My car still has one of these, and I just happened to use it yesterday when the battery on my Bluetooth adapter died. Yes, my car is old. Given the state of new cars today, I think I’m gonna keep it as long as I can.
My car is old enough to have a tape deck. Also old enough that I can fix pretty much anything that goes wrong, and unless I crash it, I fully intend to own it until I die. New cars are for chumps.
Same boat with you. I like tinkering and fixing my own stuff. I love a free weekend where I can spend some time replacing something on the car. Being locked out of my own car and forced to pay someone to do it for me seems ludicrous.
I found that the most impractical thing with these was that the user interface for selecting songs was typically “you have 200 songs and I’m gonna play them in sequence, if you want a particular song you must skip ahead until you hear it”. It worked for a 12-track audio CD, but felt like an underdeveloped toy feature when used with MP3:s.
That all depended on the player though. I had a car stereo that played MP3 CDs that was able to see folder and navigate folder structure on the CDs. It was great, if your music was already organized in folders, by album for example.
My desktop stereo system, however, only saw the individual .mp3 files and did like you described. It was much more of a pain, but I usually just played from a computer in winamp (rip).
I didn’t think this was that obscure. I made heaps of MP3 CDs full of video game music for my long drives to/from college. It was all both intuitive and easy for me - like the video shows you just copy the files on the disc and burn it.
What was really nice about these (and wasn’t mentioned by Alec) is that the smaller song size meant most or all of a song could be stored in the anti skip buffer.
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