4 ms·

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

netsharc 3mo ago
My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car. Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!
- throwway120385 3mo ago
  My truck will actually play MP3s off of a data CD. Maybe I should try that.
  - ryandrake 3mo ago
    Nearly every automobile MP3 player (USB-based or CD-based) I've used was defective in some way. Usually something stupid like only playing tracks in alphabetical order, or inserting audible gaps between tracks that are meant to flow into one another, or not supporting tags correctly, or not handling UTF-8 text... Car companies don't know how to do consumer software.
    - mc3301 3mo ago
      Mine would cut the last few second and first few seconds of each song with some terrible "meld together" business, like the world's worst DJ.
    - andyjohnson0 3mo ago
      The system in my car (2018 Ford Fiesta) will play mp3s from a usb stick but, as with your experience, it has only a basic understanding of ID3. It completely ignores the "position in media set" tag, for example, meaning that it plays the 1st track from each cd in a set, then all the second tracks, etc. I wrote [1] to post-process my (slightly obsessively) neatly tagged mp3 collection for use in my car. [1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser Obligatory note: destructively edits tags, so run it on a copy of any mp3 files.
  - andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
    This is what I do with my 18 minivan that has a 6 disc player. That's a lot of mp3s and it's fun to guess what's next (my rando mp3 discs tend to always be in alphabetical order
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  > ... stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car! Sadly when you stream music over Bluetooth there is lossy compression taking place. People can bitch all they want about "320 kbps mp3 using a modern encoder being indistinguishable from the lossless source", the fact is: mp3 were nice 30 years ago in the Napster day (when I had my ADSL Internet connection). It's 2026 and I play lossless music, including FLAC files I bit-perfectly ripped from my own CD collection (and the rips have been verified online with a DB of rips, so I now they're bit-perfect) and including lossless music from proper music streaming platform (I pay a Qobuz subscription: amazing quality, huge offering, but shittiest music discovery platform ever btw). Really: it's 2026 and if people like to listen to lossy music, more power to them. I don't, and hence I don't stream audio over Bluetooth. My car both takes CDs, memory sticks (mp3 and WAV, no FLAC) and has got its own memory. I've got a few hundred songs stored in the car: they go losslessly to the car's DAC. High-end luxury car and it's the type of car where people who've never been in one say: "I never knew music could sound that good in a car" (which btw is funny to witness when some car youtubers try a car with an amazing soundsystem). Now of course it's still a car. Don't get me started on home stereo because I've got that too (and when you know what you're doing you can get amazing audio for a really very reasonable price: for example I won't put 30 K in a McIntosh amp where a Yamaha amp costing 1/30th of the price will do). Call me an audiofool and... Enjoy your lossy Bluetooth streaming adding a layer of lossyness on your already lossy mp3 on your car stereo system which sounds like crap anyway.
  - 999900000999 3mo ago
    Apple has ruined audio for a generation. I have a budget android phone with a jack and it's miles more convenient than a dongle or Bluetooth headphones which are never comfortable to me. Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones
    - Kirby64 3mo ago
      > Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones Have you looked at the price of actually mediocre Bluetooth headphones recently? They’re like… $20 for a distinct fine set of true wireless headphones, including the case, even from a real brand. Certainly comparable to $20 wired headphones.
- jonhohle 3mo ago
  There was a short period where CD players with Bluetooth and FM transmitters were made. Pairing is weird and may not work with every vehicle, but FM fallback is, well, as bad as it always has been. I really like CDs and enjoy buying them second hand when on road trips. It was fun to put in something new while traveling, but now it requires an extra device on the off chance that a CD is found.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3mo ago
> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player). That sounds wonderful. There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time. It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s. Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.
- mc3301 3mo ago
  I had that PLUS a mini-disc player, all stock on a dirt-cheap car.
- idiotsecant 3mo ago
  I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now
  - dylan604 3mo ago
    "For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options." <=> "I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now" Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does
    - idiotsecant 3mo ago
      I guess what I'm saying is 27 different media players duct taped together does not seem like the peak of engineering. A single wireless protocol seems pretty good.
      - dylan604 3mo ago
        Back in the day, we'd rate ourselves by how many dongles we'd string together to get things to work.

netsharc 3mo ago

My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car. Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!

throwway120385 3mo ago
My truck will actually play MP3s off of a data CD. Maybe I should try that.
- ryandrake 3mo ago
  Nearly every automobile MP3 player (USB-based or CD-based) I've used was defective in some way. Usually something stupid like only playing tracks in alphabetical order, or inserting audible gaps between tracks that are meant to flow into one another, or not supporting tags correctly, or not handling UTF-8 text... Car companies don't know how to do consumer software.
  - mc3301 3mo ago
    Mine would cut the last few second and first few seconds of each song with some terrible "meld together" business, like the world's worst DJ.
  - andyjohnson0 3mo ago
    The system in my car (2018 Ford Fiesta) will play mp3s from a usb stick but, as with your experience, it has only a basic understanding of ID3. It completely ignores the "position in media set" tag, for example, meaning that it plays the 1st track from each cd in a set, then all the second tracks, etc. I wrote [1] to post-process my (slightly obsessively) neatly tagged mp3 collection for use in my car. [1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser Obligatory note: destructively edits tags, so run it on a copy of any mp3 files.
- andrew_lettuce 3mo ago
  This is what I do with my 18 minivan that has a 6 disc player. That's a lot of mp3s and it's fun to guess what's next (my rando mp3 discs tend to always be in alphabetical order
TacticalCoder 3mo ago
> ... stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car! Sadly when you stream music over Bluetooth there is lossy compression taking place. People can bitch all they want about "320 kbps mp3 using a modern encoder being indistinguishable from the lossless source", the fact is: mp3 were nice 30 years ago in the Napster day (when I had my ADSL Internet connection). It's 2026 and I play lossless music, including FLAC files I bit-perfectly ripped from my own CD collection (and the rips have been verified online with a DB of rips, so I now they're bit-perfect) and including lossless music from proper music streaming platform (I pay a Qobuz subscription: amazing quality, huge offering, but shittiest music discovery platform ever btw). Really: it's 2026 and if people like to listen to lossy music, more power to them. I don't, and hence I don't stream audio over Bluetooth. My car both takes CDs, memory sticks (mp3 and WAV, no FLAC) and has got its own memory. I've got a few hundred songs stored in the car: they go losslessly to the car's DAC. High-end luxury car and it's the type of car where people who've never been in one say: "I never knew music could sound that good in a car" (which btw is funny to witness when some car youtubers try a car with an amazing soundsystem). Now of course it's still a car. Don't get me started on home stereo because I've got that too (and when you know what you're doing you can get amazing audio for a really very reasonable price: for example I won't put 30 K in a McIntosh amp where a Yamaha amp costing 1/30th of the price will do). Call me an audiofool and... Enjoy your lossy Bluetooth streaming adding a layer of lossyness on your already lossy mp3 on your car stereo system which sounds like crap anyway.
- 999900000999 3mo ago
  Apple has ruined audio for a generation. I have a budget android phone with a jack and it's miles more convenient than a dongle or Bluetooth headphones which are never comfortable to me. Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones
  - Kirby64 3mo ago
    > Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones Have you looked at the price of actually mediocre Bluetooth headphones recently? They’re like… $20 for a distinct fine set of true wireless headphones, including the case, even from a real brand. Certainly comparable to $20 wired headphones.
jonhohle 3mo ago
There was a short period where CD players with Bluetooth and FM transmitters were made. Pairing is weird and may not work with every vehicle, but FM fallback is, well, as bad as it always has been. I really like CDs and enjoy buying them second hand when on road trips. It was fun to put in something new while traveling, but now it requires an extra device on the off chance that a CD is found.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3mo ago

> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player). That sounds wonderful. There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time. It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s. Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.

mc3301 3mo ago
I had that PLUS a mini-disc player, all stock on a dirt-cheap car.
idiotsecant 3mo ago
I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now
- dylan604 3mo ago
  "For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options." <=> "I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now" Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does
  - idiotsecant 3mo ago
    I guess what I'm saying is 27 different media players duct taped together does not seem like the peak of engineering. A single wireless protocol seems pretty good.
    - dylan604 3mo ago
      Back in the day, we'd rate ourselves by how many dongles we'd string together to get things to work.