CD to flash drive

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Jul 27, 2004
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Vancouver Island
Bare with me I am not vary computer literate.
My wife is going into hospital (no WIFI) and wants to have some music and Audio books during her stay. I would like to transfer a few old CD's from home directly to her Android Tablet or better still to a thumb flash drive.
We do not have a computer, just Android devices. A friend offered her computer but it is a newer Apple device with no provision for a CD.

I have seen external RW and burners but I am not sure that would help me with just an android device.
Any advice appreciated.
 
It depends on what exactly these music and audio books are.

If the music is an audio CD, it can be ripped to a digital file format like flac or mp3. if the audio books are a common format that the tablet supports, these can be copied off the CDs to a flash drive or the tablet, wherever you want. If the tablet does not support their format, some can be converted to a different format. Unfortunately I don't know a lot about audio books, but presumably there are utilities out there to convert to good old MP3 audio files.

I don't know about apps for doing this on android, but with an external CD drive you could do that on a computer, pull the files off, convert if needed, then copy to the flash drive or directly to the tablet.

If your phone plan doesn't have problematically low data limit, you might be able to set the phone to wifi hot spot mode, then the tablet can use it as a router/modem and connect to the internet over its cellular data connection. Google will find instructions to do this for android phones if yours supports it. This might be a bit on the complicated side compared to other alternatives, if there are sedatives or an otherwise altered mental state involved.

Another option is seek online sources for these, sometimes it is surprising what you can find available for download if you search a bit, get the files into phone memory, copy off to a USB-C flash drive if your phone has this capability, or put on a cloud, on her google drive or something.

Sorry about your wife. Good luck!
 
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You need to beg, borrow, or steal a computer with a CD drive. Freeware exists to "rip" audio data from the CD to the universal, compressed mp3 format. The computer owner will probably already know how to do this.

I'd call your local high school to see if they have a program where computer club kids help old people. Call up a kid and offer him twenty bucks, he'll handle the rest.
 
Thank you Eljefino that is about my best guess also. Just so long as my wife does not end up in Hospital listening Justin Bieber
by mistake ;-(
 
A $20-25 external drive from Best Buy will plug into the USB port on that Mac and can rip CDs, using a program like iTunes, or XLD.

Might need a different cable if that Mac doesn't have an USB-A port. And XLD might be a little confusing for some, but it's small, free, and works well.

But that, or the finding another computer with an optical disc drive is the way.

Easiset alternative is to do a free tiral, or subscribe to a single month of a streaming music/audiobook service, but that requires internet access, and might not have some more obscure material, but they also offer the broadest selection of music, so the opportunity to explore for new discoveries is there as well.
 
If you really want to put CDs onto your phone without a computer, you can connect an external computer CD drive to your phone with an OTG usb cable and then use a CD ripping app. I don't know which apps are good at this, but apps do exist that do it.
 
the mac will easily do this with an external drive, which shouldn't be expensive. You'll need to know if it has USB, USB C ports... adapters are available.

I do agree since wifi is mentioned, if you have the ability to stream, it might be just as easy/cheap to turn the phone into a hot spot, and or just use data on the phone to stream it.
 
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