This means that I can plug in a USB drive loaded with MP3s. No more piles of CDs in the car!
I got a 16 gigabyte Sandisk USB drive for $35. I am in the process of loading every CD that I own onto it. Now, instead of putting a CD into the car stereo, I turn a knob that scrolls through artists, albums, and songs.
This is truly revolutionary (and thread-worthy). In the past, I would always have a pile of CDs on the passenger seat. And more in the trunk. Often I would get a craving for a particular CD that wasn’t in the car. Not any more! Soon I will have every bit of music I own at my fingertips. Thank you, Santa.
In addition to playing MP3s from a USB drive, some receivers can control an iPod via USB. Most also have an auxiliary audio input so you can plug in any MP3 player.
I highly recommend Crutchfield. They have built their business around spectacular customer service. They will give you everything you need, including detailed installation instructions and adapters – all specific to your exact car. And you can call them for technical support (such as help installing it or anything else) from 8 AM until midnight seven days a week. They are amazing. Picking out a stereo that is compatible with my car and then installing it myself was extremely easy. I only replaced the receiver so far. Everything else is still the factory installed stuff and it might stay that way. It was a premium sound system to begin with. It sounds even better with the new receiver but that’s just a bonus – the USB drive / MP3 capability was why I got it.
I agree with John, CDs belong at home in a nice stereo. I find working an i-pod is much less distracting than trying to find a CD out of a box.
I also never understood why a Jeep would have a CD player that would skip when you drove on the terrain it was designed for. I dislike CDs in cars almost as much as I dislike the stupid FM transmitter I am using now because my current vehicle does not have a tape deck or an audio input.
We typically drive around with an ipod (or offbrand equivalent) plugged into an FM transmitter. It works alright, especially since we live far away from civilization, but whenever we take road trips through Phoenix or any other large cities, it’s hard to keep a station that doesn’t get all static-y. My Mom just got a new Silverado pickup last week (hooray for super car sales! go economy!) and it comes standard with an mp3 player and an audio input jack. It’s quite an improvement over our other car stereo systems.
It’s been a long time since we’ve kept CDs in any of our vehicles… in fact we stored them in our basement a few months ago to make more room for our dvds and widscreen television. Soon we won’t even need those, since my brothers wii is able to play movie files from an external hard drive. Technology sure gets outdated fast.
Yeah that’s what I do whenever i drive and I think it’s great. Only cost me $5 too.
The problem with that though is a lot of newer cars not having tape decks, of course. But, my car being from the 80’s, and both my parents cars happen to have a tape deck as well as a CD player, works out perfectly.
As someone who paid the extra for a 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum - it seems like only yesterday - 16 gigabytes?! It’d cost you a million Dollars to fill that with 3 minute rock and roll singles.
I was thinking the same thing, but only in relation to my 60GB iPod. Not that I need to carry all my music with me all the time, but it’s handy to have it all together. But thumb drives are so cheap now, you can just buy another one when the first one fills up.
I have an iPod adapter in my car from NewerTech. Only $30, it’s fixed to a single FM frequency, 87.9. Works almost everywhere since hardly anybody uses that frequency. I don’t know why, but the adapters on the market these days don’t even go that low, they all start at 88.1. Why? And they all cost more. NewerTech doesn’t make that old one anymore…
My 2004 Toyota has a cassette player, and 6-disc CD changer. I rarely use either, but the cassette is a good backup for playing the iPod…
16 gig is probably more than enough for my entire CD collection and then some. I don’t buy much new music. Unless my listening habits change, the 16G drive will be enough. Or, by the time I actually fill it up, the 32G will be out (and cheap). I’ll just get one of those, transfer everything over to it, and be set for life. I calculate I can fit 300 CDs on my 16G drive at my current rate of consumption (50 CDs so far totaling 2.5G).
My complaint with in car MP3 players and most other MP3 players is they almost all fail to play gapless tracks. I’m not aware of any in car MP3 players that can play gapless. The only way to get gapless playback in a car is to use something with an iPod connection or something with a line in that you can connect a Zune or a Rockbox MP3 player to.
It’s all great technology but they are failing to be a true CD replacement till they manage to get gapless playback done right. It’s not impossible to do. It just does not seem to be a priority at all for the vast majority of manufacturers.
You are an audiophile commenting on in-car music players. You’re never going to be happy there. What you need is a pair of noise-canceling headphones and a Walkman for your CDs. And a driver, of course.
Or, an iPod connected to some kind of “good” device to wire it into your car’s stereo so you don’t have to muck about with FM transmitters. The iPods can do gapless (though probably not to your standards)…
Nah, you dont even have to be an audiophile to make Johns points. I have lots of cds, from Dream Theater, Symphony X, Operas and other classical pieces, and just basically tons of songs that get separated into a few tracks because thats how they are put onto the cd. Playback from the cd is perfect, but when you are listening to a 30minute prog piece or anything like that, and you hear that quick 2.5mm gap, its amazingly annoying.
John, just get a tiny laptop and use Foobar2000 on it, then use the line in or a RCA cable to hook into your cars audio system. Haha, I may actually do that, and build the electronics into the dashboard.
Right now I just throw in all the tracks into cubase and export it all as one track to get rid of the gaps, then put it onto my player. A few mins of extra work but the annoyance of a gap is gone.
I just use an iPod. Problem solved for now. Though I don’t like the direction that Apple is going by making the Touch and possibly future iPods more proprietary. You can’t use 3rd party software to sync and manage the Touch. I don’t like a system that locks me into using one particular piece of software to manage the music on the device. Same reason that I don’t have a Zune.
The future I see for gapless playback is the iPod and Zune being proprietary, Rockbox on obsolete hardware, and no-one else stepping up to the plate.
Yeah, it sucks. At least there are free audio/wave editing programs to combine tracks into 1 continues play. Works for me cause I usually listen to a full cd instead of a few tracks and then switch.
Im surprised more media players dont offer gapless playback.
Hopefully someday we have all-in-one media programs and mp3 players that arent based on proprietariness and really have something to offer. For now ill stick with vlc for video and fubar for audio.
I’m an audiophile in the sense that I’m a bit of an audio hardware geek. I’m not much an an audiophile when it comes to high end audio quality. I’m happy with what the true audiophiles would consider entry level audiophile sound.
I’m just cursed with the preference to listen to whole albums, many of which require gapless playback to be correct to their original form.
The iPod does gapless well and that’s my current solution for portable playback.
Haha, I may actually do that, and build the electronics into the dashboard.