[AdmiralAsshat]

Circa 2001 or so, I got a portable CD player for Christmas that could also play MP3s, which was just about the coolest thing ever at the time. Now instead of the normal 12-13 songs a CD could hold when converted to WAV, I could hold 100-200 songs in mp3 form on a 700mb CD burned as a data disc rather than an audio disc.

This was then supplemented in the car with a cassette tape adapter that included an audio jack. [0] It was pretty sweet, all things considered. Tape decks started to vanish from cars at about that time, and those FM transmitter adapters that would plug into the cigarette lighter and broadcast on a radio frequency were really crap compared to the direct jack. I would argue I didn't get that same level of ease+fidelity of pushing MP3s to my car stereo until I directly installed a Bluetooth stereo into my car 15-ish years later.

[0] example: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...

[dfxm12]

My first car was too new to have a tape player, but too old to have aux/usb/bluetooth input. I had to resort plugging in my creative nomad mp3 player to an FM radio transmitter plugged into my cigarette lighter port. :)

[stuart78]

I used a series of those for iPod for the first few years, but lived in Los Angeles, so there was a ton of interference, both from radio stations and other devices broadcasting on the same frequency. It created some pretty chaotic drives from time to time...

[dfxm12]

Yeah the old school ones (or maybe just the cheap ones me and my friends had) had a only few stations they could transmit. Everyone once in a while we'd be able to tune the radio to one of those stations if we were next to a young person at a red to see what they were listening to, if we thought they had the same device. Maybe we'd kill ours to hear theirs if we heard the static...

[Fnoord]

I remember the Nokia N900 being able to broadcast FM to achieve the same!

[tylerrobinson]

One of the funniest (in hindsight) aspects of those FM broadcasters was how you selected a frequency. The Griffin iTrip didn’t have any buttons, so the way you selected a frequency was by playing a specific track from your iPod corresponding to the frequency you wanted.

That meant you had to first rip the CD containing all those 3-5 second tracks to your computer, sync the iPod, and then you’d be ready to use it.

And even after all that, the quality was still worse than the cassette adapters.

[kedean]

Semi-related, it's wild how much FM transmitters have improved since the early aughts. I drive a vehicle from 2005 without a tape deck or aux jack, so I picked up a cheap one that receives a bluetooth signal (from my phone), then bridges that to the radio over an FM frequency. The audio quality is truly impressive compared to the iTrip's and such of 20 years ago.

[Scoundreller]

Also helps if your FM spectrum isn’t close to “full”.

[paul7986]

Reminds me of one of my first webpages I created that had links to online radio stations by genres circa 2005. I even searched godaddy to see if i could buy pandora.com for a name for it and then reached out to them saying i wanted that name and got a response back; very early for them.

My online radio webpage (button links for different genres aligned left to right to easily click when driving with the microsoft player above the links) worked great through my Microsoft Treo phone which I too connected my Treo phone to stereo via a cassette tape adapter. Used a cassette tape adapter from 2005 to 2016 in different cars until that 2016 car stereo had built in bluetooth.

[interestica]

Around the same time I got a portable CD player that could play CDs, MP3s, and VCDs. Video CDs were pretty rare in North America but it wasn't much of a feat to author them yourself. You'd typically need two discs to hold a full length movie (MPEG1), but it was kind of a perfect size for television episodes (especially when utilizing RW discs).

And playing them on a CRT tv (still the norm) was a huge improvement over broadcast quality. I think that led to a further interest in DVD-authoring and then Web/Media development.

[gxqoz]

VCD is a very undercovered format. Any budding media scholars out there could make a good book out of the format.

It connects to an area I'm growing increasingly interested in, the early history of the Chinese Internet and tech industry. (VCD players sold in enormous numbers there.) See for instance this fascinating piece on the Chinese Flash gaming scene: https://www.chaoyangtrap.house/flashing-for-fun-and-no-profi...

[theamk]

My old car had no aux input, but it had the connection for proprietary CD changer unit. So I've bought a third party adapter which pretended to be a CD changer but provided AUX in instead.