> 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 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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!

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throwway120385 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My truck will actually play MP3s off of a data CD. Maybe I should try that.

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andrew_lettuce 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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ryandrake 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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TacticalCoder 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> ... 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.

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neckro23 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The layering of compression really does get you. I've noticed (both in "Plexamp in my car" and "playing music on Twitch" contexts) that using a FLAC source makes an audible difference, even compared to a high-bitrate MP3 source.

This might seem pretty obvious, but I wasn't expecting it to matter as much since the end result was compressed again (and yet again on my car's Bluetooth) using a different codec.

This isn't on anything close to audiophile gear either. My car stereo is thoroughly mediocre and my home stereo is speakers I literally found in the trash.

Now I'm (belatedly) rebuilding my music collection in FLAC...

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999900000999 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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Kirby64 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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.

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justsomehnguy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

$20 BT would get you a proper BT phonecall experience but they wouldn't give you a remotely good music playback at all. BT have a lot of codecs but a $20 headset including tax and markup would not include all the fancy ones by the cost alone.

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Kirby64 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> BT have a lot of codecs but a $20 headset including tax and markup would not include all the fancy ones by the cost alone.

What do you mean by this? AAC or SBC is perfectly fine for $20 headphones. Definitely for that quality of headphone. LDAC or Apt-X are pointless for a headphone in that price bracket.

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999900000999 2 hours ago | parent [-]

For 100$ I can get wired headphones that don't try to squeeze my head and order to do some noise canceling nonsense. This is really annoying for myself, it's like every single Bluetooth headphone has to add noise canceling and they have to sacrifice comfort to do so.

I have some $70 wired headphones from AliExpress that literally beat anything I've personally tried wireless up to like $300 or so.

	▲	Kirby64 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Or just… don’t buy ones that have noise canceling? Not that hard and often cheaper. Again I’m comparing $20 headphones here. Nobody is saying $100 wired headphones aren’t gonna be better than $100 wireless ones for sound. But, if you want ANC for planes or something then you are going to be using wireless headphones anyways.

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ColdStream 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Alas convenience wins for most people. They will take a loss in quality if it makes it a little easier.

I'm one of those people who cannot tell until the bit rate gets stupidly low or the encoder cannot handle the symbols on drums but that is no universal.

Even then I stick to headphone jacks when possible. If it is a low quality podcast, occasionally my $20 bluetooth buds come out but that is a reasonable trade off.

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q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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dylan604 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't forget the adapters that plugged into the 1/8" jack on your Sony WalkMan with a cassette shaped adapter that went into the tape deck. There are also those weird devices that plugged into the 1/8" jack with a low power radio transmitter to tune your in dash receiver to hear. (A local station I listen is on the low end where these devices operate. The station is lower powered college station with the transmitter located where I'm pretty close to the edge of its range. From time to time at stop lights, a stronger signal will come in to interrupt and disappears after the green and cars separate. I'm guessing one of these is being used)

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mc3301 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had that PLUS a mini-disc player, all stock on a dirt-cheap car.

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BuyMyBitcoins 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember being blown away seeing one of those tape-deck to aux cable players for the first time. Plugging my late 2000’s era iPod into my early 90’s car was magical.

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throw0101d 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> That sounds wonderful.

Except that rust is eating it and I'll have to replace it soon-ish.

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idiotsecant 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now

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dylan604 6 hours ago | parent [-]

"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

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idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Back in the day, we'd rate ourselves by how many dongles we'd string together to get things to work.