Farewell to the car CD player, source of weirdly deep musical fandoms

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/sep/30/farewell-to-the-car-cd-player-source-of-weirdly-deep-musical-fandoms

by n1b0m • 2 years ago

81 101 2 years ago

theguardian.com

shwaj3• 2 years ago

“… when I sit in the driver’s seat – categorically the best place to listen to music alone“

:eye-roll: I suppose, if you don’t mind road noise. Can’t stand this overwrought writing style.

codefeenix• 2 years ago

maybe not categorically, but potentially the best place for that person.

idiotsecant2• 2 years ago

There is something special for me about listening to a certain song late at night speeding on a damp muggy highway when the world is empty but somehow menacing, with nothing in the whole universe other than me and the crickets and the electric promise of a coming dawn full of opportunity.

For some subset of the last generation of american youth (and maybe this one? I am too hopelessly old to know now) the personal automobile had a kind of almost shamanic importance and the CD collection was a not insignificant part of that.

The 'best' music is not the music that is most accurately rendered. It is music in the time and place where it most properly induces the distilled current of its meaning into your soul in a way that you feel its echos 30 years later.

For some people, that is in fact in a car.

shwaj3• 2 years ago

I don’t have a problem with any of that. I don’t fetishize cars quite like you describe, but I do enjoy being on a 3 hour drive because I know nothing is going to interrupt me, and usually I’m listening to music while I do.

My issue is the debasement of the language by a professional writer. This use of “categorically” is akin to “I was, like, literally starving”, and for whatever reason this grates on me. I stopped reading immediately.

PopAlongKid• 2 years ago

There is something special for me about listening to a certain song late at night speeding on a damp muggy highway when the world is empty but somehow menacing, with nothing in the whole universe other than me and the crickets and the electric promise of a coming dawn full of opportunity.

You are paraphrasing the lyrics to Golden Earring "Radar Love".

  I've been drivin' all night, my hands wet on the wheel
  ...
  The radio's playing some forgotten song
  Brenda Lee's "Coming On Strong"
  The road has got me hypnotized
  And I'm a-speedin' into a new sunrise

PhasmaFelis2• 2 years ago

If the road noise is overpowering your music, you've got it too low.

HKH23• 2 years ago

Some music works better with road noise. If you listen to electronic music, road noise doesn't matter much, but I guess it would matter a lot if you were listening to something orchestral because you can easily hear things out of place.

happymellon• 2 years ago

Or you need to get the bearings replaced.

RiverCrochet• 2 years ago

The only real case for what is soon to be lost, I think, is that of a limited selection of music in the car forcing you to spend time with it, forging deep and often weird attachments

Honestly that's the whole article, lol.

My thoughts: Nowadays we may have deep and weird attachments with algorithms.

I don't know if this is a bad or honestly even a new thing. The music industry and its attempt to market music could be considered a type of algorithm, or even multiple algorithms. Defining and marketing genres of music "algorithmizes" the product I think - if genre X sells, then more musicians will try to call their music genre X and maybe even modify their product.

And people who grew up in the physical medium heydays of the 60s through the mid 90s are definitely attached to their preferences.

HKH23• 2 years ago

Well, familiarity breeds contempt, so to have exotic things, you need to dance the line between what is plain and what is too strange to make sense of. An algorithm should do that for you.

An algorithm with your playlist history along with others' should provide decent recommendations. Spotify used to let you dislike things and it worked really well, but then they stopped doing that and my recommendations became generic garbage.

chucksmash• 2 years ago

Agreed on Spotify recommendations. I felt like the playlists I got from Spotify circa 2017 did a really good job of walking that line. Nowadays the "song radio" and "artist radio" playlists are bad. Definitely a step back. There are bands I still like that I've added to "Never play music from this artist" because Spotify puts them on every single playlist for me now.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

Honestly that's the whole article, lol.

To be fair the story about taunting her brother with Champagne Supernova when he needed to pee was pretty funny. But yeah, there's not a lot of meat there.

internet101010• 2 years ago

This is why a not small group of people hate U2. Some album of theirs was on Apple devices by default and would be the first thing that played when you turned on the car for some reason.

shwaj3• 2 years ago

Bar Bar Barbara Santa Barbara…

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

That could be why some people hate U2. But, they already had a devoted cadre of haters. They were too successful for too long for there not to be.

War is a good album, though, IIRC.

cole-k2• 2 years ago

I can totally relate to the "deep and often weird attachments" you forge listening to albums, although I'm not sure I agree that there's a case to be made for it. A few weeks ago, I heard a song in a random gelato shop in Italy that instantly sent me back 15 years. To my knowledge, its band only had one hit (at least if we go by airplay), and this was decidedly not it. Yet I knew it well because I tend to listen to whole albums and this song was on the album with their one hit. After the high of hearing an obscure alt rock song in the strangest of places passed, it dawned on me that I didn't like that song now. Nor had I fifteen years ago.

I still listen to albums in their entirety, but I have to wonder how much exactly we lose by having the choice to only take what we like from them (without buying them in their entirety). In defense of the author, I will say that listening to the same song you don't like much enough times can make you at least tolerate it. Perhaps having all of the music of the world at my fingertips has just made me pickier, not necessarily happier.

The song in question, by the way, was "Time Won't Let Me Go" by The Bravery.

nradov2• 2 years ago

Well this is exactly why Apple iPod and iTunes became popular so quickly. A lot of bands and record labels were pumping out albums with one or two good songs and the rest garbage filler, so customers felt cheated when they paid $16 for a physical CD. With iTunes they could buy just the good songs for $1 each. Some artists and pretentious music critics whined about listeners missing out on the whole album experience but there was no going back.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

I would love a algo that recommends music the artists loved and listens too. Musicians musicians are were its at.

pests• 2 years ago

I think the music industry marketing is different though as it used to be a broadcast style attempt with a limited channels. Via radio in certain markets and station, different TV channels, later satellite radio.

Most people were seeing the same things as everyone else was.

Algorithmic marketing today allows everyone to have their own worldview which might not be shared with anyone around you.

thx• 2 years ago

i <33 mi CDs , especially in z car

garciansmith2• 2 years ago

I mostly used MiniDiscs in the late '90s and early 2000s (it was tape adapters and then aux cables for me), and I kind of always hated CDs since they could so easily be scratched, especially in a car.

But I do really miss long road trips for which my friends would burn specific mixes on CD. There was something nice about hearing their carefully selected tracks meant to embody the mood of the journey.

kevin_thibedeau• 2 years ago

You can burn a USB stick with selected tracks meant to embody the mood of the journey.

garciansmith2• 2 years ago

Sure, anyone can still make a playlist. But in my experience most people just use streaming apps and therefore a lot less time is spent on curation. And there is a little something different in the act when you need to take the time to put it on a CD or tape.

zabzonk• 2 years ago

strangely enough, in the same paper: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/30/car-cd...

hateful• 2 years ago

My phone NEVER connects properly and if I want to use it for streaming, I have to spend 2-3 minutes connecting it every time. This has always been the case. Past 3 cards, past 6 phones.

Now-a-days I load up a small flash drive for the car with a small sampling of what I want to listen to. I have another one at home and "Swap" them from time to time with new things. That way it's not overloaded, doesn't take 2 minutes to load up. So it's very much like a mix CD or the mp3 CDs I would burn a couple of decades ago.

philistine2• 2 years ago

Wired CarPlay is rock solid. Bluetooth has never, and never, will be as foolproof as a wire, or as Wi-Fi for that matter.

ClassyJacket• 2 years ago

My car bluetooth (2022 Tesla Model 3) is great and reliable, EXCEPT the huge latency. It connects and disconnects when it should, and is fine for audio, but if I want to sit in my car and watch a video (when public charging, when eating, or on my break at work, so a common situation), it literally has about one second of latency making everything completely unwatchable.

drivers99• 2 years ago

Wired CarPlay is rock solid

Mine always has a sound blip a few (15? 30? I haven't timed it) seconds in whenever I play any song (or at least, the first song when I start playing music). I wish I had a CD player in the car.

saturn8601• 2 years ago

This is not true in my case. This year I have been renting various cars to see which is best to replace my current car. Using wired carplay there are random car specific bugs (Google Maps losing tracking and freezing up, spotify crashing requiring to stop and restart the car, etc.) I have tried Ford, Chevy, Mazda, and Hyundai,(Tesla as well but that is not Carplay).

girvo• 2 years ago

Unless you're in a 2017 VW Polo, then even wired CarPlay can be weirdly flaky. Though that appears to be the ICE system itself losing the plot rather than the connection per se, but I can't be certain. It was quite surprising to come across!

RHSeeger• 2 years ago

Of course, wired means you need to plug and unplug a USB a lot more often. And the USB port is the first thing to go on many phones.

AlbertCory• 2 years ago

I have a microSD card in the phone, and it's great. When it works.

When it doesn't, the CD always works. Always. But one does get sick of that CD.

Bluetooth sucks.

doubled112• 2 years ago

the CD always works

Unless it doesn't.

In the 2011 Ford Focus my wife and I had, the stereo would lock up, stop responding to input, and play the same 1/4 second on repeat until you cut power.

thaumasiotes3• 2 years ago

I used to have a car with a tape player in it. No CD player.

But I got a kit that was meant to give that the ability to play CDs, which consisted of a CD player and an adapter where one end plugged into an audio output jack and the other end was an imitation cassette that went into the tape drive.

It was great. I used a tiny screenless mp3 player and plugged the tape adapter into it. Worked beautifully except for the fact that I couldn't charge the mp3 player in the car. But I could easily organize whatever music I wanted for the car on that mp3 player, and since it was screenless it could be operated by feel.

A friend of mine was proud, once, that his new car included an audio input jack in the dashboard. That's gone out of fashion now, but frankly it's still the ideal setup.

saltcured• 2 years ago

My 7 year old car has a microSD slot in the radio, which has a 64 GB microSD card that I loaded with music and inserted about 7 years minus 2 days ago.

Thankfully, it remembers where it left off and resumes playing from there, unless I park for so long that it goes into a battery saving mode. Then, it starts again at the top in alphabetical order.

prpl• 2 years ago

I have a two VWs, ‘17 and ‘19. Both connect flawlessly with bluetooth and wired carplay (no wireless carplay on these though)

Phone sound is also much better than cheap headphones or speaker. No latency issues (unless it’s Google Meet)

__MatrixMan__• 2 years ago

Mine connects 100% of the time. Pause works 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time it invokes "redial last number".

ranger207• 2 years ago

I have an aftermarket head unit for my pre-infotainment car that's worked perfectly for Bluetooth since the day I got it. Given my experiences elsewhere, I'm convinced the problem with car Bluetooth isn't the Bluetooth, it's the car manufacturer's code

squidgedcricket• 2 years ago

I used to have the same issue, my 2012 Kenwood head unit stopped being reliable w/ phones a few years ago. I did an aux cable for a while, but now have an cheap BT adapter plugged into to aux port and it's super reliable with my phone.

I plan to get rid of the head unit completely to get rid of the screen in my dash, it looks tacky next to the analog clock and magnetic compass.

Triphibian3• 2 years ago

Spotty coverage on the mountain drive to my house so I use CDs. I've started burning copies of CDs because the washboard bumps on the dirt roads scratch the discs up pretty quick. Sirius XM works great too.

Triphibian3• 2 years ago

Also: CD prices at thrift stores top out at 3 bucks. The local library thrift sells them for a quarter each!

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

The last few times I rented cars, I used Spotify offline via bluetooth. Worked great.

dzhiurgis• 2 years ago

Offline is becoming so increasingly rare that it’s weird some companies considering it a premium feature.

Triphibian3• 2 years ago

My issue with offline streaming apps (I prefer Apple) was the app tries to load the front page and stalls out failing to load the thumbnails. So even with downloaded content the app takes a dump with bad service. Like the other user mentioned -- its an afterthought.

Simulacra• 2 years ago

I bought my first iPod in 2003 and I have not used a car CD player since, or the car radio for that matter.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

the lore still has it that any tape left in a glove compartment long enough eventually decomposes into Queen's Greatest Hits.

CD's are different. I've only ever had one CD in the car player for over a decade, and recently switched it out a few years ago for another one. the first was gould's goldberg variations, but what replaced it was alan mearns' bach album Sei Solo Works, which are the most interesting arrangements I've heard.

I'm probably a bit odd where I think most music is just opportunity cost against time spent listening to bach, but toward weird car music, there is something separate about it, even in the bachmobile.

mp05• 2 years ago

eventually decomposes into Queen's Greatest Hits.

Can confirm.

xarope• 2 years ago

you both have access to my car's CD player contents? Gosh...

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

Decomposes? That’s a weird way of writing “achieves perfection.”

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

I’ll have to check out Sei Solo Works! Bach fan here as well.

novoreorx2• 2 years ago

Imagine a "phone player" where you insert your phone into a slot, just like you would with a CD in a CD player. It then plays local music as well as streaming services from the phone.

cyberpunk• 2 years ago

… so CarPlay?

novoreorx2• 2 years ago

Yeah but it not only works for iPhone

vel0city3• 2 years ago

Imagine having that, but you don't even need to insert it into a slot.

Personally I don't have to imagine, that's how my cars are.

globalise83• 2 years ago

Honestly I had to check that this article wasn't from 2014. Most UK and European car manufacturers haven't had CD players for at least a decade, maybe 15 years. The only reason Subaru had them is because CDs are still a thing in Japan. https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/04/25/why-do-the-japanes...

HnUser12• 2 years ago

My 2022 crosstrek has CD player. I didn’t notice its existence for a long time.

snickerbockers• 2 years ago

Lack of CD player in newer cars is the main thing holding me back from replacing my '14 prius.

I feel safe with my CD collection. Services may rise and fall but I will always have a binder full of old CDs, and contrary to popular belief discrot isn't a significant problem as long as they're kept in a dark place. I'm actually young enough to have grown up with MP3 players, but it used to be that the only way (other than piracy) to have a DRM-free copy of your music was to rip it from CD. If you bought it from one of the big online music stores, your $0.99 purchase would forever be locked in to their MP3 player's proprietary DRM scheme.

I also used to use Amazon's MP3 cloud service, wherein you would upload your own music into "the cloud" and it would forever be in your amazon account. Then one day I realized that "forever" only lasts for a few years because they had sent me one e-mail that got caught in my spam filter warning me of "the cloud"'s imminent demise and that I need to download all my MP3's within a month before they're gone forever. Luckily they aren't actually gone forever, because most of them were on my old iPod or were ripped from CDs that I still have but it still soured my opinions against relying on anything I can't control.

Anyways, I still don't trust spotify or other streaming services because I know from experience that silicon valley's definition of "forever" is a lot shorter than the operational lifespan of my CDs.

Kirby642• 2 years ago

Why not rip them to a flash drive or your phone and play them however you want? Every infotainment unit has Bluetooth, and some support playing audio via USB.

thaumasiotes3• 2 years ago

I also used to use Amazon's MP3 cloud service, wherein you would upload your own music into "the cloud" and it would forever be in your amazon account. Then one day I realized that "forever" only lasts for a few years because they had sent me one e-mail that got caught in my spam filter warning me of "the cloud"'s imminent demise and that I need to download all my MP3's within a month before they're gone forever. Luckily they aren't actually gone forever, because most of them were on my old iPod or were ripped from CDs that I still have but it still soured my opinions against relying on anything I can't control.

Funny story. I got that email too.

But when I visit my Amazon music library, all of those old uploads are still there. They were never deleted.

Odds are the music you uploaded to Amazon is still there too.

crazygringo2• 2 years ago

contrary to popular belief discrot isn't a significant problem as long as they're kept in a dark place

And where humidity is low. And where it doesn't get hot.

Disc rot is absolutely a thing if you live somewhere hot and humid.

ncr100• 2 years ago

Have a stereo store (or do it yourself) add one?

Or a USB drive: https://www.autopartstoys.com/products/apt-2018-2021-toyota-...

inasio• 2 years ago

My car doesn't have a CD player any more, but I still have a Minidisc player in the glove compartment with a maybe 20 discs that provide a guaranteed nostalgia trip (each disc has 20-50 songs with a very specific set of eigenvalues from back in the day). Also helps that the Minidisc player runs off a single AA, Sony built good stuff, I found it in storage after easily 10-15 years of its last use and it still played music off that one AA

notinmykernel• 2 years ago

I love my CD car player.

aceazzameen• 2 years ago

My car still has a CD player. Unfortunately I have a phone holder attached to the disc slot so I never use it anymore.

pram• 2 years ago

I had Radiohead's OK Computer in my cars CD player for like 10 years, it would start before the MP3 player adapter would load. So I've heard the opening to Airbag like hundreds+ of times probably lol

ellisd• 2 years ago

OK Computer feels like pure bliss compared to my nightmare of iOS autoplaying the only album on my phone: U2's Songs of Innocence. I've never intentionally listened to it, nor do I plan start!

Despite the poor press surrounding the release, an independent study of select iOS users by Kantar Group found that in January 2015, 23 percent of music listeners played at least one song by U2, more than any other artist for that month. The study also found that of those participants who listened to U2's music, 95 percent of them accessed at least one track from Songs of Innocence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_(U2_album)#...

at_a_remove• 2 years ago

I am preparing to get into the digital thing, but I just ... love a car CD player. Used to have a multi-disc that seated twelve in a cartridge, so I would have a dozen-disc mix for one kind of mood, another if a particular friend was in the car, and so on.

I would have transitioned early, but I found most headunits to be queerly useless when it comes to playlists. They just don't seem to do them, and I've regressed down to a playlist with a single track with a one-word title. (I did manage to get playlists working on a Roku, at least.) Playlists are a natural descendant of the album order, so you would think it would be a priority.

I know that .m3u and .m3u8 are in that realm where many dialects exist to support, but I just think that headunits could catch up in this area.

grujicd2• 2 years ago

IMO, CD with mp3 is the sweetspot for car use. Regular CD is too short and it's awkward and/or dangerous to choose and change the next disc while driving. Some flash based storage with ton of music on the other hand gives too much choice and it's hard to pick next album while driving. Spotify can be ok but if algorithm takes you to a strange place it's also not easy to switch something else with hands on the wheel. And there's a question of cell coverage, or roaming costs if you drive across countries. I know you can download on Spotify, I'm using it as an example of "play anything" streaming vs preloaded collection.

CD with mp3 gives something like 10 hours of music which is perfect for longer trips. You spend one time to make few compilations, you pick a disc depending on a mood and you're covered for the whole trip, you don't think about poor reception.

Sure, you can also make playlists with Spotify/flash, but you're not "forced" by medium so we mostly don't do it. And if there's a passenger willing to be a dj then it's a different thing.

reginald782• 2 years ago

I use this feature for audio books. With regular audio CDs there is way to much swapping but MP3 CDs it isn't worth mentioning really since it is ~10 times less frequent.

vel0city3• 2 years ago

Android Auto / Carplay seem like the sweetspot for car use to me. When I want to play something else, I press a button on the steering wheel, say "Play playlist whatever" or "Play album foo by bar.", and it plays it. Or when I'm stopped at a stop light, I've got a big display to navigate to what I'm looking for.

If you're getting 10 hours of playback on 700MB that music must be pretty heavily compressed. 128kbps AAC I guess would get you there, 256kbps would be 1125MB. 192kbps MP3 is a bit over 800MB, so you're not getting even that quality on an MP3 CD.

grujicd2• 2 years ago

There's variable bit rate mp3, so it varies depending on source material. That said, 10 hours is a rule of thumb. You put albums until CD is full. And car on a highway is not an environment differences between bitrates really matter.

Also, "play album by foo" voice command doesn't really work when you have non-english names. Or even english based names when you're not a native speaker with good pronunciation.

causality0• 2 years ago

I'm going to miss CD players in cars mainly for the fact that they are a convenient place to securely mount smartphone holders that's in a prominent position without blocking anything important.

mauvehaus2• 2 years ago

If your car uses a DIN mount for the radio, it's generally easy to find a compatible aftermarket head unit. You'll likely have to get a wiring harness adapter, and doing a tidy job mating the two halves of that requires a bit of extremely basic soldering and the foresight to purchase some shrink tubing.

The only downside to going this route is that most aftermarket head units look like they were designed by 17 year old young men to impress their peers.

AIUI, If you don't have a DIN mount, it's usually possible to purchase an adapter to get the physical interface sorted. Aesthetically, it may be a crapshoot. The only cars I've done this on (because of a failing cd player) have had a DIN mount.

nradov2• 2 years ago

Very few newer vehicles have DIN mounts anymore. The proprietary infotainment systems are deeply integrated into the vehicle and can't be replaced, at least not without losing a lot of functionality.

mauvehaus2• 2 years ago

Ugh. Right. Fair point. My car is from 2010. I dread the day I have to do any serious work on my wife's 2018. When you turn the headlights off, there's a perceptible delay while the computer thinks about it before actually turning them off.

binary132• 2 years ago

Am I just imagining it or does everyone hate the companies and products we’re getting these days? Who actually wants a $35,000 “entry level” car with a $20/mo streaming subscription model and a phone that spies on you? Am I losing my mind?

sickofparadox2• 2 years ago

And yet, the vast majority will just watch things get worse and worse and never question why, beyond "the president did x".

ghssds• 2 years ago

"the president did x".

Which one?

snakeyjake• 2 years ago

An entry-level car doesn't cost $35k it costs ~$20k.

A base model Mitsubishi Mirage can be had for $18,480.

https://www.southsuburbanmitsubishi.com/api/legacy/pse/windo...

Just yesterday Doug DeMuro reviewed, positively, a brand new Nissan Kicks that has models starting at $23k: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z88vakJoPXw&t=67s

Most people would agree that the classic VW Beetle was an "entry-level" small car like the Mirage.

If you wind back the clock 50 years a 1974 VW type 111 (Beetle) was $2,746. https://www.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/376521.jpg

That's $17-18k today, depending on which inflation calculator you use and the Beetle came with no power brakes, air conditioning, radio, backup camera, or airbags. Plus the Mirage's engine is more fuel efficient and reliable (come at me I had a 1973 Beetle).

nerdponx• 2 years ago

It's easy to boil the frog if the frog doesn't have anywhere to jump away to.

supportengineer• 2 years ago

The current crop of consumers, as a group, doesn't know any better. They don't know any other way. They may have never seen a car with a carburetor, or one with manual windows, or an AM radio.

mmmlinux2• 2 years ago

The more fascinating thing is no one makes a good Bluetooth interface CD player. Seems like it should be trivial to pair a portable CD player to your car infotainment. if you look on amazon because these do exist, they all say they don't work with cars and only work with headphones for some awful reason.

crazygringo2• 2 years ago

The only real case for what is soon to be lost, I think, is that of a limited selection of music in the car forcing you to spend time with it, forging deep and often weird attachments – sometimes to entirely unexpected records – in the process.

This just sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me.

I'll take Spotify any day please, where I can explore new genres and discover new artists spanning decades, and actually expand my mind and tastes.

Back when I listened to the same CD's over and over in my car, it was stultifying. My musical taste was stagnant. I was musically trapped.

Who would argue in favor of being trapped, over freedom and exploration? When it comes to music, whose entire history is about the freedom to explore and create new things?

foxyv• 2 years ago

Jokes on you, I'm autistic and will listen to the same song/album on repeat for months!

cardiffspaceman• 2 years ago

I have a tape of an Sigue Sigue Sputnik song that I played on repeat all 400 miles from my house to my brother’s house. Then I went home doing the same. I say that I have a childlike love of repetition. I have done similar things with CDs.

tpoacher• 2 years ago

Meanwhile my mom's car still has a cassette tape. She's listening to tapes she recorded back in the 90s.

Farewell to the car CD player, source of weirdly deep musical fandoms

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