Asking for help - Please! How to play CD's in car with no CD player!

the simplest most glarring solution is....

6 hours of music if compressed on average ought to end up being less than 100 songs. at roughly 5MB per, that's only half a gig of music more or less.

I had a 16GB phone and know the issue very well. you should be able to carry 2GB or maybe more on your phones, since they are not cluttered up with games or other non essentials.

that comes to several hundred files.
 
you said you bought them all from Amazon.

meaning you have an account. meaning you also have a history with Amazon. even if you don't have the compiled CDs Amazon ought to be able to allow you to redownload them.

if so, just load them onto your phones instead of the laptop.

alternatively....
I would find out what my car can if at all, do with that USB jack, or some other hidden jack there may well be in there somewhere.

does the car have a radio in it at all? there might be a way to tap into that via RCA/Headphone jack, or simply via BT from a small portable media player.

a friend's new Chevy came with Cirrus or XM radio.... punching its buttons he found that its screen doubled as his car's information and maintenence center.

I think its time to read the owner manual and see what options the car does or does not offer. and go from there.

OK, Got out the manual and here is what I can discern.....

Supported USB music specifications:
MPEG-1/2 layer3, OGG (Vorbis), FLAC, WAV, WMA (std /pro)
Then it goes on about bit rates and sampling frequency for quite some time....I'm not going to post all of that stuff.......

Only USB devices formatted to FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 are recognized.
Only music files with compression rates btw 8Kbps~320Kbps can be played.

iPod mini, and shuffle are not supported.
IPod Nano is supported 
iPod Touch is supported except for iOS1.1.
iPad, iPad Mini - supported but normal operation not guaranteed.
iPod Classic - not supported

Radio does have a USB port and AUX (tiny RCA type jack)
Radio does have Bluetooth Audio.  May or may not be supported depending on music player being used.  Streaming may or may not be supported.

May not support when using formats such as HDD Type, CF, or SD memory.

(time for a small vent from a 60's something year old.....AM was simple, FM was simple, Vinyl was simple, 8 track was simple, cassette was simple, CD's were simple.  What the heck happened????)

First Attempt:  I'm going to purchase a thumb drive at Walmart per some of the recommendations already made.  I'll try to ask Mr. Amazon Prime if they have a record of my music over the years.  It may be easier (but not time saving) to copy all the music CD's to my computer then copy paste into the thumb drive?? (Asking a question here.)

My fear is because so many requirements must be met, and your not even sure if your supported, you may not know if you did something wrong or you're just not being supported.......

Second Attempt : will be to load the music into my smartphone, as recommended above.

Thanks for now...

Get one of the low profile USB drives. They come in multiple storage sizes (not only 256GB) and they are much more convenient in the car.

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Low-Profile-Drive-SDCZ33-016G-B35/dp/B005FYNSZA

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1384375-REG/sandisk_sdcz430_256g_a46_ultra_fit_usb_3_1.html/?...

Yes, get all the music from CDs to computer and just transfer it to that USB drive.

that 'mini' jack on the radio obviously is for inputting info.

running a stereo headphone cable from the phone to the radio and selecting aUX should do the trick. use the phopne to select and play files.

you should be golden now either way... adding the content to your phones, or onto the USB drive. those are unquestionably the cheapest ways to go.

one caveat is to poke the USB drive into the laptop to see its formating. often the cheaper ones still use FAT, but I've bought some lately that were all NTFS, or windows only pretty much. Apple can read from NTFS but not write to it. both OS can read/write to FAT.

regardless the formating, it can be easily changed by any personal confuser with the confuser's disk utility.. often the formating is liisted on the packaging.

as to bit rates I read that as saying 'from' yada yada to 320 which is max for compressed files.

odd that it does not support AAC, or ALAC, or AIF all Apple types.

no worries. stick with MP3 or Windows WMA. you should be golden.

as for those "... not guaranteed to work with...." these are just disclaimers nearly everyone uses to avoid responsibility yet imply they should all do just fine.

of the things likely not fully supported might be ID tags.

the names of the tracks may not populate fully or correctly.

in fact, things like 'folder' or too many folders may not be supported.

its easy enough to find out. dump some on the USB drive and plug it in!

you'll also find out how to navigate them. hopefully from the steering wheel.

several portable media players are listed and I suspect that IF they are running recent or latest IOS or Droid OS again, you should be golden.

as for what happened?

the sun kept coming up and going down.

somewhere on a few of those instances, people came up with what they thought were good ideas, which as it turned out, were good ideas.

the problem is very little of it ever crossed our radar close enough to get our  attention.

catching up is not that hard.

Keeping up is.

"as for what happened?

the sun kept coming up and going down.

somewhere on a few of those instances, people came up with what they thought were good ideas, which as it turned out, were good ideas.

the problem is very little of it ever crossed our radar close enough to get our  attention.

catching up is not that hard.

Keeping up is."

Ha, Ha, Ha,...excellent.  You've got a great sense of wit & humor.