Macan Audio, MP3 files etc

[Col Lamb]

I posted the following years ago in a thread, and as someone is having issues here it is again in its own thread
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MACAN AUDIO

Options
Standard, Bose or Burmeister
Listen to them all if considering upgrading for the base system fitted to your Macan variant. Take anSD card or USB stick with a few of your favourite music tracks and to get the best out of your listening encode the MP3 files from a CD at a high data rate such as 320 kBps. You may want to obtain a FLAC music file and recreate the test as I explain later.

Preparing your music for in car listening
This depends upon your listening preferences:-
Music can be placed on a USB memory stick or SD cards (2slots currently available)
Music can be transferred into the inbuilt 10Gb Jukebox
Music can be streamed from mobile telephone
iPod or similar will connect up directly to the PCM

If your music is already digital then it is simply a case of copying the music albums/tracks onto the memory device and inserting the device into the car.

If your music is on CD then you can rip the discs to folders on your PC or Mac.
iTunes is a free download and you can use this to rip your CDs to a specific folder, do change the standard encoding format and data rate to MP3 and 320kBps for the highest quality. Once you have ripped the CDs copy the whole Music folder which contains all the ripped albums to the memory device and you are good to go.

If your digital music is oldish rips them you may wish to download MP3TAG and use this freeware to check the data that there is on each album and that it is consistent between the tracks, t may well be that it needs editing and this software will do that. Generally if album art is not being displayed in car then the PCM will use the Data SIM to go online to Gracenote and it will download the artwork. The software will also enable you to download album art (800x800 max) that Gracenote does not find and place the jpg file in the album folder and link each track to the jpg file. Once you have checked the albums copy all the music onto the memory device.

If you use Playlists or would like to within iTunes you can create your own Playlists. Once you have created one you can export it as an M3U file into the root of your Music folder as a belt and braces situation as the iTunes Playlist will be in the iTunes sub-folder within your Music folder and also within this sub-folder iTunes will have placed copies of the album artwork that it has found. iTunes also has a Genius mode, enable it in Preferences, select a specific favourite track and select Create Genius Playlist, it uses your selected track to add other similar style tracks, or at least that is the theory.

Do note that other CD ripping software is available and many do a better job than iTunes, I only suggest this as its free easy and certainly compatible with the PCM.

CD audio is sampled at 44.1kHz/s 16 bit stereo therefore if considering re-encoding it to a Lossless file if you try to increase the sampling rate it will not produce the quality of file you expect, you would be better advised downloading a new FLAC file at the sampling rate that you desire.

Playing your Music in Car
Insert the memory device in the appropriate slot, select media source and you are good to go. Once you have your music playing spend some time adjusting the balance, fade, base, trebble etc to get the quality of audio that suits your taste. With a Bose system do also check the Surround mode or uncheck it to see which is best for you.

You also have the option of transferring the music to the Jukebox, but remember it is only 10Gb and can take quite a few attempts to get the music all transferred. I would only initiate the transfer once all the album art has been correctly assigned and that the PCM is accurately displaying the albums/artists, do not that compilation albums may cause issues if you have not checked and corrected the data with MP3TAG.

Porsche Communication Management (PCM)
Technical data: Audio and video files from MY17 manual

Supported media

SD cards up to 128 GB

DVD drive Audio CDs up to 80 min., CD ROMs up to 700 MB, DVD±R/RW, Standard Video DVD, Video DVD compatible DVD Audio

Portable players MTP Player, USB 2.0 devices of "USB Device Subclass 1 and 6" such as, for example, USB sticks, USB MP3 players without special driver software, external USB Flash memory and hard drives

DVD changers Audio CDs up to 80 min., standard video DVDs, video DVD-compatible DVD Audio

File system

SD/SDHC/SDXC/MMC memory cards

USB mass storage exFAT, FAT or FAT32, NTFS file systems with a maximum of 4 partitions

DVD drive ISO9660, Joliet, UDF

Format

MPEG 1/2 Layer 3; Windows Media Audio 9 and 10; MPEG 2/4; FLAC, MPEG 1/2; ISO-MPEG4; DivX 3, 4 and 5; Xvid; ISO-MPEG4 H.264 (MPEG4 AVC); Windows Media Video 9

File extension

.mp3 (does not apply to DVD changer); .wma; .asf; .m4a; .m4b; .aac; .flac; .mpg; .mpeg; .avi; .mp4; .m4v; .mov; .wmv

Playlists

.M3U; .PLS; .WPL; .M3U8; .ASX

Characteristics

max. 320 kbit/s and 48 kHz sampling frequency; max. 2,000 kbit/s and 720x576 px. at max. 25 fps

Number of files

DVD drive max. 1,000 files DVD

Jukebox (max. 10 GB storage space) max. 3,000 files can be copied

USB mass storage and memory cards max. 10,000 files per medium

Metadata

Album covers up to 800 x 800 pixels; GIF, JPG and PNG formats or via Gracenote database

Video DVD region codes

Code 1: USA, Canada and US Colonies

Code 2: Europe, Greenland, South Africa, Egypt and the Middle East, Japan

Code 3: Southeast Asia, South Korea, Hong Kong

Audio Comparison Test
I took one of my FLAC audio files and put it into one of my Audio editing programmes (Adobe Audition for those interested) and converted it into mp3 files with various encoding bitrates, and as a matter of interest I encoded the FLAC as AIFF and WAV to see what file size they produced

Source as a FLAC of file size 85,444kB

MP3 encoding data rate ----- File size in kB
96 ---- 2,264
160 --- 5,435
320 ---- 10,863

As a matter of interest I encoded the source into a WAV file and it was 208,394

Also being fully lossless the AIFF encoding gave a file size 208,394

With another forum member we sat in my Bose equipped Macan and listened to the FLAC and mp3 files.

FLAC was a clear winner with rich tones and a clarity of the brass instruments that the mp3's failed to come near.

MP3 at 320 gave a perfectly listenable file for most music but even at the high data rate there was a lack of clarity in the tonal quality and a slight edge to the brass.

As the MP3 data rate was lowered the audio quality got worst as expected, with the 96 file listenable but not something you would want to do regularly on a £800 Macan extra, you would certainly want the higher quality media files.

Whist it was certainly not to lab standard of testing it was an interesting exercise to actually be able to hear the difference and for me and my old ears I was pleasantly surprised that I could discern as much difference as I did.