Car music options

In My Humble Opinion
1

Full disclosure: I’m on the early end of Gen-X, and as such I vividly remember a time (once I got past the “near-constant living hell” years, but I’d rather not go there again, even though I will) when major technological advances were loudly trumpeted in the mainstream media. As a result, I learned about the World Wide Web, high definition television, digital music, and digital video disks at the same time as everybody else. Sometime later, however, technology…for some truly inexplicable reason…became something that you were expected to learn about completely on your own with zero publicity. As a result I was at least several months late to the party on pendrives and flatscreen monitors, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn about this newfangled “wai-fai”.

So now I’m about to move my extensive collection of music CDs from my old Nissan Leaf to my new one…this was about a month ago, to put it in perspective, and at literally that moment I discover that cars do not have CD players anymore. Shortly after I discover that the same is true for electronics stores. I’m aware that CDs hold the distinction of the most universally despised medium in the history of the goddam universe, but as someone who, y’know, buys them a lot, it was a bit of a shock. Look, here’s how it works: I buy an audio album with very high audio quality (or “too perfect”, whatever the freak that means :roll_eyes:), then I upload the files to my computer. Now I can play the album on a CD player or at home, and if the files get corrupted for any reason I can upload them again, and if something happens to the disk I can make a replacement CD! Win-win! So no, it didn’t occur to me to spend a lot of money to download music files to my IPad, which could not be transferred anywhere else which Apple could yank at any time for any reason, which wouldn’t have been an issue anyway since both of those hideously overpriced piles of crap just stopped freaking working for no…ahem. :angry:

At any rate, a dealer at the place which sold the Leaf showed me the basics of connecting my phone to the car via the USB port. Some experimentation and frustration later, I was able to upload some music files to my phone. And the same connection could hook up the phone to the car. So far so good.

But to actually play any of the music on the phone (through its own or the car’s speaker) requires a sound application…and that’s where I ran into my next snag. See, I have Winamp, RealPlayer, and AllPlayer on my computer (as well as the humdrum Windows Media Player), all of which are capable of playing every manner of sound file. The problem is that these are Windows applications, which, as my phone is an Android device, will not work with it at all. The only things it does have (which the car apparently does as well) are YouTube Music and Spotify, neither of which I had any familiarity with before I got that phone. I’ve been using the latter, as YouTube Music can’t play uploaded files for some reason.

Spotify is…cumbersome. It doesn’t recognize subdirectories at all; everything gets dumped into a bit “user files” pile regardless of it’s location on the phone. It’s possible to make playlists, but each song has to be added, one by one, from the big honkin’ pile. To get anything close to a reasonable quantity is going to require slogging through literally hundreds of completely disorganized tracks. There’s no fast-forward or rewind option (something that every CD player I ever used had), and I’m not risking an accident to finagle a teensy little dot on a teensy little bar on my phone. The worst part is that it’s hard to get the stupid thing to play what I want when I want. It’ll start for no clear reason, or jump around, or even skip tracks. (There’s also the periodic whiny demands to upgrade to Premium, which was another problem I didn’t have with CD players.)

I’d really like to know if there are any better options. My problem is that I have zero experience with dedicated MP3 players. I just need something where everything is organized, it’s easy to make playlists, and I can do super basic stuff like fast forward and rewind without a damn touchscreen. Are there any good, Winamp-esque non-whiny music applications for Android? It’s not going to be a sole option, but it’s a good place to start.

2

Musicolet

Free. No ads. Plays Flac & MP3s and many more types. Has playlists and queues–I have no idea what the difference is, I don’t use them.

3

I’m not sure what the problem is.

Use any media program (I believe windows media player will do) to convert your CD to a format your car recognizes (mp3 will work, check documentation) load them on a thumb drive, plug in thumb drive, play music.

Or load them on your phone, I’m sure android has a native media player.
(Storage in a phone is quite a bit more expensive than as a usb drive)

Or do what everybody else does, stream from your phone. No storage required.

4

If you’re looking for a music player app for your Android device, I recommend Rocket Player. I’ve been quite happy with it for years.

5

They do not make car CD players because you do not need them: they are arguably convenient if you already have hundreds of CDs, but you can copy that entire library onto a single thumb drive, as explained by @The_Librarian . Look for a USB port.

If you load them onto your phone instead (check your car has Bluetooth playback or similar), simple players would be something like Rockbox or VLC.

6

This is what I do. Samsung Music, very basic MP3 player but gets the job done, easy to make playlists, shuffle play by artist or playlist, and easy to add album art if you can get it. Oh, and free. I have a hard time justfying anything else, as long as your car has Bluetooth. In my car I can play, pause, skip forward, skip back, and search for a song from the steering wheel. If you do not have a Samsung phone, not sure, but there are likely similar options.

7

I’m not so sure it does. And I hadn’t heard of Samsung Music (that @snowthx mentioned); it didn’t come pre-installed on my Samsung phone. That said, it shouldn’t be hard to find a free (or cheap) one that you like okay.

8

I have musicolet as well, really straightforward and it plays anything I throw at it.

9

Stay tuned for CD’s to be making somewhat of a resurgence, perhaps due to the shortage of vinyl & resulting high cost of LP records. But don’t expect to see the return of CD players to cars anytime soon. The dashboard info screen takes up so much space that a CD slot was deemed expendable. Especially considering society’s smart phone addiction. I know, it sucks. It was handy to grab a CD or 2 on the way out the door and shove them into the player. Now one must fiddle with electronics to find the select music you wish to hear at that particular time. But that’s how things are. There’s a place in the world for audiophile music lovers, but the car ain’t one of them.
As others mentioned there are options. You can stream. You convert CD files to a playable format & load onto your phone or a USB. The popular format for this is MP3. It permits you to downgrade the music quality in order to fit more files (songs) onto an allotted disk space. There’s no shortage of music converter software available. Many free, some paid but generally have more options. I’ve been using Total Audio Converter. As well, lots of playback software out there if you want something other than what comes pre-installed on some phones.
Having to convert from CD is a nuisance & time consuming, but welcome to the world.

PS/ I’ve run onto many people that had gotten rid of vast LP collections when CD’s became popular. Now they wish they hadn’t. I expect those that ditched CD collections in favour of cramming MP3 files onto a drive will come to have regrets as well.

10

I ditched my CDs somewhere around 2007, the year I got a car radio that took usb drives,
Since ±2014 I only stream stuff.
(I won’t have any music for the zombie apocalypse)

11

Bought a new Subaru Forester last fall. Likely the determining factor was when my wife and I noticed that familiar slot in the dash.

That pushed back my need to convert my CDs another few years.

12

I’ll throw another vote to VLC - it’s a bit feature lite, but since I can use it on my kindle, my android tablet, my iPhone (recent sidegrade from a dead android phone), and share media while on the same network, it’s extremely flexible (and freeish).

13

I keep a huge music library on the inside media PC–close to 200GB worth. I used to load up 32 or 64 GB USB drives with a ton of music, park one in each vehicle and let the stereo deck play on shuffle but then I got a deck with Bluetooth and now I just keep a massive SD card on my phone, which knows to hook up to the stereo when the car starts up and I use Folder Player to handle the music. Folder Player is extremely low resource and about as simple as it gets, plus it handles basically anything. Big advantage of this newest configuration is it’s nearly impossible for me to forget my phone at home–no music = no phone. Plus no more errors when the USB drive gets borked due to extremes of temperature inherent in a parked car and it’s much easier to switch out music playlists on my phone, which is always with me.

14

Pretty much the same here.I had ripped all of my CDs at one point, well over a thousand. Today I use Apple Music and just tell Siri or Alexa what to play.

I am frustrated by the lack of some indie and back catalog stuff. For example, Apple Music only has 3 Bob Geldof albums, missing 2 of my favourites.

15

“My” streaming service (Spotify) has all of them.

16

LOL.
“Hey Siri, play Slip Kid.”

So complicated…

17

O-kay! This board always comes through, doesn’t it? :grin:

Tried putting mp3 files on my pendrive and sticking it directly into my car’s USB slot. (Friendly reminder to The_Librarian that I’m completely new to this, so a little patience, please) As it turns out, the vehicle doesn’t have YouTube Music or Spotify (it can pull them off the phone if it’s hooked up, but that’s it), but what it does have is a very clean, concise music file player which can fast forward and rewind. Even better, it keeps the subdirectories on the drive without having to make playlists, so I can easily keep the Enya stuff away from the Disturbed stuff.

Oh yeah, this is my go-to option. :+1: I’m going to have to buy a dedicated pendrive for this, of course, but that’s nothing.

Thanks also for the Android sound player options. Seriously, I’d have no clue how to search for this stuff otherwise. Music on the go away from my vehicle isn’t as big a priority for me, but I still want an alternative to Spotify.

18

While I’m glad you found a solution thay works for you, i gotta say, streaming Spotify is pretty amazing. You might play around woth it for the free trial.

19

You’re assuming the only way to have something in your car is to have it come with the car. I’ve never bought a car without immediately upgrading the audio system. So I can choose what I want (and what’s on sale, of course). But I ALWAYS get Bluetooth, and an AUX input if that isn’t working…

… AND a slot for those CDs!*

It’s no more expensive, and even though I rarely use it, it’s a quick, easy fix if I really need to listen to the entirety of A Hard Day’s Night in order… or, if I find some obscure CD at a truckstop that I want to listen to right away.

*That’s in case you decide “Screw all this tech, I’m going to buckle my CD collection into the passenger seat and hit the road!”

20

No kidding. I am often utterly astounded at how easy it is for me these days to hear pretty much whatever I want whenever I want. A song pops into my head and I can talk to my phone or smart speaker and, bam, there’s the song. It helps to have a subscription to something like Apple Music (I have a trial) and Amazon Music Prime (comes with my Prime Membership.) It’s incredibly awesome. Just talk at your smart device, and listen to one of hundreds of thousands to millions of songs.