Karen tries to play audiobook files on her phone but they don't play in the proper order. Leo says that's likely because the player isn't very smart, and can't read the metadata. It's only looking at a file name. So she may need to number those media files in order so it will read them back properly. A better player will do.
John has a new car and it doesn't have a CD player. It has a USB plug instead, but the music just jumps all around. Leo says that most car makers expect you to keep your music organized and play it from the phone. John's Corvette uses Apple CarPlay so his iPhone will interface with it really easily and he can play all his music via the iOS Music app. He can just tell it to play an album and it will play it. Or he can even tell it to play with no pauses between tracks, shuffle, create playlists, genre, and more. It's wide open in terms of options.
Angelo wants to be able to rip old LPs and save them as MP3s. What is a good turntable out there that can handle that? He's getting overwhelmed with the choices. Rich says that ION Audio is the king of these, with the ability to rip to a computer or straight to a flash drive. That's where he'll want to go, and they're not that expensive.
Greg is running into issues with music he has downloaded via SoundCloud. He gets errors now that say "invalid file." Leo says those are MP3s, so the Samsung Galaxy S7 should play them just fine. It could be an issue with how the file is saved by the app. SoundCloud enables you to stream in SoundCloud, but not play it with an MP3 player. That may mean a bad download, or saving to a format that his player doesn't recognize, or it may even be copy protection.
Mark has a music start up and he wants to be able to separate the explicit ones from the regular ones. But with thousands of songs, it's not practical to listen to all of them. How can he do it in a batch format? Leo says the metadata would be the key, if the MP3/AAC has an explicit tag in it. There's a program called MP3 Tag. Wikihow.com has an explanation of how to do this.
Tyler is in a rock band and they're recording their first album. They want to release a few songs for free on their website, but they're having trouble offering free downloads over iOS. Leo says that iOS can play MP3s, but it's hard to get mobile apps to talk to one another. Leo advises putting them on SoundCloud. It's a good place to do it because he can do it for free. And SoundCloud has an app that people can use to play the songs on mobile as well.
Rick wants to know why his acoustic MP3s skip around. Leo says it could be the software he's using to play them back. Leo says it's weird that it would get better over time, rather than just being from a bad encode. It could also be the software he used to rip the CD with.
The chatroom says that some MP3 players have a check box that says "skip gaps," and the acoustic music could have silent sections in it that causes it. Leo says to try a different player, different medium and look for commonality.
Jess would like to know how to put the music from his CD onto both his Galaxy S5 and his Barnes and Noble Nook. Leo says it's pretty easy to rip the CD and get it onto a mobile phone. There's a lot of choices. CDex and Exact Copy are a couple of software options.
There was a story recently about kids "getting high" on mp3s that has gotten some people upset. Leo said this simply isn't true, it isn't possible and is not happening. Sociologists and Psychologists who study this call it "moral panic". Whenever there is a new technology, it can be scary. So there's no need to worry about your kids getting high on MP3s.
