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Playing CDs in New Car

Legion

Staff member
I use a lossless music player, both walking around and in the car. I currently have over 128gb of music on it, but it will take up to a 2TB card. That is a lot of music...

Streaming music with your phone is fine, unless you are driving places with no 4g service. Like lots of places around where I live, including my house.
 
I have a decent size CD collection accumulated over the years. My entire collection was ripped to MP3 files a long time ago, but in the past couple of years, I have gone back and ripped everything to lossless FLAC files so I can play them back in audio quality similar to that of ther original CDs. I have the entire collection on a USB3 thumbdrive plugged into the back of my WiFI router at home so I can access them anywhere in the house. I also have the files stored on an SD card in my smartphone. If you create playlists, you can listen for hours without ever changing CDs.

BTW: I still have a collection of vinyl records that date back to the 60s. I would like to save them as FLAC filesss, but since they have to be ripped in real time, it would take a few hundred hours to accomplish this.
 
They can keep their bluetooth. I want my passenger side key door lock back....

The wife's car has an aux port. We use an old mp3 player or plug in my phone.


I am with you on the door key thing. I once had a Ford Taurus X that was assigned to me as a company car. It was a cross between a station wagon and SUV. I got locked out of the car one time because the battery failed and the electronic locks would not work. I had a battery charger in the rear storage area of the vehicle, but the only way to get into the car with a key was the driver door. I had to crawl over the backs of the front seat and the rear seat to get to the battery charger so I could recharge the battery. What a stupid design. The engineers who designed that thing must have been crackheads or something. I was so glad when I put enough mileage on the car to turn it in. The Taurus X model only lasted a couple of years. Apparently, others were not any more impressed with the vehicle than I was.
 
Hercule, I'm curious. Do you remember what Herb Alpert & TJB album that you had on 8-track? If not, do you recall any of the songs? i've been a Herb Alpert fan since I was about 12-13, and still have a lot of my favorites on that flash drive.

Sorry, I don't. It wasn't my car or tape. I can imagine it was a greatest hits anthology of some sort. We played it over and over and over and over again on that trip. That car died on one of the subsequent trips (in about the same place actually) and was replaced with a family truckster-type station wagon which his brother delivered to us roadside. And after that he had his grandmother's car when she died - a big 'ol land-yacht they named "Edma" (yes with an M. Because someone heard the grandmother's name wrong.) By then the entertainment of choice had switched to a cassette of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds, which we also played over and over and over again on trips home. Ah, the adventurous college days...
 

musicman1951

three-tu-tu, three-tu-tu
I have a USB port, CD player and Sirius XM radio in my car. I usually listen to the radio because I like the variety, but nothing sounds as good as the CD's.
 

Doc4

Stumpy in cold weather
Staff member
Beethoven did not have this no music in the car problem for a number of reasons.

Yes but whatever music he did have was all on "lossless" technology.

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BTW: I still have a collection of vinyl records that date back to the 60s. I would like to save them as FLAC filesss, but since they have to be ripped in real time, it would take a few hundred hours to accomplish this.
Could you not just set them up to play/record one side while you were doing something else, come back later, split them into song files and save them that way without having to actually sit through the whole record each time?
 
Since you have a USB port I would go with putting the songs on your cell phone (if you have an old one you aren't using you could re-commission it to travel only duty) then plugging the phone into your jack. This way you won't need to worry about the batteries (unless the port is only for data and not recharging then you'd be better using your current phone) and you wouldn't need to worry about the cd's skipping from bumps.

**One warning about ripping music-Sony had an extreme take on copying their music onto computers. At one time (surprisingly many people don't know of this) they put a root kit on their cd's so it would screw up your computer if you tried copying anything. They were told to stop this pretty quickly but there are cd's out there that have this "feature" on them so be careful.
 
If you play music over bluetooth, you might as well use high bitrate MP3s. USB cable with FLAC is an upgrade, given your car's sound system is able to show the difference. I don't bother, I just use Tidal via Android Auto. I have to say Spotify's UI is way better in AA, but the sound quality of Tidal blows it out of the water at home, and my main use case isn't the car. So for car use, save 50% on the price and use Spotify. YMMV of course :)
 
Could you not just set them up to play/record one side while you were doing something else, come back later, split them into song files and save them that way without having to actually sit through the whole record each time?

No. I have a manual turntable that only plays only one side at a time. Thus, I would have to be no more than a few feet away to stop the turntable when the record is complete. I would record all the tracks on one side at the same time, but it still is a lot slower. With CDs a good CD/DVD player on a computer can RIP an hour long CD is under 5 minutes and catalog the album, track titles, artists, genre, etc with no extra effort.
 
We were lucky in that both the newer vehicles we purchased had a CD player. I'm one of the few who like having the actual physical items vs something I have to stream, including movies. Doesn't streaming the music "live" off your phone use your data plan as well?
 
We were lucky in that both the newer vehicles we purchased had a CD player. I'm one of the few who like having the actual physical items vs something I have to stream, including movies. Doesn't streaming the music "live" off your phone use your data plan as well?
it does, but if you select a paid plan, you can download music on your phone to play them offline.
 
I've ripped most of my CDs to FLAC files on computer storage and backed up. It can be time consuming if you have a large collection, so I just did a few CDs at a time. You don't lose sound quality with FLAC. As a side benefit, you can stream music at home from your collection and use playlists, random jukebox features, etc. as provided by music player software.
 

jackgoldman123

Boring and predictable
I've ripped most of my CDs to FLAC files on computer storage and backed up. It can be time consuming if you have a large collection, so I just did a few CDs at a time. You don't lose sound quality with FLAC. As a side benefit, you can stream music at home from your collection and use playlists, random jukebox features, etc. as provided by music player software.
Opportunity to find favorites and cull not so favorites
 
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