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Comment by trentnix | Hacker News Reader

For the younger crowd: fancy head units (that's what we called the essential aftermarket CD player/receiver in the dash of your vehicle) would show you CD Text with artist, album, and track name. It would melt the brains of your friends when the name of the song that was playing would scroll by on an old-school, single- or multi-line LCD display. It was a massive flex in its day.

Good times...

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My 2006 Toyota had that. What I really wanted was an aux port, or even a cassette deck I could use with an adapter to plug in my iPod. Instead I had to make do with a FM transmitter plugged into the cigarette lighter.

My 2017 Focus ST still has a CD player with CD text, and I actually do listen to music on CD in it, the bluetooth quality is noticeably worse for whatever reason. I got my first iPod in about 2007 in middle school, and I only ever had about 10-20 CDs growing up, but I started getting into CDs about a year ago. It seems like there is a minor resurgence now that vinyl is expensive, since CDs still cost the same as they ever did, and a lot of them are cheaper even without inflation. I picked up a copy of Pretty Hate Machine at a Walmart for $8 the other day.

Amusingly, my 13-year-old Honda does that -- even though it doesn't have CD Text support.

The factory stereo has a recent copy of Gracenote's CDDB built-in.

It also automagically rips and compresses Red Book CDs to to internal storage.

And it is smart enough to play a CD seemingly like regular -- with random track access and such -- while concurrently [and rather quickly] ripping the entire disc.

It's mobilized piracy at the most invisible form.

But yeah: CD Text is/was neat, at least in concept. I never got a chance to use it; none of my audio hardware ever supported it. (Supposedly, it also supported song lyrics.)

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