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Hardbopjazz

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2 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

Oh no doubt all of that's true. It works well for me because I plan ahead with things I want to hear soon and I'm cool with what I put on.

Have you had any issues playing music off of a USB stick? I seem to have a few problems with every car I've ever had with a USB port. Failing to recognize the stick, stopping mid-song, skipping, failing to load the entire contents of the stick, etc. I've figured out fixes for some of these problems with each car but even with my newest one, I still get glitches.

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10 minutes ago, bresna said:

... Or thinking to yourself, "Hey, I haven't heard Paul Gonsalves' "Gettin Together" in a while", only to realize that it ain't on the stick that's in the car and then you'll have to go get it, bring it into the house, copy the folder over and bring it back out to the car where you'll have to browse for it (if it loads right this time). :)

Or, you could easily listen to that album in your car with Spotify (or another streaming service). No cd or usb drive to remember, forget, lose or damage. My new CX-5 has no cd player, and I'm fine with that. If you insist on playing cds in the car, you could get a mobile player with bluetooth capability. Buying a new car based on whether it has outdated technology strikes me as rather short-sighted.

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My concern with using CD:s in a car is that they risk being scuffed. Including the whole chain, I find it as easy (or easier) to copy 50 albums worth of MP3:s onto an USB stick and bringing it to the car as pulling 50 individual CD:s and putting them in a CD wallet. However, more often I just plug the phone into the AUX input to stream (from Spotify or my cloud storage of my own rips and recordings). 

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I have XM radio in my car now because I find it much more convenient than bringing my USB sticks back & forth to the house to keep swapping the music around. I tried using huge memory sticks, but I found that the more memory the stick had, the more likely it was that it would have loading issues.

Funny thing is, with XM radio & my 1 hour drive (each way), I find myself listening more to channel 95 (Comedy Central Radio) than channel 67 (Real Jazz). :) 

Edited by bresna
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45 minutes ago, sonnymax said:

Or, you could easily listen to that album in your car with Spotify (or another streaming service). No cd or usb drive to remember, forget, lose or damage. My new CX-5 has no cd player, and I'm fine with that. If you insist on playing cds in the car, you could get a mobile player with bluetooth capability. Buying a new car based on whether it has outdated technology strikes me as rather short-sighted.

To you but not to others. 

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59 minutes ago, bresna said:

Have you had any issues playing music off of a USB stick? I seem to have a few problems with every car I've ever had with a USB port. Failing to recognize the stick, stopping mid-song, skipping, failing to load the entire contents of the stick, etc. I've figured out fixes for some of these problems with each car but even with my newest one, I still get glitches.

No never an issue playing what's on the thumb. I've not tried super large ones as again, don't need maximum options, just things I want to hear in an uninterrupted environment.  Off topic but I mentioned how little driving I do now with no commute and its really effected my ability to listen as much as I did when I had a 30-45 minute commute ten times a week.  There's nothing to stop me from listening while I work from home, except that every phone call makes me stop what's playing, and even if I get to play without interruptions, work takes enough mental energy that I don't feel like I am listening to what was playing. Very frustrating.

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56 minutes ago, sonnymax said:

Or, you could easily listen to that album in your car with Spotify (or another streaming service). No cd or usb drive to remember, forget, lose or damage. My new CX-5 has no cd player, and I'm fine with that. If you insist on playing cds in the car, you could get a mobile player with bluetooth capability. Buying a new car based on whether it has outdated technology strikes me as rather short-sighted.

Doesn't Spotify charge a monthly fee and use cell phone data? I don't have unlimited phone data and I already pay $5/month for XM, so that might not be the most cost-effective way to go for me.

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On 9/12/2019 at 8:34 AM, Larry Kart said:

Half Price used to give you a lot more for CDs, but they quietly changed things. Now it's, as you say, hardly worth going there to sell stuff. In fact several longtime employees to whom I've sold things in the past now have the decency to look very sheepish when they offer you a  total of a dollar or so for, say, ten  or  fifteen clean, eminently sale-able CDs. 

I don't get to the Half Price in Skokie very often, but I have fairly recently, and it seemed to me that prices on used CDs the store was selling were not appreciably lower than before. 

It makes sense that demand for CDs is down, what with streaming, digital downloads, and the resurgence of vinyl. But then you'd think the sales price on used CDs ought to be something more like a dollar. And it isn't.

Edited by riddlemay
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1 hour ago, Aggie87 said:

That is getting more difficult in many cars, as the audio is integrated into the GPS and other controls,  with a larger touch screen. 

It's not usually a stand alone radio head unit like decades ago.

Remember putting in an Amstrad radio/cassette player to the old Ford back in the day. It even had FM stereo. The height of sophistication back then (along with the vinyl roof !)

I transferred my Pathe Marconi Blue Notes onto cassette for use in that contraption.

Edited by sidewinder
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53 minutes ago, bresna said:

Doesn't Spotify charge a monthly fee and use cell phone data? I don't have unlimited phone data and I already pay $5/month for XM, so that might not be the most cost-effective way to go for me.

I get it free, but there's ads. If you're old enough (and I think you are), you remember listening to the radio and hearing ads. Same thing, only the ads on Spotify are a LOT less intrusive, imo.

As far as data, you'd have to look at your plan. I get Pandora free of any data charge with my T-Mobile. Keep in mind though, that if you use Wi-Fi, that's not going to count against your data usage.

Besides, most plans give you an option for unlimited data. Not always as "unlimited" as the word implies, but still.

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16 minutes ago, David Ayers said:

You can just load music over WiFi at home and then listen to it without data usage in the car. 

 

Same as with downloads. 

Yeah, but it's always such a pain loading CD's into iTunes every time I want to change the music on my phone. Granted, my iPhone is an ancient iPhone 5 (with 16gb, which makes it suck even more).

But then having to delete albums out of iTunes on my laptop, and ripping the new ones in order to sync everything, is all such a pain.

Granted my phone only holds about 30 CD's, but still, ripping 30 CD's every time I want to switch out all the music on my phone is a good entire night's worth of time, couple hours at least.

SO much easier to grab 36 CD's and put them in one of those multi-folder things, which only takes about 15 minutes to switch out all 36 discs (incl. liner notes).

Granted, we don't even own a car any more (haven't for almost 9 years), and now that rentals don't even have CD players, I never get to take CD's on trips, unless it's to St. Louis, cuz my Dad's car has a CD player still.

Point being, when you have 4,000 CD's, and potentially 1,000 are things that might be nice to listen in the car, a car CD player was and still would be a hugely helpful thing to still have (if I even had a car, mind you).

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Times have definitely changed.  I can't make mix "tape" discs for friends anymore, because none of them have anything to play them on (including laptops).  As for selling CDs, I figure I've bought them only for my pleasure, so never went into it thinking about resale value.  Not sure what the "value" to a particular disc is anyway, if a listener can hear it on a streaming service.  We actually have it better than film buffs - I can stream my music all over my house from iTunes on my computer, but studios don't even allow DVDs to be ripped to a home server.  (Studios definitely need to make that accommodation, if they want to stanch the loss of DVD sales.)  

I have an old iPod in my car, connected via USB.  I load 20 GB of music on it, random, and love it; every couple of months, I change the music mix.  My Subaru has a CD player, but I never use it.  It also has SiriusXM; I find myself mostly listening to Little Steven's Underground Garage and Fox News.

If you've concluded your CDs have little-to-no resale value, why not give them away here?  Not to some public library where people won't appreciate them, but offer them as "Pay It Forward" here, or trade them for other CDs.  Might be a lot more satisfying to know they'll have a good new home.

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10 minutes ago, mjzee said:

I have an old iPod in my car, connected via USB.  I load 20 GB of music on it, random, and love it; every couple of months, I change the music mix.

Even my iPod mini managed music better than my iPhone 5 (16GB) ever has, even before I routinely have 95% of the memory used up, which means it runs like a dog half the time, and barely has room for a dozen CD's now.

I've tried backing it up (meaning the whole phone) to/though iTunes (to my laptop), which was supposed to somehow trigger a reloading of everything using memory more efficiently, but I tried that 3-4 times, and the memory usage was always the same.

In any case, my wife's iPhone 5 (same vintage, also 16GB) is probably short for this world, so we're both going to probably update later this year.  And this will be the LAST time I ever get the minimum memory option available, I can tell you that.  Especially since I seem to keep these phones for a good 6 years (or probably 3x as long as most people typically do, I gather).

But if I still owned a car, and wanted to play music on it a lot from my collection -- I seem to remember being able to load about 50 CD's worth of stuff on my old iPod mini, which actually really performed much better.

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3 hours ago, riddlemay said:

I don't get to the Half Price in Skokie very often, but I have fairly recently, and it seemed to me that prices on used CDs the store was selling were not appreciably lower than before. 

It makes sense that demand for CDs is down, what with streaming, digital downloads, and the resurgence of vinyl. But then you'd think the sales price on used CDs ought to be something more like a dollar. And it isn't.

I don't get to Skokie as often as I get to the one in Bannockburn, I think it is. That store gives you almost nada; Skokie is better, but I think that my somewhat better experiences in Skokie may be because one of the buyers there knows me from the now closed Highland Park store as a writer on jazz and seems inclined to give me a break, perhaps for that reason. He smiles, and says "hello, Larry."

I also find that the stock at the Bannockburn store is almost static. About the only reason I go there anymore is that it's close to the Costco store where I shop for all sorts of things fairly often.

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It is $10 a month for Spotify Premium, which gives you many hundreds of thousands of albums without any ads. I have never seen anything deleted off of Spotify Premium. The question, "what happens if the music disappears off of Spotify?" Is not a real concern at this point. It just does not happen.

By turning on the Bluetooth setting on your smartphone while in your car, which takes about three seconds and is so easy to do that even a tech dunce like me can do it, Spotify Premium starts playing in the car. For $10 a month, you then have a larger music collection available in your car than any collection owned by any of us.

No data charges are incurred in this process.

We may not like it, but a huge percentage of the population now wants to listen to music that way. They do not want to mess with CD cases or even sticks for a USB port in their car.

I have found that younger people are mystified by anyone who does play music over physical media. To them it is just like someone refusing to drive a car today, and insisting on a horse and buggy on the highway. Sure, you can find a few older people in Amish communities who still do it.

____________________________________________________________________________

When I got divorced, most of the contents of our house were sold in an estate sale in 2015. I came back to the house the day after the estate sale. A salvage company was picking up what had not been sold.

The owner of the salvage company told me that his business was picking up whatever was not sold at estate sales and taking the items to large swap meets and swap markets, where he sold everything for $1.00 each. He told me to take anything I wanted, for free, that was still in the house.

I was surprised that most of the books which had been purchased by my ex-wife were still there. The salvage company owner told me, "oh, I get so many books from every estate sale. No one wants to buy books at estate sales any more."

Edited by Hot Ptah
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1 hour ago, Hot Ptah said:

It is $10 a month for Spotify Premium, which gives you many hundreds of thousands of albums without any ads. I have never seen anything deleted off of Spotify Premium. The question, "what happens if the music disappears off of Spotify?" Is not a real concern at this point. It just does not happen.

By turning on the Bluetooth setting on your smartphone while in your car, which takes about three seconds and is so easy to do that even a tech dunce like me can do it, Spotify Premium starts playing in the car. For $10 a month, you then have a larger music collection available in your car than any collection owned by any of us.

No data charges are incurred in this process.

Of course there is data being used. That's how the music is getting to your phone. This article: https://www.whistleout.ca/CellPhones/Guides/How-Much-Data-Does-Spotify-Use-Canada says that 1 hour of Spotify uses about 40 MB of data.

2 hours ago, Rooster_Ties said:

Even my iPod mini managed music better than my iPhone 5 (16GB) ever has, even before I routinely have 95% of the memory used up, which means it runs like a dog half the time, and barely has room for a dozen CD's now.

I've tried backing it up (meaning the whole phone) to/though iTunes (to my laptop), which was supposed to somehow trigger a reloading of everything using memory more efficiently, but I tried that 3-4 times, and the memory usage was always the same.

In any case, my wife's iPhone 5 (same vintage, also 16GB) is probably short for this world, so we're both going to probably update later this year.  And this will be the LAST time I ever get the minimum memory option available, I can tell you that.  Especially since I seem to keep these phones for a good 6 years (or probably 3x as long as most people typically do, I gather).

But if I still owned a car, and wanted to play music on it a lot from my collection -- I seem to remember being able to load about 50 CD's worth of stuff on my old iPod mini, which actually really performed much better.

Update to a Samsung Galaxy. Unlike an iPhone, it has expandable memory via Micro SD. I put a 256 GB micro SD card in mine. I can fit a ton of music on that.

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