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You're wrong. My 2015 MY Volt, which I bought only 18 months ago, has a built-in CD player that integrates very nicely.
I stand corrected, must have confused it with the DVD player. Yes, my Volt has a DVD player for my collection of hundreds of DVD's. :)
 
Discussion starter · #82 ·
FYI, my research leads me in the direction of this type of player - slim car CD player .

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DVD-Player-...ash=item33b9d4a403:g:eykAAOSwopRYajAh&vxp=mtr

This would meet all the must-have requirements I listed previously.
It could be mounted vertically on the side even if it turns out it can't fit in the space in the Bolt below the touch screen.
The main issue would be to get an installer to cleanly wire it for power/audio so there are no exposed cables.





 
Discussion starter · #84 ·
Good luck and let us know how it goes but I suggest you talk to the installer before you order it.
Yes, that's the plan - and would rather order something from the US than Germany, with a US warranty, preferably a unit the installer is already familiar with/already has available. There are many similar CD units from China on Alibaba as well for even less money ($60 range). I know the labor will be more. If we really wanted to go cheap we would buy one of these and leave the power & audio cables exposed and do self-install, but minimizing cost to that degree on a $47k car is silly, convenience & safety are more important.
 
My only concern is where to hook up the analog audio cables but surely an installer can figure that one out.
 
Discussion starter · #86 ·
My only concern is where to hook up the analog audio cables but surely an installer can figure that one out.
We spoke to a couple of installers this afternoon - they each said they could handle it, it just might take them time to fish the audio wires since it's the first Bolt they worked on. 1 to 2 hour job was the estimate job time.

Neither stock any unit similar to what I found - all of them were at least twice as big, and designed to replace built-in car stereo head unit, which is not applicable to our solution. So we definitely have to order parts ourselves, and use an installer for labor.

I will try to source something like the above in the US, but if I can't, may order the kit I found above from Germany.

I got to drive the Bolt some more this afternoon on the way to the installers . Put my 64GB USB stick with my classical CD collection.
It was much faster to index than on the Volt, I could start choosing the album right away.

However, soon afterwards, I got the message that the maximum index size was reached. My 1000 CD album collection probably have about 30 tracks each, so that's about 30,000 audio files. Not sure what the exact limit in the Bolt is. I did not see a limit listed in the manual.

I know the Volt isn't showing all the albums on the stick either, but unlike the Bolt, doesn't even put any warning message about it.

For 15,000 CDs, even converted, we would be looking at around 10-15x as many files, so definitely not workable with current Bolt firmware, even if we could afford converting my husband's entire collection, and a 1-2TB USB flash drive. As I said before, those embedded car audio systems just are not designed for a very large collection.

I also noticed that the audio files in each folder do not play in "gapless" mode, ie. there is a short pause/silence between each ripped CD track, which is especially noticeable when the tracks are just markers between movements on a live concert.

This is the same behavior as the Volt and Prius that could play audio from USB stick. I think the Leaf might have handled this properly, I don't recall. Wish some car manufacturer would allow gapless mode to work. Seems like an easy enough bug to fix.
Anyway, separate CD player unit should take care of gapless issue, too.
 
We spoke to a couple of installers this afternoon - they each said they could handle it, it just might take them time to fish the audio wires since it's the first Bolt they worked on. 1 to 2 hour job was the estimate job time.

Neither stock any unit similar to what I found - all of them were at least twice as big, and designed to replace built-in car stereo head unit, which is not applicable to our solution. So we definitely have to order parts ourselves, and use an installer for labor.

I will try to source something like the above in the US, but if I can't, may order the kit I found above from Germany.

I got to drive the Bolt some more this afternoon on the way to the installers . Put my 64GB USB stick with my classical CD collection.
It was much faster to index than on the Volt, I could start choosing the album right away.

However, soon afterwards, I got the message that the maximum index size was reached. My 1000 CD album collection probably have about 30 tracks each, so that's about 30,000 audio files. Not sure what the exact limit in the Bolt is. I did not see a limit listed in the manual.

I know the Volt isn't showing all the albums on the stick either, but unlike the Bolt, doesn't even put any warning message about it.

For 15,000 CDs, even converted, we would be looking at around 10-15x as many files, so definitely not workable with current Bolt firmware, even if we could afford converting my husband's entire collection, and a 1-2TB USB flash drive. As I said before, those embedded car audio systems just are not designed for a very large collection.

I also noticed that the audio files in each folder do not play in "gapless" mode, ie. there is a short pause/silence between each ripped CD track, which is especially noticeable when the tracks are just markers between movements on a live concert.

This is the same behavior as the Volt and Prius that could play audio from USB stick. I think the Leaf might have handled this properly, I don't recall. Wish some car manufacturer would allow gapless mode to work. Seems like an easy enough bug to fix.
Anyway, separate CD player unit should take care of gapless issue, too.
While you are installing the CD player, shop around for some sort of portable hard drive enclosure with music controls that you can put a big !TB portable drive or greater into it and rip everything as AIFF files. At 650 MB per CD, I compute it would just barely fit into 1tb. Hopefully the Enclosure has an aux cable and you are set
 
My computations suggest a much larger disk...
You're right. We need 10TB. Are we sure we can't do a little compression. Apple has a pretty good compression, don't remember the acronym, aap?
 
Discussion starter · #91 · (Edited)
While you are installing the CD player, shop around for some sort of portable hard drive enclosure with music controls that you can put a big !TB portable drive or greater into it and rip everything as AIFF files. At 650 MB per CD, I compute it would just barely fit into 1tb. Hopefully the Enclosure has an aux cable and you are set
1 TB would fit my 1000 CD collection, but not my husband's 15,000 CD collection.
With 2:1 lossless compression, we would be talking about 5 TB. 10TB without compression.
Using 12:1 lossy compression, 1TB might do it.

Even then, if such a device existed, I don't see how you could select which folder/file to play.
A few buttons on the front wouldn't be adequate for that - these controls work fine for a single CD since the device controls don't need to handle the album selection (that's done by the operator who chooses which disc to insert), just track selection.
But for a music collection, you would require some kind of display.
Since there is unfortunately no video input on the Bolt, one would need to a device with an additional display.
Such a device would more accurately be called a player, not an enclosure, since it would need to read the content of the hard drive, decode the file system, playback the files, and do a D/A conversion for the the audio signal.
You are basically talking about a laptop computer with a large storage amount at this point. It would be bullky and inconvenient to use in the car. No doubt such devices will shrink physically over time as technology improves, but given the physical constraints of the Bolt Gen1, the requirement for an additional display would remain.

Since the firmware in the Bolt cannot deal with a collection that large - even my 64GB stick in lossy format is too large for the Bolt - a pure storage interface cannot work.

And all this still presupposes putting $11,000 of labor into transferring the entire CD collection to a hard drive. Yet again, this is impractical.

I found a player unit that is similar to the one from Germany, but in the US. Same half-DIN form factor.

http://www.qualitymobilevideo.com/ad318.html
https://www.myronanddavis.com/ad318

Specs don't explicitly list CD audio support, though, which is a bit strange, but they list CD-R and CD-RW. Would be odd for it not to support audio CDs. I sent an email to the manufacturer to inquire, but it bounced. I sent another message through their web site.
 
Discussion starter · #92 · (Edited)
Believe it's AAC?
AAC is a lossy audio compression slightly better than MP3 .
Apple started using it in their iPods, but they didn't create the technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

I'm not a huge fan of lossy formats, at least not for digital archiving. For car playback, they are OK.

Apple created a lossless encoder also.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless .

There are many other lossless encoders, like DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, FLAC, WMA lossless. Most achieve about 2:1 compression ratio. There is some variable in how much computing power is needed to encode and decode.

Currently, my own music collection is in FLAC format on my home computer. I may convert it to WMA lossless as it appears that the Bolt supports this format. I will experiment with it. I think the Volt supports WMA also, but not sure about lossless variant. The manual for the Bolt says WMA lossless is explicitly supported.

For my husband's collection, physical CDs are the only viable option, though.
 
Discussion starter · #93 ·
FYI, my 64GB USB stick has 11,128 MP3 files on it, and that's too many for the Bolt firmware to handle. Each file is one CD track.

According to JRiver media center, my own collection in FLAC is 1023GB, 47,968 files, and 147.9 days. I guess it has grown a lot since I first ripped my CDs. That's closer to 3,000 CDs than 1,000 .
This is already at least 5x as large as the Bolt can handle (my guess is, the Bolt's limit is around 10,000 files, but did not verify it).
And my husband's collection is another 5x as large as mine.
 
1 TB would fit my 1000 CD collection, but not my husband's 15,000 CD collection.
With 2:1 lossless compression, we would be talking about 5 TB. 10TB without compression.
Using 12:1 lossy compression, 1TB might do it.

Even then, if such a device existed, I don't see how you could select which folder/file to play.
A few buttons on the front wouldn't be adequate for that - these controls work fine for a single CD since the device controls don't need to handle the album selection (that's done by the operator who chooses which disc to insert), just track selection.
But for a music collection, you would require some kind of display.
Since there is unfortunately no video input on the Bolt, one would need to a device with an additional display.
Such a device would more accurately be called a player, not an enclosure, since it would need to read the content of the hard drive, decode the file system, playback the files, and do a D/A conversion for the the audio signal.
You are basically talking about a laptop computer with a large storage amount at this point. It would be bullky and inconvenient to use in the car. No doubt such devices will shrink physically over time as technology improves, but given the physical constraints of the Bolt Gen1, the requirement for an additional display would remain.

Since the firmware in the Bolt cannot deal with a collection that large - even my 64GB stick in lossy format is too large for the Bolt - a pure storage interface cannot work.

And all this still presupposes putting $11,000 of labor into transferring the entire CD collection to a hard drive. Yet again, this is impractical.

I found a player unit that is similar to the one from Germany, but in the US. Same half-DIN form factor.

http://www.qualitymobilevideo.com/ad318.html
https://www.myronanddavis.com/ad318

Specs don't explicitly list CD audio support, though, which is a bit strange, but they list CD-R and CD-RW. Would be odd for it not to support audio CDs. I sent an email to the manufacturer to inquire, but it bounced. I sent another message through their web site.
Ok, a friend of mine was able to download an open source copy of amazon's Alexa software for raspberry pi. What if you took a real PC plugged into an inverter, added a usb3 raid array to get the biggest disks you could, load up your favorite Linux, find some music management software and made your own big ass custom Amazon echo?

There are plenty of diy projects where people have made robot cd loaders to rip CDs to other digital formats. Then comes the problem of getting all the songs titles and artists, since you mentioned there's a lot of off the wall music that is probably not in any music database. That same diy robot project probably could be morphed to also take a hide from pic of the back album art and use ocr to snag the song titles as well as the front cover art. All of this is possible, though requires some development and integration.

I have about 300 CDs before I went digital.those CDs sit in the basement where all my new tunes are through pandora. I just can't imagine having 15k CDs. That's just cra cra.
 
Discussion starter · #95 ·
Ok, a friend of mine was able to download an open source copy of amazon's Alexa software for raspberry pi. What if you took a real PC plugged into an inverter, added a usb3 raid array to get the biggest disks you could, load up your favorite Linux, find some music management software and made your own big ass custom Amazon echo?
Seems like a lot of trouble. I think a $200 car CD player can do the job, hopefully.

There are plenty of diy projects where people have made robot cd loaders to rip CDs to other digital formats. Then comes the problem of getting all the songs titles and artists, since you mentioned there's a lot of off the wall music that is probably not in any music database. That same diy robot project probably could be morphed to also take a hide from pic of the back album art and use ocr to snag the song titles as well as the front cover art. All of this is possible, though requires some development and integration.
If such a service existed, we might use it in the future (or loan a robot that does this stuff). But I don't think it should be up to the car driver to spend the time to develop the technology, all because GM dropped the ball on a CD player.

I have about 300 CDs before I went digital.those CDs sit in the basement where all my new tunes are through pandora. I just can't imagine having 15k CDs. That's just cra cra.
Do you use an iOS device ? Apple has decided to exclude the Pandora app from Carplay, so you won't able to use Pandora in the Bolt, even if you want to. That was shared to me by my friend who attended the Chevy Bolt press event friday in Palo Alto. This is what I was referring to in an earlier post about potential anti-trust issues.

Pandora app was also built-in to the Volt, without a smartphone connected, and has been removed as well. It's not just the CD player that has gone away. This is IMO not a coincidence. Car audio seems to have to gone a pay-to-play model.
 
...
Pandora app was also built-in to the Volt, without a smartphone connected, and has been removed as well. It's not just the CD player that has gone away. This is IMO not a coincidence. Car audio seems to have to gone a pay-to-play model.
I don't think it's quite that sinister... removing the CD player saves weight, cost, and space (all things the industry cares a lot about, which is why spare tires are rare now too). And the majority of users these days don't use them. I used them (mp3s on CDs, mainly) in my old car, but once I got an iphone I almost never did. And I've never used a CD in my Volt, I either do bluetooth from my phone or USB to an old ipod a friend gave me (better interface than a flash drive, I think). You are unfortunately in the minority... but you are far from alone. I'm sure this bothers a lot of other people too, and I do feel for you. I get very annoyed when features I use are removed from products I like. And for what it's worth, I think it's a bit premature to remove the CD drive too, though it would have to happen eventually. Heck, Teslas don't even have an Aux jack, you have to use bluetooth or USB, which I think is dumb. I use Aux jacks on roadtrips with friends to have rotating DJs.

You have to admit, though, that your case is a minority of the minority. That collection is easily 100x bigger than anyone I personally know. And even among avid collectors, I would bet it's rare that they would want instant access to anything in their car; having their favorite 100 albums or whatever on flash probably good enough for most. But I'm sure there are others like your husband, and it is rough to suddenly have your preferred and convenient methods ruined by bean counters... it's just that the industry doesn't cater much to outliers. I'm glad the installers sound like they can help you and I think we're all interested to see the final product, as I'm sure there will be some others who might be interested in doing the same thing. It's rough being the pioneer but it sounds like you are on the right track.
 
Do you use an iOS device ? Apple has decided to exclude the Pandora app from Carplay, so you won't able to use Pandora in the Bolt, even if you want to. That was shared to me by my friend who attended the Chevy Bolt press event friday in Palo Alto. This is what I was referring to in an earlier post about potential anti-trust issues.

Pandora app was also built-in to the Volt, without a smartphone connected, and has been removed as well. It's not just the CD player that has gone away. This is IMO not a coincidence. Car audio seems to have to gone a pay-to-play model.
I use pandora and Spotify all the time either through Bluetooth or the aux port on my volt. I don't even bother with the buggy Volt's pandora infotainment app. I don't think I can use Pandora on the volt without a smartphone. But I do understand why Apple might have excluded Pandora from CarPlay, they don't own the software. Pandora would need to partner with them, and Apple has a vested interest in their music store and Apple Music Radio (which I was a huge user of when it was free, no longer using it after they started charging monthly fee).
 
AAC is a lossy audio compression slightly better than MP3 .
Apple started using it in their iPods, but they didn't create the technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

I'm not a huge fan of lossy formats, at least not for digital archiving. For car playback, they are OK.

Apple created a lossless encoder also.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless .

There are many other lossless encoders, like DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, FLAC, WMA lossless. Most achieve about 2:1 compression ratio. There is some variable in how much computing power is needed to encode and decode.

Currently, my own music collection is in FLAC format on my home computer. I may convert it to WMA lossless as it appears that the Bolt supports this format. I will experiment with it. I think the Volt supports WMA also, but not sure about lossless variant. The manual for the Bolt says WMA lossless is explicitly supported.

For my husband's collection, physical CDs are the only viable option, though.
What about ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) for FLAC or Shorten? These are all lossless formats. It's sounds like you are resigned to resist moving away from CDs into anything modern. I had a coworker who loves his 128GB iPod that he loads up with all sorts of lossless music. He cannot hold everything in it, but cycles things in and out as he feels like it. So instead of ripping 15K CDs, just rip as you go.
 
Discussion starter · #100 ·
What about ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) for FLAC or Shorten? These are all lossless formats. It's sounds like you are resigned to resist moving away from CDs into anything modern. I had a coworker who loves his 128GB iPod that he loads up with all sorts of lossless music. He cannot hold everything in it, but cycles things in and out as he feels like it. So instead of ripping 15K CDs, just rip as you go.
As I said, my own collection is already ripped . In lossless format (compressed 2:1), my own collection would need 8 x 128 GB iPods. In lossy format, it should fit in 2 iPods. I don't need to have it lossless format in the car, though, I can have another smaller copy in MP3 or other lossy format for purposes of car playing.
But even then, due to limits in the car's firmwares (both Volt and Bolt), the car still cannot handle my collection's size in digital format.
For me, it's not so much of a problem of moving to something modern - I can use JRiver to convert it to any format I wish with the click of a button (and a few tens of hours of computing), it's a problem of having the car being able to handle the entire collection.
I have switched my collection from ALAC lossless to FLAC lossless in the past. I may switch it again to WMA lossless if there is a benefit.
I could probably split my collection into 5-10 separate USB sticks just to get around the car's per-stick file limit, but it's a bit silly IMO. I think such limits are things the car manufacturers should fix, but I don't know if they can.

The size of my husband's collection is much larger, though. Ripping discs each time one is selected for playing still takes a lot of extra time. It's a possibility, but it's far less convenient than just inserting the disc into the car's player.
 
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