We might want to open a topic about our favorite road tunes, but for now, I invite those who've used non-CD options to share their experiences. Many newer cars, especially small ones, are not available with CD players.
For a while, some cars were equipped with hard drives, but now I think most people just use their phones. That's an option I'd prefer to avoid. Most new cars come with USB ports; ideally, one could load up one or more flash drives, but from what I read, car audio systems like to look at the ID tags on individual tracks, and often don't navigate a folder structure gracefully, or have limitations on the number of folders they can read, etc.
I have an additional wrinkle in that as a Linux user, I have a large library of music stored in Ogg Vorbis format; most car systems will work only with MP3s or AACs. That would rule out having the car's audio system directly accessing USB storage.
For those vehicles supporting Android Auto (or presumably Apple CarPlay), you could run a media player such as VLC, which will work with a folder structure and will support file formats such as Ogg and FLAC. After upgrading my phone earlier this year, I kept the old one in case I would want to use it as a music appliance. (Phone service is shut off, but it still works as a tablet.)
My 2011 car, while lacking a USB port, does have an analog auxiliary port (3.5mm mini jack). I can use either a player such as Clip Zip or Clip Sport, or a phone. Nothing shows up in the display except AUX, but it does work, something I keep in mind in case the CD player dies and I'm too cheap to replace it.
My ideal modern implementation would be USB storage that is format agnostic and able to navigate an extensive folder structure, but I don't think the industry sees eye to eye with me.
While it's true that I'm old enough to be moving into my "you kids get off my lawn" phase, this really does seem more complicated than it needs to be. Please feel free to share your own observations.
Topic: OT: Road tunes without CDs (Read 6587 times)