Casette Tape vs Online Music continuous play

[bruce bowser]

I can already see where this is going with online continuous play. They are going to interrupt it every 3 minutes with commercials. I'll go back to the 1980's casette tapes before this.

[Ed Pawlowski]

I put most of my music on the computer and then transfer what I want to a USB stick. Otherwise I'm listening to SiriusXM.

[Dean Hoffman]

Have you tried Tunein? Maybe I'm just used to the ads but it doesn't seem too bad. They have a commercial free version but I haven't tried it.

[rbowman]

I tried Spotify briefly but unless you pay them you get a lot of ads. After getting the same razor ad three times in a row I deleted the app. Jango might not have as much music available but it's ad free (so far).

[micky]

I only listen to music 20% of the time, but before I took a 3-month trip to countries where none of the radio talk stations were in English, I used RadioMaximus and 181 FM - Oldies (one of a dozen 181 FM web-radio stations, and I recorded every song for 36 hours. Then deleted the ones I don't like and copied the rest to a flashdrive which I use in the rentacar, or computer.

Two interesting things:

1) The first time, they got copied to the flash drive in the wrong order. This might not matter, but the first 4 seconds of every song is part of the previous song's file. Playing them in the wrong order mixed this up more. Turns out, they wee copied in the order they were displayed on the File Manager. Since I usually put the most recent ones at the top, that's how they were copied. I redid that.

2) For various reasons, I had 3 different rentacars on one trip, and the first two played the songs in alphabetical order, even though they weren't stored that way. There were 100's of titles, but apparently enough RAM and software in the car radio to sort the songs. Since the first part of each song title was the artist, often hir first name, all the songs by Aretha Franklin were played together, some of them more than once in a row, because that's what alphabetizing does.,

[gfretwell]

I haven't listened to any broadcast music in my car in 20 years. I play my own MP3s from a thumb drive and a disk drive before that.

[gfretwell]

That is usually because of whether they are indexing on the file name or the ID3 meta file. You can also load genre in the ID3 file and most players will filter by that. There might also be album title, date (file date or recording date) and a bunch of other stuff. If you right click the song title in Winamp you can see and edit the ID3 files.

[rbowman]

One of the plus points of the car I bought this spring is there's a direct USB port. The last one required a MP3 player plugged into the aux.

[bruce bowser]

I'd use a thumb drive, it's just that I like continuous play and somehow, I think an ad will appear on there during the recording. With an old 1996 boom box tape deck, you know no site provider can slip ads in.

[bruce bowser]

The thing is, I never really bothered or let alone perfected recording with much CD burning or thumb drive use strictly for audio, at least. I have three thumb drives and they're all practically empty.

[gfretwell]

As soon as you commit to MP3, the media doesn't matter. It will work on just about anything. If your CD player is smart enough it will play MP3s from a CD and you can get about 150 on one disk. This is not new technology. The player in my wife's 2008 Lincoln plays MP3s from disk but it also has a USB that supports 16g thumb drives. That is over 10 days worth of continuous music. After 250 hours you might be ready to hear the same song again.

[micky]

Unefortunately for me, my car radio plays only audio CDs, not MP3s etc. and you can't get many songs on an audio CD.

Previous car had a CD changer. It was a 2000 Toyota and the changer worked until about 2014 (though it jammed 3 times. Once I freed it up by pressing a lot of buttons and twice I had to take it out of the car and fiddle with it. The 4th time, in 2014 I had to rip the guts out to retrieve my CDs.

This car has a screen with a map and GPS and behind it is one slot to play a CD and another slot that holds a CD with the map on it. For a couple years I t hought the map was inadequate because it's from 2005, and I wanted to connect the screen to my phone. That can't be done, but the map in the car is pretty good after all.

They sold newer map CDs on ebay. but only 3 or 4 and only up to 2008 when I guesss they were driven out of business by google maps, and the CDs they sold were 30 or 40 dollars. Worth it if I had no CD at all, but not just to get a map that's 2 or 3 years newer.

[Dan Espen]

I never knew my car radio/CD player handled DATA CDs with MP3s until I tried it. You can typically get 700 MP3 tracks on a data CD.

I tried it but eventually found out the radio has an 8 bit processor so song count overflows at 255, so I can only play 255 tracks on each CD.

Still that's enough for me to get all of my collection on 31 CDs. I typically play the same CD 2 or 3 times before I get bored and switch to the next CD. I'm really happy with this solution. I really detest radio and it's commercials.

I wrote some software to pick random tracks and spread them over all 31 CDs so I don't have to listen to the same artist day after day.

My car is getting a little old now. I'm able to keep a full backup of all my music on 1 USB stick but the car won't play from USB, only that Apple thing.

[micky]

If that was a way of encouraging me to try it, a) you are very tactful. (I mean it.) b) I did try it. IIRC the owners manual etc. said nothing about audio CDs or MP3's or the difference . Surely MP3 existed in 2005? But I guess the car radio people hadn't gotten around to it yet. They were probably gloating about using a gps map in the radio (and it does work very well to show where I am and what direction I'm going.)

Interesting.

I have about 20 CD's I got at a Goodwill store. That was all they had from a set of about 35 that was made for sale to GI's in Germany during the 70's (with songs from the 50's, 60's and a little 70's). Most are original, but a few are reproductions. Some reproductions sound exactly like the group that made the song famous, but a few are inferior.

But since I no longer have the changer, I only play one of them and it's not even a good one.

You know for under $15 there are things that plug into the cigarette lighter that transmit to the radio. They have USB and probably AUX inputs and maybe even SD card input, and have switches to play the next song, the previous song, to adjust the frequency to any unused freq. in your area. There are dozens of models, some with flexible stalks, others very short. Some have a little screen that shows the name of the song that is playing. They also have bluetooth and work with the cell phone. It's incedible how much they pack into a little thing for so little money. Maybe by now some are $20. If you're interested, I'll tell you which ones I like

Most have two USB jacks, one of which is only good for charging your phone and one which takes a flashdrive and is input to the radio.

[Jim Joyce]

Is your current car still a Toyota? One of the nice things about most factory Toyota radios is that USB adapters are widely available, easy to install, and not very expensive. Some of them plug into the CD changer port on the back of the radio. That's the other nice thing about many Toyota factory radios. They tend to have a CD changer port. When I added a USB adapter to a 2002 Highlander it took only about an hour.

[Dan Espen]

Tact is a virtue. I was guessing you'd look into it a bit. I have the OEM radio in a 2006 Scion Xb.

Of course you can always have a new radio installed.

I had 300 45s, 500+ LPs, and a number of CDs. I can get obsessed in multi-year projects so I ripped them all to my hard disk track by track. I don't regret the time spent as I now have multiple ways of accessing my entire music collection and full backup.

Nope, didn't know that.

Thanks for the offer.

My CD scheme works well enough for my current car. Right now I'm not spending much time in the car so I'm not hot to upgrade right now.

A USB player that supports FLAC would probably be the best way for me to go since that's the format my backups use. Random play would be a necessity.

I've got most of my house and back yard covered with WIFI. I tried bluetooth, but even with class 1 bluetooth I wasn't satisfied.

Getting away from radio stations with their obnoxious advertising was a very good thing. I'm glad I spent all that time moving my entire collection to my hard disk which is the root of the whole system.

[Dan Espen]

Back of the radio?

I just did some searches for my 2006 Scion Xb. I don't see any indication that there is something on the back of the radio for USB.

I know I can connect a player to the AUX port. I really like the CD controls on the steering wheel which I don't imagine would work with AUX.

I just looked for IPOD to USB, didn't look good.

If I could get an easy way to plug in a USB stick, I'd go for it. Otherwise my data CD solution is good enough.

I could afford a newer car but I love the bizarre look of the early Xb and I think I'm going to stick with it until I see something I like more.

I'm 74 now and in great health, I'm thinking the Scion might outlast me. I only have 50K on it, and lots of people have gotten 300K out of them.

2020 - 2006 = 14 years. 300K / 50K - 1/6 of it's lifetime.

At this rate, I'd have to live to age 144.

[gfretwell]

Your dash unit has GPS Nav and no USB port? Must have been a strange crux of technology there.

I bought new radios for my 97 Honda and 2000 Ford truck that both play MP3s and the one in the Honda will also sync with a phone if that is where you want to get your music from. They are both 2009-10 technology. Prior to that I had PCs in my vehicles. I stopped when Socket 7 boards that still worked were getting rare and I wasn't willing to replace all of the capacitors. That does seem to be the best for a car MP3 playing PC. The 133-166 Pentium seems to tolerate the 140+ degrees you get in a car in the summer when it is parked in the sun. They still run. Faster CPUs have trouble and you really don't need more than a P133 to play MP3s. You can even go slower with a tweek to the player software (MPXPLAY) That is a DOS application and DOS boots faster than my commercial players, any of them, including the one in the Lincoln. It also lets you select songs from a keypad so you don't need to take your eyes off the road. It defaults to random. I still run it in the house, It will run on W/7 and I assume W/10. That is what I run from my 3W1 Seeburg

[gfretwell]

Try loading the songs in a subdirectory. That is probably a limit on the number of files you can put in the root.

You are also not getting 700 MP3s on a 700MB disk unless they are painfully compressed, like mono 64kb or something. Typically they are a meg a minute.

[gfretwell]

MP3s were starting to grab hold in 98 or so (at least that was when I became aware) but you are in the gap in 2005, That could be before they started putting MP3 capability in radio units. My oldest is 2008. If you can find a Blaupunkt Toronto 410 on Ebay, I can recommend that one. Crutchfield usually has deals on new players tho. Finding a clearance on an old model is usually the biggest bang for the buck.