The Ioniq is the first car I’ve ever had without an auxiliary input jack. I spent the past couple of days experimenting with other options for playing lossless and high-res music files encoded in FLAC. I thought I would share the results.
To cut to the chase: my solution is iPhone + Apple CarPlay via USB connection + the Foobar2000 mobile app, with high-definition audio output enabled.
Longer version:
The first thing I tried was a USB flash drive. The sound was quite good, I liked the user interface, and you can store a heck of a lot of music files this way. However, this approach comes at the expense of gapless playback. Many albums play continuously from one track to the next with no pause--think of live albums, or classics like The Dark Side of the Moon. When playing albums like that via the USB flash drive, there is a brief pause between each track. I didn’t like that, so I abandoned this approach.
I turned next to my iPhone, connected to Apple CarPlay via a USB cable (not Bluetooth). I experimented with three different audio apps: Vox, VLC, and Foobar2000. (Apple Music cannot play FLAC files.) VLC and Foobar2000 are free; Vox requires a subscription if you want goodies like gapless playback.
Vox and VLC have the advantage of being fully CarPlay compatible; that is, they appear as icons in CarPlay and you can search the music library on the car's touch screen. Foobar2000 does not: you have to launch an album or playlist from the app on the phone. Once you start playing an album, however, it appears in CarPlay's "Now Playing," and from that point on, you can use the touchscreen and manual controls to reverse, fast forward, pause, etc., just as with the other apps.
However—you knew a “however” was coming!—Foobar2000 does a far better job of playing high-resolution audio files, provided that you enable high-definition audio output (Settings > Tools > Advanced). The difference was quite striking. For me, that made up for the inconvenience of not being able to browse the music folder on the touch screen. If you don’t have high-res music in your library, you’ll probably be happier with VLC.
I also experimented with different ways of getting music files from my PC to my phone. The simplest way, I decided, was via File Sharing in iTunes. Under [Name’s] iPhone, click File Sharing, then the name of your music player (e.g., VLC or Foobar). With Window Explorer queued up alongside, you can drag and drop entire folders from your music library into the music player’s “Documents” in iTunes.
To cut to the chase: my solution is iPhone + Apple CarPlay via USB connection + the Foobar2000 mobile app, with high-definition audio output enabled.
Longer version:
The first thing I tried was a USB flash drive. The sound was quite good, I liked the user interface, and you can store a heck of a lot of music files this way. However, this approach comes at the expense of gapless playback. Many albums play continuously from one track to the next with no pause--think of live albums, or classics like The Dark Side of the Moon. When playing albums like that via the USB flash drive, there is a brief pause between each track. I didn’t like that, so I abandoned this approach.
I turned next to my iPhone, connected to Apple CarPlay via a USB cable (not Bluetooth). I experimented with three different audio apps: Vox, VLC, and Foobar2000. (Apple Music cannot play FLAC files.) VLC and Foobar2000 are free; Vox requires a subscription if you want goodies like gapless playback.
Vox and VLC have the advantage of being fully CarPlay compatible; that is, they appear as icons in CarPlay and you can search the music library on the car's touch screen. Foobar2000 does not: you have to launch an album or playlist from the app on the phone. Once you start playing an album, however, it appears in CarPlay's "Now Playing," and from that point on, you can use the touchscreen and manual controls to reverse, fast forward, pause, etc., just as with the other apps.
However—you knew a “however” was coming!—Foobar2000 does a far better job of playing high-resolution audio files, provided that you enable high-definition audio output (Settings > Tools > Advanced). The difference was quite striking. For me, that made up for the inconvenience of not being able to browse the music folder on the touch screen. If you don’t have high-res music in your library, you’ll probably be happier with VLC.
I also experimented with different ways of getting music files from my PC to my phone. The simplest way, I decided, was via File Sharing in iTunes. Under [Name’s] iPhone, click File Sharing, then the name of your music player (e.g., VLC or Foobar). With Window Explorer queued up alongside, you can drag and drop entire folders from your music library into the music player’s “Documents” in iTunes.
