Start saying your goodbyes to your car’s CD player

[bandit957]

It seems to me like I still purchased some new vinyl singles in the late '90s, possibly 2000.

I more or less skipped the CD era, jumping straight from vinyl to digital downloads.

[bandit957]

Anyone else used to think the height of comic genius was to play records on the wrong speed? I noticed that Toni Tennille's voice sounded like Rick Astley when slowed from 45 to 33.

[Henry]

Anyone else used to think the height of comic genius was to play records on the wrong speed? I noticed that Toni Tennille's voice sounded like Rick Astley when slowed from 45 to 33.

It's also true of speed-dubbing cassette tapes. Anyone would sound like the Chipmunks (even Barry White!) when done this way.

[kkt]

That's happening.

Thanks for saving me the trouble of finding and posting that bit of perspective!

By the way, there's a local chain of CD stores in Seattle that still has pretty good size stores with a good selection.

[PHLBOS]

Anyone else used to think the height of comic genius was to play records on the wrong speed? I noticed that Toni Tennille's voice sounded like Rick Astley when slowed from 45 to 33.

It's also true of speed-dubbing cassette tapes. Anyone would sound like the Chipmunks (even Barry White!) when done this way.

What about Louie Armstrong? 

Playing a 33 LP at the 45 setting => everybody sounds like the Munchkins.

Playing a 33 LP at the 78 setting => everybody sounds like the Chipmunks.

[Duke87]

As soon as I got my first personal laptop in 2005 I ripped all my CDs to it and mothballed my stereo. Since then I have had no cause to use any of my CDs while at home.

To this day there is, however, a giant box of CDs in my car - because while I recognize it is antiquated technology, it is impractical and in most places illegal for me to use my laptop as a music player while driving,  I'm too cheap to spend money on buying a portable music player when the car is the only place I would ever use it, and since my library is currently a mess of a whole bunch of file formats I would have to spend a lot of time converting or reripping a lot of it to get a commercial device to recognize it all.

Someday I will own a car that lacks a CD player, and that will force me to spend the money on a music player and the time on converting all my wma, m4a, wav, midi, and other random filetypes to mp3. Until then, my kludgy box of CDs works and I'm sticking with it.



As for the likes of Pandora, in addition to the cell signal concern already raised, I like listening to whole albums and I like controlling exactly what I listen to. So the radio-ish nature of it doesn't appeal to me.

I am also painfully aware that for various reasons things stored on the internet are perishable and that song you really like may disappear from Pandora any day if there is a licensing disagreement. So I store my own music on my hard drive where it is physically in my possession and the whims of some remote host cannot ever take any of it away from me.

[ZLoth]

Unless I'm mistaken, a CD player in a car is probably more complex than a CD player in a home audio system due to a more complex loading method plus additional anti-skip mechanisms so that your CD doesn't skip when you hit a bump in the road. My last car had issues with the CD player loading and jamming, and when I checked the online forums, I found that it was a common occurrence AND the cost to fix was $300+. I ended up spending $100 instead on a FM modulator (because a direct connection was IMPOSSIBLE) as a replacement.... which lasted until I got rear-ended last month and my car got totaled. And, when I was hunting for a replacement car, my requirements was that the car have both Bluetooth integration/aux input, not CD. This was completely different from 2006 when I wanted a CD player and tested with duplicated CDs on CD-R media.

Car radios have come a long way from the days when the radio consisted of a AM unit with a speaker into the center of the dashboard, and FM was a considered a luxury addition. Now, we have sound systems in cars where we don't have to rely on what the radio broadcasters think we should like surrounded by lots of commercials. Often, I'm listening to the Classical, Met Opera, Old Time Radio, 40s, or 50s station on XM.

Sound quality is very good in my car. Because of my graveyard shift, I'm recording the audio streams from the local NPR station such as Met Opera, then play it back through my phone. The audio quality through the Bluetooth connection is actually quite good and much better than the FM stations in my area. And, while a CD can hold only up to 74 minutes of music, a MP3 player, even with a high bitrate, can store much more.

And, only thing that I noticed with the car shopping last year... every vehicle, even the low end ones, had at least a Aux input, so there is nothing preventing you from hooking up a portable CD or tape player. Of course, how many of you had or knew someone who had their car broken into and some previous, irreplaceable CDs stolen?

[bugo]

It's funny how 25 years ago a CD player in your car was considered superior to a cassette player. Now the cassette player is better because you can us a cassette adapter and plug it into your MP3 player or your phone.

[formulanone]

Someday I will own a car that lacks a CD player, and that will force me to spend the money on a music player and the time on converting all my wma, m4a, wav, midi, and other random filetypes to mp3.

It takes about 5 minutes per album to rip it into another format; perhaps just a minute of your own time between loading and unloading the medium from the case to the tray. Only the most obscure of albums requires manual entry of the song/album data, since there's databases that have the info, if you want your tracks to be labelled individually. Something to do while surfing the web or doing work on the PC. Sure, copying 600-some-odd albums didn't happen overnight, but work with your favorites and then copy the stuff you'd also like to have in a more portable format.

Admittedly, it was making some pleasure out of lawn work, rather than driving, which pushed me into MP3s a decade ago. But the convenience is tough to beat, since my tin ears aren't audiophile-quality, anyhow.

[bugo]

I'd rather download the MP3 files of a CD I own than to take the time to rip them. Since you already own a copy of the songs, then you should be allowed to download them.

[1995hoo]

I'd rather rip it because then I can control the format as opposed to being saddled with low-fidelity lossy compression.

[formulanone]

I'd rather download the MP3 files of a CD I own than to take the time to rip them. Since you already own a copy of the songs, then you should be allowed to download them.

I agree, but you're fighting a losing battle with any sort of legal distribution, at least in the eyes of recording companies and distributors.

That said, I've downloaded a few songs where a skip in the track rendered a song unlistenable.

[ajlynch91]

I haven't used my car's CD player once since I bought it. No need when all my songs are on my iPhone and my car connects via bluetooth.

[hbelkins]

Of course, how many of you had or knew someone who had their car broken into and some previous, irreplaceable CDs stolen?

My new car was broken into outside the apartment where I lived in 1994. My CDs were found dumped at a car wash a couple of miles away. I only lost one of them -- Ratt's "Out of the Cellar" -- and the only stolen item not recovered was a pair of Foster-Grant sunglasses that had gone out of production and I was not able to buy a replacement pair.

[stormwatch7721]

I have an ipod. Will it work?

[bugo]

Ratt LOL

[Brandon]

Of course, how many of you had or knew someone who had their car broken into and some previous, irreplaceable CDs stolen?

My new car was broken into outside the apartment where I lived in 1994. My CDs were found dumped at a car wash a couple of miles away. I only lost one of them -- Ratt's "Out of the Cellar" -- and the only stolen item not recovered was a pair of Foster-Grant sunglasses that had gone out of production and I was not able to buy a replacement pair.

They just wanted to play that disc Round and Round. 

[adventurernumber1]

I do not like this idea at all. I actually technically don't "have music on my phone" as in having music I bought off of iTunes. All the music on my phone is actually on an obsolete app called iTube that was taken off the App Store quite a while ago now (I first got the app in mid 2013). The app was free and the only price I had to pay for almost 200 favorited songs on there was a fair chunk of my iPhone storage 

But anyways, because I don't "have music on my phone," I absolutely hate this idea. Especially since I don't trust the radio at all to play any actual music these days. Whenever I listen to music in the car it's always on CDs. And I've bought new ones recently, too. Several months ago I bought an Alan Jackson CD at Kmart, and I can also verify that CDs are indeed still being sold in stores. I honestly don't see any reason at all to get rid of the CD player in new cars.

[Dougtone]

I would KILL to have a banjo played as I drive.

Someone playing a banjo as I drove would remind me too much of the movie Deliverance.

[Duke87]

It takes about 5 minutes per album to rip it into another format; perhaps just a minute of your own time between loading and unloading the medium from the case to the tray. Only the most obscure of albums requires manual entry of the song/album data, since there's databases that have the info, if you want your tracks to be labelled individually. Something to do while surfing the web or doing work on the PC. Sure, copying 600-some-odd albums didn't happen overnight, but work with your favorites and then copy the stuff you'd also like to have in a more portable format.

Not as simple as "rip it into another format" since while I do have a fair number of CDs I still lack hard copies of A LOT of my music. Indeed, there is a good amount of music in my library for which no official hard copy exists - for example, I love the soundtrack to Streets of SimCity but I only have it because I located the audio files among the game data on the CD-ROM and copied them onto my computer. It's all in wav format, as is typical of late 90s PC video game audio. WinAmp plays it just fine but I don't know of too many portable music players that would, so it'd have to be converted and relabeled manually (since wav files have no internal tagging system).

[Stratuscaster]

The time I once took carefully labeling and listing songs on cassette J-cards is now spent filling out MP3 tags on converted audio tracks.

And all my music is backed up to an external USB hard drive as well as burned onto DVD media.

[1995hoo]

Funny, I used to type up the cassette cards and print them out (not on the actual card, of course–I used ordinary paper and then used scissors to cut it to fit). I'd created a template for use on my old dot matrix printer. Then I got an ink jet and had to create a new template.

I have a bunch of those tapes downstairs because I've never gotten around to going to the immense nuisance of putting my mixed tapes onto DVD-Audio (they won't fit on CDs).

[SSOWorld]

Won't be long until we say goodbye to wired aux ports and USB ports.

[Pete from Boston]

Won't be long until we say goodbye to wired aux ports and USB ports.

USB ports will stay around a while.  They're for charging devices as much as anything. 

[MikeTheActuary]

I was an early adopter of mp3's.  So, I haven't bought an audio CD in about 10 years, and for almost 20 years, the only CD's I've listened to in cars were audio books; other CDs acquired were immediately ripped to mp3.

I feel old.