricity rates we have here. I power it only as needed using WOL, even in an automated fashion for backups. It goes back to sleep as soon as all backups from all the computers are over. The backups are scheduled during off-peak power hours only currently. I could change that, though. But this would be much less reliable than we want it to be. In theory, it would be possible to remotely WOL start the server from the internet, but my router does not support that feature, at least not in an authenticated fashion. There may be other routers that do, I think.
We live in a very spotty area in the hills though, cell signal wise. The 4G drops out a lot. Often only at 2G indoors. Usually, we can't even make calls from the car until we are back at sea level. We can start calls , but they invariably get cut off as we go down hill after about 1-2 mins, so there is just no point. This is true for pretty much all the cell operators - just the terrain. Even Onstar calls drop off as they often start on 4G instead of satellite but then get cut off as the cell signal drops. There is no way that I know to force Onstar to start the call on satellite instead of 4G - I guess that would cost the company a lot more. I have made successful sat calls with Onstar in empty signal areas, though. There are sometimes 20-30 miles stretches in the bay area with no signal at all on any cell operator (look at CA 84 & 1 for example).
Very often I don't get charge notifications from my Volt even though it's always parked and charging in the same spot in the garage. I'm not quite sure if this is due to some problem on the Onstar side, signal or the car.
Bottom line is, I wouldn't rely on internet for streaming music in the car, I just don't think it's going to be reliable enough because of the cell signal available to the car. The server itself has a cable connection with Comcast, which does sometimes dropout and require manual reboot of the modem, which would be inconvenient if it happens while we're on a road trip. I do have an XM subscription in my Volt which works great over satellite, though. I mostly listen to news & comedy channels, occasionally classical channels. XM wouldn't help my husband's situation in the Bolt, though.
There are plenty of folks who have rigged up contraptions to take a large stack of CD and automatically feed it to a CD reader using robotic parts.
Does that include feeding the CD cases and booklets with all album and track names as well at the same time
?
Anyway, I RTFM a little bit for the Bolt. Looks like it supports Windows Media Lossless - I will have to try it.
Lossless WAV is also supported.
No mention of volume size limit for USB storage devices. File systems are listed as FAT16/32, NTFS or HFS+. I reformatted my 256GB USB stick to NTFS - it was in exFAT, and the Bolt doeson't support it. Now it works in the Bolt. I only tried with 2 albums on it, in MP3.
No mention of which version of Bluetooth is supported by the Bolt, also, which may affect audio quality.
On another note, Qi wireless charging works with both our phones. Just had to orient them a certain way. And for my Note4, I had to remove the protective case, or it can't be physically inserted. It barely fits without the case. Removing the case is pretty much a requirement for wireless charging anyway since the rate of charge is too low with the case on on a tabletop Qi charger. I normally charge it through Quickcharge 2.0. That doesn't seem to be provided in the Bolt, unfortunately, so it would take space in the one 12V outlet under the center console. There is no additional 12V outlet inside the center storage unlike the Gen1 Volt.