Don't Forget for Carrying All Your Tunes

• Understanding the impact of the iPod
• Integrating an iPod into a car audio system
• Using other MP3 players
• Accessing music on a USB drive
• Discovering in-dash hard drives

Bringing lots of tunes on the road with a CD changer and lots of bulky discs is now so twentieth century. In the late 1990s, I installed a 100- disc CD changer in the trunk of one of my cars for a cross-country trip. At the time, it was the only way to bring a ton of tunes along. But I knew something was amiss when it took an hour or so just to load up the thing. I’ve since taken the mega-changer out, and now 1 can carry 10 times as many tunes on my iPod, which is one-tenth of the size.

MP3 players such as the iPod have irreversibly changed the way people carry music into the car. The advent of the MP3 has especially been a boon to mobile-music lovers because it’s now easy to take thousands of digital tunes on the road. Although disc-based head units still dominate, most now offer some way to let users have access to their large libraries of digital music files.

Today more than ever, the way you carry your music files on the road — be it with an MP3 player like the iPod, burned onto a disc, loaded on a USB drive or SD card, or even on a hard-disk drive — will determine what sort of car audio head unit or system you choose. You can even have several different portals for access to your tunes within a single car audio system. These days, the digital-music options are only limited by your imagination and budget.

In this chapter, I explore ways in which you can bring your entire music collection on the road ... without installing a dozen 100-disc CD changers in your ride. Because Apple’s iPod dominates the MP3 player market, most of the ways to integrate an MP3 player into a car stereo are iPod-specific.

But we’ll also look at other MP3-friendly portals, such as USB drives and hard-disc drives.