Cars without CD players

It's come to my attention that an increasing amount of new 2016/2017 cars out there are starting to be built without a CD player available. All of them have MP3 capability, but no CD player.

How have you guys adjusted to hearing your tunes in the car if you don't have a CD player. I'm accustomed to having a stack of CD's in between the CD's that I pull from to hear music. So what is the MP3 solution? Do you load up new music every so often on your smart phone or MP3 player? Do you have a device with enough memory to hold a good chunk of your music?

Haha, my cars are so old I don't even have music in them. 93 van and a 91 Volvo

Yikes!  It will be a sad day when I get one of those.

The iPod Classic holds all of my music, but they don't make it anymore.  With that many songs it's actually more distracting and likely to cause an accident than to scroll through to find the song I want than it would be to change CDs, so unless it's a long car trip I prefer just to grab a few CDs.

bjorn agin wrote:It's come to my attention that an increasing amount of new 2016/2017 cars out there are starting to be built without a CD player available. All of them have MP3 capability, but no CD player.

How have you guys adjusted to hearing your tunes in the car if you don't have a CD player. I'm accustomed to having a stack of CD's in between the CD's that I pull from to hear music. So what is the MP3 solution? Do you load up new music every so often on your smart phone or MP3 player? Do you have a device with enough memory to hold a good chunk of your music?

My current commuter car that I've had for the last 3 years, has a cd player that plays mp3 on cd. I burn disks with 10 or 11 album, usually or related style or a particular artist with a large library. I wish, that it had bluetooth. I want to ditch disks if I could, although, I'd like to have it as an option. if and when i replace me stereo, it will have bluetooth or at least an aux analog connector. I'd rather be able to cue up music on my iphone or stream music through it to my stereo.

eatbugs wrote:Yikes!  It will be a sad day when I get one of those.

The iPod Classic holds all of my music, but they don't make it anymore.  With that many songs it's actually more distracting and likely to cause an accident than to scroll through to find the song I want than it would be to change CDs, so unless it's a long car trip I prefer just to grab a few CDs.

I think the stereos on new cars connect via Bluetooth, and have integrated controls on the dash that would control your device. For example, here's the dash of a 2016 GMC Terrain



I guess the only difference would be taking the time to load your device with music vs scanning your CD collection for the discs you want. I suppose looking at the screen to see what music you want to play would be about an equal amount of distraction as compared to fumbling through CD's while driving.

I have a 2015 small sedan that still has a CD player/radio, but also has bluetooth and a USB port.  I actually just rip all of the music/audio book stuff I want onto a 16GB flash drive and plug that directly into my stereo.  I don't even take my cds into the car anymore.

I've not played a CD in my truck for years.  I bought a Zune back in 2009 and wore it out over the next several years.  I still played CDs in the truck at first but soon realized the convenience of having my favorite albums with me wherever I went.  My truck is a 2006 and has an aftermarket stereo in it that can do MP3 CDs, aux line in, and even flash drives.  My wife's 2016 Kia Sorento does the same.  So, I've gotten VERY used to playing my music off another source so that everything is just a push of a button away.

I don't have a Zune anymore.  It finally died after 6 years of HARD use.  I bought a FiiO X5 hi-def player.  You can load two micro SD cards with 120 GIGS of music.  They will actually take bigger cards and read them, but this was what is recommended by FiiO.  It will play MP3, WAV, FLAC, etc.  I LOVE this player and will keep one as long as they keep making them.  I highly recommend the FiiO since you can have high quality music files and only carry that device.  The battery lasts a long time as well.  You can get a headphone amp that will boost the volume so that the battery will last longer when playing in your car.

alldatndensum wrote: I bought a FiiO X5 hi-def player.  You can load two micro SD cards with 120 GIGS of music.  They will actually take bigger cards and read them, but this was what is recommended by FiiO.  It will play MP3, WAV, FLAC, etc.  I LOVE this player and will keep one as long as they keep making them.  I highly recommend the FiiO since you can have high quality music files and only carry that device.  The battery lasts a long time as well.  You can get a headphone amp that will boost the volume so that the battery will last longer when playing in your car.

I have a low-end FiiO and it sounds better than the iPod classic v5 I used to have, which is supposed to be the best sounding iPod.  The only drawback is paying for cards for the unit, but it's more than worth it.

My car has a tape deck, so I just use an adapter for an MP3 player.

If they hadn't been so expensive, I would have bought the Gen 7 FiiO.  They are gonna have to come down a bit before I spring for one of those.  The Gen 5 was plenty for me.

If anyone ever buys one, be sure and do the firmware update immediately.  It makes the controls way more intuitive and responsive.

I thought this thread was about older vehicles with just cassette decks. Anyway, I have a 2014 Corolla that has a CD player and Bluetooth. I have my favorite songs on my Samsung cell phone that I loaded on my computer from my CD collection and I transferred them to my cell phone. So whenever I get in my car all I got to do is press a few buttons and it plays the songs on a shuffle. My 2006 Honda Civic only has a CD player. If I get a new vehicle that don't have a CD player, I won't miss it. As long it has Bluetooth or some other program that can play songs from a mp3 player or cellphone, I'm happy.

I have a cd player in my car, but I mostly use the Bluetooth connection to my phone. I currently have a little over 5600 songs loaded and I'm only at about one third capacity. That's much more than I could ever carry with physical copies.

The 2014 Chevy Sonic hatch I totaled back in March had no CD player, but had two options for input. A USB port, or an audio jack for ipod etc. I prefer this over CD player actually.

Depending on the actual system in your car you might be able to use a USB Solid state drive, or a flash drive.

For me my car had the "Chevy MyLink system" which can only see 10,000 songs on a given drive attached. since 10k was not enough for me I had bought a 4-port USB switcher, and 4 16GB flash drives. I put one subgenre on each flash drive, and I could hit a button to choose which flash drive I wanted, then use the in car menu screen to choose artist, album and song.

I wrecked that car, so now im back to CDs again. It was nice while it lasted.