Amazon and Brennan B2

[Will Roberts]

Pardon my being naive, but I am not sure I understand Amazon's various online music products. I am an Amazon Prime member but have only used the service for purchasing various products, including CDs, to be delivered to my home.

What I would like to do is be able to purchase MP3s as individual tracks, or occasionally as entire albums, to include on my Brennan B2's internal disk and to copy to a thumb drive for use in my car.

I have done this from various recording company and artist sites without problem -- usually paying a dollar or so per track or some greater amount for an entire album with payment made by PayPal or credit card.

It appears that Amazon now has several music products including "Prime Music" and "Amazon Music Unlimited" which allow copying to mobile devices but not to PCs. It also appears that one can still buy MP3 tracks from Amazon but they are now stored in the "Amazon Cloud" rather than downloaded.

My questions is: If I set up Amazon Cloud, can I download to my PC for transfer to the Brennan? Or am I forced to use a proprietary Amazon music player to listen to music in my Cloud account?

I am really not interested in free or unlimited streaming of music. I just want to have the flexibility being able to buy legitimate good quality digital files that I can play on various devices.

[rita....@btopenworld.com]

Hi Will

I can't answer all of your question, but for MP3 music I pay for from Amazon (not on the subscription but those I buy) are loaded automatically into 'my amazon music'  This on the list of files on the amazon music app.  Then I can drag them to the download box on that page, which downloads them to Windows Media Player.  I can burn them onto cd's then which I load on my B2.  I'm sure you could do that to a thumb drive too but I haven't tried that yet.

Hope that helps

Rita 

[Will Roberts]

Thanks, Rita! That was a great help.

For some reason, when I went to Amazon yesterday, it appeared that Amazon was only offering MP3 tracks delivered as uploads to the Amazon Cloud.

I just went there again, and it offered me the option of downloading the MP3 directly to my PC -- which is what I wanted to do. I'm not sure why this option was not obvious yesterday.

The process went smoothly as you described.

I then just copied the MP3 from my desktop computer to the Brennan over our home network. (I can do the same thing in reverse, copying from the Brennan to a thumb-drive plugged into the USB port on my desktop computer when I want to create a collection of MP3s to take with me in my car.)

[PMB]

Hi Will,

I'm sure others would be interested in "copying from the Brennan to a thumb-drive plugged into the USB port on my desktop computer", so please let us know how you do it.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[lesliebr...@gmail.com]

Hi Paul, after reading your reply to Will's post, it got me curious. Usually play music in my car from my phone using an Aux cable (old car, old car stereo). I know a lot of new cars with newer media players have a USB inputs for thumb drives etc. So I thought I'd give transferring some mp3s from my B2 to a thumbdrive (Sandisk 64GB) attached to a USB on my Windows 10 laptop ago (as Will had done). I used NAS, and I this is the sequence I used. It worked fine. Really simple. Plugged thumb drive into Laptop USB. Opened the drive, reduced window size and pulled it to one side of screen. Opened File Explorer and scrolled to where my mapped B2 drive shows. Opened it, selected an artist, opened the folder to show albums, seleted one, dragged and dropped the album in to the thumb drive window and watched the files transfer. Once completed, checked it would play using windows media player. Very easy with NAS. Now I just need a new car, with a new stereo with a USB input to play my music from this thumb drive. Hope this is useful.

Leslie.

[PMB]

Hi Leslie,

Thanks for the info, as you say simple...

For others doing this it may be worth checking that your car media system supports the format (FLAC, AAC, etc) of the music you are transferring to the memory stick.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Tony Johnston]

To copy tracks to thumb drive I just drag and drop from my backup hard drive. Simple and quick.

[lesliebr...@gmail.com]

Hi Tony, that'll work too. With NAS the B2 mapped drive shows on my laptop via the network, so it saves having to attached my backup drive. Just need to plug in the thumb drive and drag and drop.

[Will Roberts]

Exactly! Just drag-and-drop from the B2 NAS to the thumb-drive memory stick or even to your portable mp3 player. As Paul points out, the only concern is to make sure the format of the file on the B2 is compatible with whatever device on which you want to play it. For example, my car will handle mp3 and acc files, but not flac. (For that reason, I have intentionally have been using mp3 as my format-of-choice on the B2.)

If you are using flac files on your B2, you can still drag-and-drop them onto another device, but you will have to run them through some conversion software to get them into whatever format your other device can handle. NCH Software's "Switch" audio file converter is good for this purpose and will do batch conversions of multiple files. There are many other alternatives, too.