If you do not have network access to stream the songs in real time, what you can do is download whatever you want from Youtube/Spotify in advance. Then you can copy the resulting files to your USB stick. Note that the downloads may be mp3, but sometimes they come out as Opus or AAC or whatever the service actually offers, so check that your car plays them. (If it does not, you will have to re-encode them, which is less than ideal.)
If your free or subscription service has it and you have Internet. Usually it works fine. As for the car audio, I will opine that Bluetooth sounds fine unless you find a really crappy device (and NB that 100-speaker cathedral sound field recording was not made for listening to in a car anyway). You can also buy pretty good Bluetooth ↔ 3.5 mm transceiver dongles online.
I have and use Spotify, CBC Listen, and Amazon Prime Music for streaming quite often when I drive as my car has Android Auto. Having said that it is simply incredible how much music I can’t find that I do have on CD. For those, I use Musicolet or Blackplayer. The time it takes to burn to PC is my biggest gripe.
How long does it take from the time you pop the CD into the drive?
I just tested a randomly selected CD. It was the soundtrack recording of The Graduate, total time 36:57. Ripping time with an old crappy drive was just over 6 minutes. Meh, I guess, unless you needed to listen to it RIGHT AWAY but did not plan ahead.
I have a couple of hundred CDs (never counted) and already put them on my phone so that I could listen to music while walking the dog. I use Pulsar on Android now, but I’m looking for another player that can shuffle the entire library without making it a big playlist. When I got my new car with no CD player (and Android Auto) it automatically collects to my phone through Bluetooth. I like that since I don’t have to remember to bring anything inside when I get home.
I like having CDs for security, but I almost never listen to any.
I also have Sirius XM, since my wife really likes it and they gave us a free Google Nest so that we can listen to it while making dinner or cleaning up also.
If you’re the sort who cares about these sorts of things, it’s worth mentioning as well that the free tier of Spotify only has half the bitrate you can get form the paid tier (not counting the super-special paid tier). It’s a max of 160 over mobile devices for free and 320 if you have a standard paid sub.
The primary purpose of my car’s CD player these days is to hold the mount for my Spotify Car Thing (a silly piece of tech I love regardless)
Not intended as a hijack, but here’s a related question:
I’ve always avoided streaming music to my phone while on the road, because I don’t want to exceed my data limit in my cellphone plan. Is this an issue that I shouldn’t worry about?
There are about 1000 MP3 players on the Play store. I use Rocket Player currently. I was using Black Player but I think Rocket Player worked with Ford Connect or whatever it’s called, so the app would show up on my car screen when I plugged in the USB.
We have an 8GB plan shared among 3 phones, and some data (2 GB, I think) will carry over if not used. We generally use very little data, so it appears we can stream on our road trips without worry.
Yep, depends on your plan. My plan only throttles me if I go above my limit (no overages), but if I’ve ever gone beyond, I haven’t noticed any difference in quality.
Only by people under 40. The distinction of the worst medium is and shall ever be 8 tracks. They were despised when they were…CLUNK…new. (you’d know what that clunk means if you ever had the pleasure of listening to one)
My last new car was a 2012, so when we got a new truck a couple years ago I was surprised to see not only that it lost the CD/mp3 drive, but now takes thumb drives. And it just works, right out of the box! You can use your finger on the entertainment system slider to move your location in the song back and forth! Such useful features, and exactly what I have been waiting for since…forever!
Why the hell wasn’t I informed about this???
My progression went from cassettes, cassettes with dbx noise reduction adapters, CDs using a cassette adapter, CDs in dash, mp3 players in dash, ipods plugged in, and now thumb drives. I’m never going to do streaming. When we get free Sirius I hate how they edit the songs for content, and I don’t want to spend money to find others do that, too.
Do you mount them under dash, or in the trunk? Because we are past the era of the three-hole mount radio. You can’t just upgrade a factory entertainment system which integrates the a/c and on-star (and in the case of Minis, the speedometer and nav system) etc. Can you? Did I miss that memo, too?
I’m sure @DKW was speaking ironically. But even so, his statement doesn’t work. It’s not that CDs are despised as a medium; it’s that physical media in general are seen as hopelessly passe nowadays.
See, this thread got me thinking “Wait, what if newer isn’t better? Maybe older tech like CDs actually sounds better, and listening to an entire album in order is somehow healthier for your peace of mind?”
So I was deciding which of my old CDs (from cardboard boxes in the basement) I should put in the car, when it hit me…
How about just listening to the radio?
I’ll pause a moment here for the music/tech geeks to recover…
So I tried that on my last road trip, and it was great! Not needing to be in control meant I could appreciate the scenery more and just relax more (and think less). At first I was scanning from station to station, but then I thought I should just pick one each hour and take what the universe/fate/chance gives me.
From Woodstock to Rochester, I listened to a newer Alt-Rock station… I don’t think I heard a single band I recognized, but it was good stuff. From Rochester to Lakefield, an oldies station (but not “Classic Rock” or “We’ll play anything from the 70s, even if it’s crap”… these were deep cuts from the Stones, the British Invasion, Chicago, and even Al Kooper’s early Blood, Sweat & Tears). Switched to NPR for the news as I passed Lebanon, and kept it on for Radiolab. Then some classic country (Cash and Kristofferson and Hank and Willie) as the sun was going down over Arlington… you get the idea.
(The only downside was having to listen to commercials, but the local spots like “Weirdo Buck’s Barely-Used Trucks” were entertaining.)
Pretty zen. All minimal effort on my part, and all free…
