Here is what I did back in the day, before I had a smart phone: I bought an FM transmitter and a universal 12 volt power cord to connect to it (so it wouldn’t need batteries). Then I placed the transmitter right next to my radio. I connected my MP3 player directly to the FM transmitter. You could do the same, but with a portable CD player.
If you can’t find an FM transmitter at an auto parts store or a big box store, you can find them online and in truck stops.
The smarter thing to do is download iTunes (soon to be replaced by the Apple Music app) onto a computer, copy all your CDs onto the hard drive, and put all the music on a digital device. If you don’t have a smart phone, you can buy a refurbished iPod or iPhone (such as the 4s or the 5s) on eBay, copy your music library to that device, and use it instead of your CDs.
Your computer can rip CDs to your computer much faster than it can play them. It might only take a couple hours.
It does the whole CD at once. If you setup your settings to speed up the process, you just insert the CD, iTunes starts copying, and then the CD drive opens as soon as it’s done copying.
iTunes is very intuitive. It sorts the songs into single files and downloads the information for you so you don’t need to input the artists’ names or song titles.
Most programs give you a choice, but in your case you’d choose to rip the whole CD. I prefer using MusicBee on Windows, for what that’s worth. If you have a laptop and you can do this while watching TV, it’s an easy mindless activity for a few days.
If you have room on your PC, consider ripping the CDs to a lossless format such as FLAC so that you never have to do it again. If your player can’t handle lossless format or your USB drive doesn’t have enough room for all of the files, you can easily convert from FLAC files to smaller MP3 files on the fly when you copy them to the USB drive (at least with MusicBee).
Of course, you’ll want to be sure the ripped files are included in your backups (one on-site and one off-site if you’re doing it correctly) so that you don’t have to do this again.
On another note, consider using a low-profile USB drive such as the SanDisk Ultra Fit for this situation, especially because you won’t be taking it out that often. That assumes you choose to use a USB drive instead of your phone, which is also a reasonable choice.
Given his car is 2019, most likely it would allow for that, from my experience with my 2019 Accord.
As my daughter gets in my car, she immediately demands to stream her music over Bluetooth
The only trick I have to do is: I put my cell phone on USB cord, so that Android Auto can [automatically] take over, then if my phone gets a call, her music gets interrupted by the call, it also helps with navigation if I happen to turn it on.
This is my thought - precious few cars have amplifiers and speakers capable of true, high-quality reproduction. Beyond that, even fewer cars are quiet enough to hear the difference.
For the OP I can think of a couple of solutions:
The easiest would be to find a portable CD player on eBay and plug it in to the auxiliary jack.
There are also after-market car stereos that play DVDs and CDs.
Rip the CDs in a high quality MP3 or lossless format to a USB drive
Rip them to iTunes and use your phone with CarPlay (or the Android equivalent) This requires more work up front but is probably the easiest in terms of accessing and managing all the content. After that you can bring your entire library with.
OK. Non-audio expert making the most of some expert advice. Here goes:
There is no Aux input - That negates the use of an old-school portable CD player with a “headphone” style cord one could just connect. However, portable CD players are a hassle anyway (Been there done that in the 1990s).
I have added “CD-Quality” to this discussion. I did that to expand the topic a bit.
Chris from Honda is an audiophile. Not to be confused with an audio file. (hilarious). In a recent Acura RDX media vehicle, Chris added a music player. An iPod. On that, he had placed some high-quality audio files he had transferred from CDs in his collection. He did this so that testers could hear the full extent of the RDX’s AMAZING audio system. It blew our minds and re-set the bar for the best audio in any vehicle, at any price point we have ever heard.
Here is what Chris wrote back just slightly edited for context: "As I understand it, any vehicle with CarPlay will play any iTunes music that’s on the phone. The integration is great, you can search playlists, artists, songs, via the head unit and skip to next song via the steering wheel buttons. And you can generally have album art for the song currently playing. (John G. adds, that I have done the same with Android Auto and a Samsung phone).
Related to this CTC post, I think the CarTalk member would just need to transfer (burn) their CD’s into iTunes on their laptop and then connect their phone to the laptop to load all or some of their music on their phone.
When burning CD’s, I think iTunes will default to the most compressed setting which is 128kbps. Sound quality will be less than CD for sure, but it’s good enough for some listeners. In iTunes ‘Advanced settings’ one can bump the bit rate to 256 kbps which is likely good for most people. At that higher (256) setting each song will take up more memory, but because it’s still compressed, it won’t take up much storage at all. Incidentally, Pandora has a ‘High Quality’ setting that I think bumps the bit rate from the standard 128kbps to 256kbps. If your data plan can handle it, I highly recommend that. (John G confirms that this is the case, that it is better, and that it works seamlessly).
For those who want the best sound possible, they can select AIFF or one of the other lossless formats in iTunes advanced settings. Lossless generally means ‘not compressed’ and therefore takes up a lot more storage. Like 4 to 5 times as much. The difference in sound quality would be considered by many to be small and maybe not noticeable. I’d argue it does sound better, and I think it’s worth the effort and the need for more storage, but I’m the exception."
5) So, member melot, it seems that you will need to do some file sharing and explore iTunes or another music service a bit to move your CD collection to the phone of your choice and then use Apple CarPlay or Android Auto to play it. Or, you can also use a music player inserted into the USB port.
6) If I may add a suggestion: If you are a music fan, it is well worth exploring Pandora. It is super easy to use, lets you customize playlists, and for $3.99 per month is ad-free. There are also more expensive plans for under $10 per month that allow you to select individual tracks of your choice. So you can select tracks that you already “own” on you CD list. I realize this is not the same as playing your CDs. However, it is the trend, and as the owner of hundreds of CDs I never use anymore, was my music solution. Pandora has many competitors. I offer it as the example because Pandora/XM (them merged) has the highest in-vehicle market share by a country mile now.
Indeed, thank you very much for adding that! In effect, the USB holds the files and the vehicle plays them. I am not sure if this is universal, or not. If anyone knows, please chime in.
Maybe, but unless they’re wholly out of touch, they’re not worried about 100% perfect sound in their car. The car is noisy, it’s shaped wrong for audio, there’s mandatory reflective surfaces right where you don’t want them (windows), and if you sit in the center of the soundstage for optimal audio you’ll get arrested for hanging out in the back seat while the car tools down the road without a driver.
Yes, but that limits what you can do. You can only play the songs in order, and you might be able to shuffle them (play them in random order), but you can’t have multiple play lists, play a particular genre, or play songs from a particular artist unless you carry multiple USB drives.
Storing the music on your phone using an app, such as iTunes, gives you many more options, including the ability to play podcasts.
On both my Mustang (Sync 3) and my F-150 (base sync) you can indeed play music, by artist or genre. That’s a pretty common feature with most infotainment systems. You can do playlists with Sync 3, but you have to set up the lists beforehand when you’re putting music on the flash drive , the playlists need to be a certain directory on the USB in order for them to be recognized by the infotainment system. You cannot make a playlist with the infotainment system after the fact.
Given all the possibilities to play music in a car, compressed to a practically infinite variety, uncompressed again with many varieties, sourced from flash drive, cell phone, laptop, less than 1% harmonic distortion, all that audio technology for cars is just marvelous. One has to wonder then why the telephone company requires I dial my own area code to phone my neighbor to see if I can borrow a cup of flour … lol .
That should work nicely, although your CDs will eventually wear out.
…and when I say that, I don’t mean they’ll actually wear out like a vinyl record, but that the layer of media under the plastic that stores information will deteriorate with age.
Computer scientists used to think CDs would be good for archiving data, but they (and I) have discovered they don’t age as well as was predicted when CDs first came out.
