Your music in the car

You guys make music and have cars? Fantastic!

6 Likes

Music in motion, it’s a thing :smile:

A prior version of CarPlay wiped all of the music off my iPhone when I plugged it into a rental Mazda.

My driving music solution is bone conduction headphones, specifically the Shokz Openrun (formerly, Aeropex, previously Trekz Titanium).

I suspect they are technically illegal in some places since they are technically headphones. But they don’t cover your ears. I find it easier to hear road sounds when listening to music via bone-conduction headphones than car speakers.

I have a cross-country drive coming up, so am curious to hear about alternatives to Apple’s music app. I may even pay for Youtube, so I don’t get ads every five minutes in DJ sets.

My car is too old, and my phone is too new for aux cords.

Loud.

I have a Sansa Clip+ with a 64Mb SD card, music is divided in 3 big folders

  • Calm, with ambient stuff such as Alessandro Cortini
  • Easy, with Pop/Rock (Radiohead for instance) that I can listen to with my family
  • Weird, the electronic and experimental stuff (e.g. Warp), for when I’m alone in the car.
1 Like

Very cool idea, thanks!

1 Like

That’s rough. Somehow my car is new enough to have an aux cord but not new enough to have power windows

2 Likes

My car is too old for an aux setup. I’ve got an old ipod with a fm transmitter I still use. The fidelity is definitely not the greatest. I use to use cds but the stereo decides when to eject these days. This can mean it works as it should for a week or two and then randomly it won’t eject for months. I got it to eject recently a cd thats been there since last September maybe?

Otherwise, it’s radio and that means the local oldies station, before it gets all churchy in the evening or the community station when I know a certain show is on.

1 Like

I just make sure it’s under my name. It does tend to get stuck in a random “album” that it makes but i can usually find it (if not, I make a playlist)

Their artwork is on point.

On topic - I don’t drive, but I listen to my tunes on SoundCloud and Dropbox.

Most dash CD players had a manual eject button. Like a recessed router reset switch.

1 Like

Yeah for some reason this Mopar deck doesn’t. Its a common failure point on them apparently. It’s not that it just doesn’t eject because it recognizes the attempt and changes to radio. It just does not follow through on the actual eject.

1 Like

Gotcha.

My wrangler played CCR chronicles on repeat for 2 years till someone told me about the manual eject.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

2 Likes

I feel so old! Y’all are talking about streaming this and soundsharing that - whenever I try Bluetooth anything its a disaster - not connecting, connecting and disconnecting… I’m also very data-averse and never have it on on my phone.

I export my mixes in progress and put them on a SanDisk mp3 player. That thing was like 30 bucks and they last forever. But are mp3s over? I never hear about those anymore.

When I listen to music I put it on an MP3 cd. I feel like any car with a cd player likely also has mp3 xd capabilities- it’s amazing. Right now I have a cd that has 5 cabaret Voltaire albums and 5 throbbing gristle albums, what else do I need?

2 Likes

You think that’s old? I remember sitting in my dorm in '96 or '97. Some guys a few doors down had just filled a 1GB hard drive up with a few ripped CDs, back when a 1GB drive was the largest drive made and usually required an expensive SCSI card too.

Anyway, I decided to do a test of my own: I ripped a few tracks from Dark Side of the Moon, probably at 128k, and played them through my dumpster-dive dorm stereo. I concluded that MP3s were shit and would never go anywhere. :rofl: Many years later, I was briefly in charge of the engineering team for an on-demand CD printing service. A few years after that, I lent a CD to an engineer at a different company. The next week, he gave it back, apologizing that he couldn’t find anything to play it on. :sob: Now I’ve got MP3s on my phone and vinyl in my storage unit.

My mistake was to imagine that anyone cared about quality. People want to listen to their tunes. Whatever makes this easier will win, everything else will lose. Apple made the music purchasing and listening experience ever so slightly better than in the CD world. Apply is happy, the music industry is as happy as it gets, and listeners are mostly happy. Meanwhile, plenty of high res devices and services have come and gone, vaporizing vast swaths of investment capital.

1 Like

Flac is a thing nowadays, but yes a player is not standard in cars.

1 Like

It is a thing, but until recently I haven’t had a sound system that could showcase the difference between 320k/VBR and FLAC. My mid '90s dorm system cobbled together from dumpster finds was more pleasant to listen to than any cheap speakers I’ve had since. I plan to change that, so may end up getting into FLAC. But a decent 1200 clone is a higher priority, so I can play my small vinyl collection.

I’m glad so many are still using CDs like me! My car is also too old for any new technology (just about manages bluetooth voice calls).
I let the kids pick the CDs from Nirvana, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Dopplereffekt, Beastie Boys, NIN, Radiohead, Jurassic 5, New Order, The Fall, Leftfield, AC/DC, various OSTs, they love it!
Good to get them away from the infinite choice of Spotify for a bit I think.

1 Like

Confirming herewith, this is the perfect solution for my use case. Thanks again @Fin25

1 Like

VLC definitely has its quirks and annoyances on Android, but it does the job.

2 Likes

Let this be a warning to you