Streaming in the car. Apple, Spotify or something else?

Streaming is for sad people with no attention span.

Get yourself one of these fitted...



But seriously...I prefer YouTube music for my limited streaming needs...

 

My cars have SXM built into them. We pay the subscription price. The quality and selection tops any of the "streaming" services.

 

i sub to a streaming service that allows downloads to a stand alone device, i use my ipod touch, and then take it with me in car and work. Don't need to be connected to internet is why i go this route.

 

I’m assuming you’re talking about using your phone connected to the car through Bluetooth or a wire?

All the music I actually ever paid for is currently uploaded to YouTube music, which used to be Google music. Besides that I stream music and podcasts from Spotify. Are there streaming apps you already use and have accounts with? There’s really nothing special about any of them that wouldn’t let you stream them in your car.

 

I stream from my phone via the bandcamp app.

 

For a while I had a six month free trial of Spotify. If you never paid for it, you could probably find a similar offer somewhere. I think mine was through my cell carrier, AT&T. But now even with the free version, it’s fine. Podcasts don’t have commercials besides the ones podcaster puts up himself. I’m using free Spotify 99% of the time with no complaints. It was nice having no commercials and unlimited skips for music but it’s fine without it.

This is all assuming you have unlimited data. Otherwise it’ll cost a fortune to stream anything.

 

If the car has its own internet connectivity, you can stream through that but it will cost you. They usually give you a month or three of free trial service but after that you have to pay.

If you're streaming online content via your phone to the car's audio system, you're using a whole lot of cellular plan data. May not be cost effective.

Your best option is to put as much of the content on the phone as possible and play it via the phone using either bluetooth or direct connection. If you have a subscription to Apple Music or the Android equivalent I think you can d/l that stuff to your phone and play it from there.

Or subscribe to SiriusXM.

 

I have an unlimited data plan so I go between Amazon Music HD and Spotify where I have a bunch of playlists I’ve saved or created. I pay for both services.

 

a CD player is a must have in my car, what can I say.. I'm an album guy

 

Unlmtd data & free versions of Pandora (a decade of thumbs), Spotify, and YouTube.

Last month I tried YouTube’s music app on a bike ride home from work and got hit with a two >5 minute ads in half of an album (I think it was yessongs?), then got nine minutes into a fifteen minute ad, pulled over and deleted the app.

On the road I use normal YouTube for full albums, rare tracks, and some podcasts; Pandora for eclectically shuffling hot tracks; spotify for podcasts that YouTube has bullied away.

My car is also old enough to have a 6 disc changer AND a cassette deck!

 

The car is where I do the bulk of my podcast listening. Mostly music podcasts….

Other than that, whatever I have queued up on my iTunes.

 

my wife's car has SXM. my car = i have to hum or listen to FM. (sometimes i wire my phone/other into the AUX input.)

 

Many/most new cars don’t have CD players. Young Car Buyer: What’s a CD?

 

My nephew and I recently did a road trip together and I said why dont you bring some of your tunes with, he said I dont have any CD's so he brought one of those JBL bluetooth speakers and his phone, whatever works I guess

 

All the music I ever had from either cd’s, or downloaded 20 years ago all existed as files on a computer at one point, and then I put them all in google play music, and that became youtube music. It’s fine for the streaming of my music that I uploaded, but the actual YouTube streaming service is terrible. Out of all the free ones, Spotify is the least annoying.

 

I stream from my phone several hours a day, and it doesn't affect my data plan that much, which is relatively low. I never use
Wifi either.

 

The absolute lowest stereo audio bitrate that will sound sort of ok is 96kbps. That's around 42MB of data per hour. If you're doing that fairly regularly, it's not a trivial amount of data. I dunno.