Books on disk

I use a USB CD drive on my computer, but I don't believe you will be able to plug it directly into the USB port on your truck. Well, you can plug it in, but it won't do anything. It requires drivers and software to play.

My wife is legally blind, and lives off of audiobooks. I used the computer's built-in software to convert all her existing CDs to MP3 files. Your computer will just look at them as any audio or music CD. I then loaded them all on an iPod, I think 128GB. Plenty of room. She also uses a lot of audiobooks from the library, probably 3 or 4 a week. They are all loaded over the internet directly to the iPod. I can either keep the files on the iPod, or delete them. Since there's plenty of room I just keep the files on there. They expire in 3 weeks, but she frequently checks the books out again months later to listen to again and they don't need to be downloaded again, they are just activated for another 3-week period.

The iPod uses the same OS as an iPhone, so it can connect to your truck through bluetooth or a a USB cable and play through your truck's audio system. (She normally just listens with her earbuds since we have different tastes.)

I also have a lot of old time radio broadcasts loaded on her iPod. About 500 Gunsmoke, all of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, various others she likes, mostly westerns like Hopalong Cassidy, all episodes of Jimmy Stewart in the Shooter, etc. It works for us, and she never runs out of stuff to listen to.

Moved from Tech Issues.

I use the USB drive on my 2014 RAM.

I organize all of the files into folders on the memory stick. I created folders like "A-G", "H-M", "N-T", and "U-Z". And then I organize each of the artists into their own sub-folders and every album inside those artist folders.

Make sure all of your tracks are named numerically so that it can see the seqence:

"01-XYZ.mp3"
"02-XYZ.mp3"
"03-XYZ.mp3:
etc.

It should play the next track in the list when they're sorted that way.

You may be better off using a public library, and downloading audio books to a computer, laptop, ipad or phone. No CDs, no player. I use an app on my ipad called "overdrive". All you need is a membership to the library and you have free access to hundreds of audio books. And you can join other libraries where you travel to. You do it all on line and don't have to go to the library. Been doing it for years.

Using a portable CD player in a moving vehicle subjects it to skips in the content. It's very annoying. Even on well-paved roads, the skipping occurs.

I would get an mp3 player. You can hold a lot of books on the one device, and you can connect it to the car system, external speakers, or headphones easily. And, you don't have to deal with annoying skips.

Mp3 devices compatible with audible books

larry cad wrote:
You may be better off using a public library, and downloading audio books to a computer, laptop, ipad or phone. No CDs, no player. I use an app on my ipad called "overdrive". All you need is a membership to the library and you have free access to hundreds of audio books. And you can join other libraries where you travel to. You do it all on line and don't have to go to the library. Been doing it for years.

x2 I use Libby on my phone (android) free downloads from my local library.

I have tried Plug in mechanicals and no joy on my jeep Forget if it was a CD or a Cassette.. The Jeep simply has not the driver needed.

Memory stick does work as in my case does the SD card. and though it took me a while to find it there is a CD slot hidden in the center counsel.

The Memory card or Stick WILL advance normally But you may need to rename the tracks.. start with 01, then 02 then 03 (followed by whatever they are on the CD) for example 01-prelude
02-at the races
03-at the farm

(making these up)

Another option... Check the radio owner's manual.

Sometimes there is an optional multi-cd changer that plugs into the back of the radio and hides "elsewhere" you can load half a dozen (more or less) Cd's and it will play through them in order.

I've used lots of books on CD. When it became clear that vehicles were not coming with the CD player, I looked for alternatives.
I now copy the CD into iTunes (or whatever they call it now). It's a little tedious, but once you get going...
Now I can move the mp3 file to my iPhone, or my previous Android phone, or, yes, a usb stick.
The audio system in my current vehicles plays all of those without a hitch. Easier to control it from the radio unit, but more than one way to hook it up.

agesilaus wrote:
We listen to Audible books as we travel cross country. So we had a CD player in our F350. However that spontaneously combusted and the truck we are looking at a 2018 RAM 2500 does not have a CD player.
It does have a very nice backup camera display tho, one that I'd rather not replace.
So has anyone used:
1) A USB CDROM player?
2) Or listened to books/music on a USB memory stick?

Seems like we tried the memory stick idea in the F350 but it would not advance thru the chapters, stopped after playing one file

Any other suggestions welcome

You can't just use any old external USB CDROM for computers, the radio will not recognize those..

There was a outfit that did make a external USB CD drive specifically for Ford trucks but it was insanely expensive and required very specific vehicle model yrs and radio trim levels.

USB memory stick works great for audio files but you do need to pay close attention to some details to get everything to work as you want it.

Your USB flash drive needs to be "FAT32" (IE DOS compatible), NTFS (MS Windows File System) typically will not work, never tried ExFAT (Extended FAT32) which allows for larger partition. Most USB flash drives 32GB in size or smaller will come formated as FAT32, USB flash drives larger than 32GB typically will be preformated with ExFAT and may or may not work.

As long as you buy 32GB or smaller flash drives it will work and they will give you about 300 hrs of MP3 files at 128kb.

To get your files to play in order, you must organize the files in folders. If your audio books are split into a file for each chapter than you must put all of that books chapter files into the same folder for that book.

Playback order can be a bit tricky to get right as most players will play numeric (files starting 01, 02, 02) files first and alpha (a, b, c) files after that.

So, to get a CD album ripped to MP3 to play in album order, the first letter(s) must stay the same for the entire album.. To get play order you need to number the files in order, but you must make sure that track 1 is 01 and sequence like 01, 02, 03 otherwise player gets confused thinking 1 is after track 10..

Example:
T01
T02
T03
T04
T10
T11
T12

Something to be very aware of, most vehicle radios will play MP3 and WMA files ONLY.

WMA files while of better sound quality, if you buy downloads will typically have DRM (Digital Rights Management) flag set. Car stereos are not able to play any file with DRM flag set, those files must be converted to MP3 which does not support DRM.

For that reason, I would highly recommend making sure you are only trying to play MP3 files..

For purchased and downloaded WMA files you will need to find a WMA to MP3 file converter. Converting WMA files to MP3 removes the DRM flag since MP3 specifications do not recognize DRM.

For Audible books that will require you to find a file format converter to convert Audible file format to MP3..