Audio file formats - really annoying

Tomorrow I will get a new car. Not for the fun of it - since being father to four kids, we need a car that is able of moving all six of us. this shiny new car has an USB port which enables me to put in an USB memory stick and play the music placed on it as if it were an audio cd. This sounds great, doesn’t it? No more joggling with joggling with CDs, no more problems with cleaning and carrying discs around and moving the right tunes from one car to the other.

In preparation, I checked the specs and have taken a look onto our family music library. My wife had a MacBook for a while, so I will find those m4a-files purchased in the iTunes store all around. I am using Linux only at home and was using cds when listening to music elsewhere, so most of the music extracted from our cd collection is transcoded into the open ogg vorbis format. When buying new music, we are relying on a mix made up from Amazon’s mp3-store and the Google Play music store which will give us mp3-files for our collection. My Jolla plays all of those formats just fine, so did my Palm phones. My wife has an outdated iPhone and does not listen to music from the phone at all.

OK, now you are asking yourself: Come on, what’s your point? This is not interesting to the world.

You are right, of course.

My simple problem is, that the new car (which cost a lot of money btw) and most other car audio systems, stereo devices and portable music players support mp3 and mp3 only. This is annoying. What am I supposed to do now? Transcode all those Gigabytes of music into that format? Purchase music again in another store? Why is it so hard to make audio system play ogg-Files, or mp4 files? One is about licensing, I know, but the other one could be easily supported. It is the standard for HTML5 audio, so its usage may increase in the future.

Ok, I am done now. I will now get all of our CDs and rip them to mp3 files. It may take some time, don’t wait, go to bed if you’re tired…