Input for portable CD player?

[Chuck_Ruck]

I drive an older Ford with an archaic music box, a CD player. Back 30 years or better, my Dad was a member of the Columbia Music Club. After he passed, I inherited his entire collection. Many of the songs and artists were lesser known, and their stuff never made the digital jump. Does anyone with a newer Ford know how I would be able to still utilize them? Is there an aux cord i will be bale to hook a discman to? I really want to play some of my Dad's old road trip albums.

Sponsored

 

[Apples]

Why not rip them to MP3? Then you can throw them on a USB drive, your phone, YouTube Music etc.

 

[jdogi]

Exactly as stated, I'll just add one thing. I've yet to see a head unit that deals well with thousands upon thousands of files on USB storage. They just don't seem to design them for that use case. So I'd recommend keeping it to less than a couple hundred albums on the drive. And it generally doesn't matter how fast the drive is... it's that the software of the head units isn't up to the task of a simple thing like consuming such a large list. I gave up trying so it's possible things have evolved, but doubtful.

 

[wilmerfjohnson]

HI - My beloved 2018 Fusion SE, with Sync 3 -easily handles a USB thumb drive with over 1000 mp3 files. Now, there is no search and the songs are played in alphanumerical order based on file name. But - it works.

 

[Jhuff]

I don't know enough to answer your primary question, but a quick search showed me a ranger forum where the topic was the absence of aux inputs.

As for the question you didn't ask, your best bet would be to rip the cds into digital files... cd drives have slowly been disappearing from vehicles and computers, and that trend won't reverse. Hell, my own computer doesn't have a cd drive, so I had to buy an external drive just to rip blue-rays.

The ripping process is a little bit of a learning curve, is tedious/repetitive, and it may require a small investment (possible external drive). But, whatever computer you own, the music player (iTunes etc) should have the functionality to rip your collection into digital. Just don't skimp on bit rate... memory is cheap these days, and these digital files will be your "master copies" unless you want to do the process all over again someday... so I suggest ripping the files with all the quality settings maxed. I used to play the game of how small I could make the music files, without losing too much audio quality, but all of those files have since been trashed, due to poor quality, and I replaced them with downloads from itunes.

Edit: depending on how old your computer is/how much memory it came with, you might want an external hard drive as well for storing the library, or at least as a backup if you don't want to lose your collection to a computer crash.

 

[XirallicBolts]

I would absolutely begin doing a digital backup now. CDs don't last forever and eventually begin to decay.

HI - My beloved 2018 Fusion SE, with Sync 3 -easily handles a USB thumb drive with over 1000 mp3 files. Now, there is no search and the songs are played in alphanumerical order based on file name. But - it works.

Look up Tag & Rename -- it has many mass-tagging options, including 'tag based on filename'.

 

[PrincipalD]

I agree with the digital backup. However, in my 2001 Explorer I have a FM transmitter I can hook up to and it transmits it to a radio station. That’s a cheap and easy solution until you get them digital.

 

[Reidt131]

Adding to what others have said, once you rip the music you can add songs to Spotify that don't exist in their database. Look up "Spotify Local Song Storage".

That would allow you to shuffle, select particular albums, etc rather than just an ordered list.

 

[adcam]

How about bluetooth CD player?

 

[brkdncr]

I ripped all of my cds to a Synology. It has an app “ds audio” that works in CarPlay that lets me stream my music from the Synology to my bronco.

you can also use you iTunes app on your PC to sync songs to your iPhone. It’s not all of them but you can set it up to rotate songs automatically or just do it manually.

 

[KyTruckPlant]

I drive an older Ford with an archaic music box, a CD player. Back 30 years or better, my Dad was a member of the Columbia Music Club. After he passed, I inherited his entire collection. Many of the songs and artists were lesser known, and their stuff never made the digital jump. Does anyone with a newer Ford know how I would be able to still utilize them? Is there an aux cord i will be bale to hook a discman to? I really want to play some of my Dad's old road trip albums.

Hop over to Amazon and pick up a Bluetooth Transmitter to plug into the Discman. Then connect to the Bronco.

Keep it simple.

 

[Jawaburger]

Exactly as stated, I'll just add one thing. I've yet to see a head unit that deals well with thousands upon thousands of files on USB storage. They just don't seem to design them for that use case. So I'd recommend keeping it to less than a couple hundred albums on the drive. And it generally doesn't matter how fast the drive is... it's that the software of the head units isn't up to the task of a simple thing like consuming such a large list. I gave up trying so it's possible things have evolved, but doubtful.

I don't think that is an issue with the new Broncos, I have 90+ GBs of music on a flash drive and the head unit has no trouble pulling the song, album and artist info and organizing them by song, album or artist.

 

[Johnny Mo]

I don't think that is an issue with the new Broncos, I have 90+ GBs of music on a flash drive and the head unit has no trouble pulling the song, album and artist info and organizing them by song, album or artist.

Agreed - I only have 9-10 gb and not having any issues at all either.

Sponsored