Adding device for stored tunes on 2014 Street Glide Special

[ricochet]

Looked for a while figuring this would have been discussed before but not seeing it.  I have 2014 FLHXS with the 6.5 BOOM infotainment including a USB cable to add a personal device to.  I'm starting to appreciate having tunes on the bike but the radio signal has been weak and only good in town.  Have a signal booster coming to maybe help that.  So I'm not into smart devices and the last time I had tunes on a bike in 1973 when I strapped an 8track onto the sissy bar of my XLH.  The reverb was awesome but it didn't last long  .  So what low cost option/gadget can I get like online or at Walmart for example to hold a bunch of CD's worth of music on?  Am I understanding it correctly that whatever device plugged into that USP cable in the little glove compartment is powered through that cable and can be managed through the infotainment center?  My daughter says there's cheap Itune type devices for cheap money that will work. 

What have you guys done for cheap tunes?

ricochet

[UltraNutZ]

IMO, get on Craigslist, fleabay, etc. and find you a 16gb or 32gb used iPod.  That will literally hold 1000s of tunes and compatibility wont be an issue.  Some of the USB storage devices will require more power (voltage and amps) than the USB connector can provide

[lilchief]

Put your music on a flash drive/memory stick and plug her in. You can get the memory sticks with a variety of memory on them, like 16gb, 32gb, and even a 64gb. Those hold a boatload of music. I like the 8gb & 16gb ones because they are cheap, and still will hold 100's of songs.
Lil Chief

[Alien]

Put your music on a flash drive/memory stick and plug her in. You can get the memory sticks with a variety of memory on them, like 16gb, 32gb, and even a 64gb. Those hold a boatload of music. I like the 8gb & 16gb ones because they are cheap, and still will hold 100's of songs.
Lil Chief

yes....

[glens]

I don't think you can control a dedicated "player" through the USB interface but the head unit has a pretty good "player" built right in.  A 16 GB thumb drive can hold thousands of MP3s, and you can also use a thumb drive to update the head unit software / navigation stuff.

It doesn't matter how you structure the directories on the thumb drive, the head unit will find and index the MP3s.  I make a directory called "Music" or some such in the root of the filesystem, and within that I make directories with the artist names, and within those I make directories with the album names which contain the songs from that album.  I isolate the music into its own root directory for a couple reasons.  First is because it leaves the root directory clean for software update files (easy to find / delete) and I know there at least used to be a limit on entries in the root directory on FAT filesystems.

Last time I looked, I believe a 16 GB USB thumb drive was like $12 at Walmart.  Cheap.

Keep a complete backup of your music on another thumb drive and/or an external hard drive.  The USB stick could grow legs or fail, and you don't want to have to spend all the time ripping CDs again.

If you're ripping your own CDs to MP3s, you don't need any higher quality than 128K constant bitrate encoding.  This will keep the file sizes down and have plenty of fidelity.

You'll want to ensure you get proper ID3 tags into the files, too, so the player can properly index / group songs.  Also, I use a program called "mp3gain" (here) to normalize the level of all the songs so there's no variation in volume from one song to the next, and I've found that doing so at a level of +6 dB does a good job of matching the sound levels between the MP3 player and the FM radio.

[ricochet]

Thanks guys.

So I can just use a flash drive and the Boom systems will play from that storage device?  That's too easy.  I'll study these recommendations and create one to play with.

Thanks

All tips welcome.

ricochet

[lilchief]

Yep, plug in your usb full of music and switch the system mode to usb and you're playing music. You can use your thumb controls to scroll through the songs as well.
Lil Chief

[Quicksilver]

plus 1 for the USB thumb drive/memory stick. WAY better than an MP3 player!   Hundreds of songs all controlled with the stock handlebar controls.  Just gotta learn how to turn all your tunes into MP3's and your away to the races.