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by pkdpic 921 days ago
Glad to see this pop up, its been a weirdly big struggle for me as a new-ish parent.

For a while my ancient CD collection and healthy ecosystem of local used vinyl / CD stores had us in a nice routine in conjunction with youtube-dl and my posse of old Sony voice memo usb mp3 players.

Then youtube-dl wasn't a thing anymore (maybe it is again?)...

Then we had to get a new car (a Tacoma)...

No CD player, no aux cable.

I had really bad early experiences with apple music and Spotify not having stuff I wanted. Unclear artist support reputations also (Im no expert there). But it all had heavy Enshittification vibes early on IMHO.

Anyway somehow in my exhausted dad mental state I've concluded that buying albums on iTunes like a maniac is at least worth a try before augmenting my car to have an aux cable and / or peripheral CD player. I held off buying albums on iTunes literally until 2 months ago. Very strange but maybe working.

Anyway curious what other folks are doing as far as listening to music. This article was spot on but I needed a Solutions section...

6 comments

Youtube-dl still functions quite well. You can even grab the CLI here: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

And occasionally you can find one of their TLDs just by doing a search on DDG or Brave.

> Then youtube-dl wasn't a thing anymore (maybe it is again?)...

yt-dlp is definitely a thing: <https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp>

Try an fm transmitter?

Plug it into a 12v socket (cigarette lighter socket) and plug the audio cable into the headphones jack. Tune the radio to the set frequency. Bob's your uncle.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=fm+transmitter+for+car&crid=XYUJ3...

A Bluetooth transmitter would have much better quality and not have to move around the spectrum manually. FM transmitters are a simple technology but in practice are worse than a classic compact cassette adapter.
How expensive is it to swap out the media player in your car for something with an aux port? Alternatively, does it not have a USB port?
youtube-dl is still a thing, last commit was one week ago.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/commits/master

Nobody else has said so, but most cars have USB ports you can plug a flash drive (or external SSD, in my case) in to for music.