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.
Also: CD prices at thrift stores top out at 3 bucks. The local library thrift sells them for a quarter each!
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.
Wired CarPlay is rock solid. Bluetooth has never, and never, will be as foolproof as a wire, or as Wi-Fi for that matter.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
strangely enough, in the same paper: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/30/car-cd...
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.
You can burn a USB stick with selected tracks meant to embody the mood of the journey.
I bought my first iPod in 2003 and I have not used a car CD player since, or the car radio for that matter.
i <33 mi CDs , especially in z car
“… 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.
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.
maybe not categorically, but potentially the best place for that person.