Making sure you’ve got your favourite driving music has never been easier! Any recent smartphone or tablet can store all the music you would need!
Whatever you have on your phone you can connect via your car’s audio system in order to listen to music. The ease in which you can do this however, depends on your car’s audio system!
I’m going to go through the various ways in which you can connect your phone to your car’s audio! Starting from the easiest to the hardest -“ keep on reading till you find the easiest one for you. There really is no need to keep CD’s lying around the car or even more out-dated forms of music storage!
1. Bluetooth
This is by far the easiest! If you’re lucky enough to a have a car with Bluetooth audio capabilities, then you don’t need anything at all. Any phone from the last 5 five years, should have Bluetooth as well.
All you’ll need to do is make sure your Bluetooth is enabled on your phone, should be in settings somewhere. Perhaps under "connectivity" or "networking" or something similar.
Once that’s enabled go to your car’s audio system menu. Scroll through the menu ’til you see something with the word "Bluetooth" in it. Enable it or ask to pair or search for devices and it should then detect your phone.
Select your phone and it will connect. For the initial connection between the car and phone, it may prompt you to enter a code that it displays into your phone or something similar. Once you’ve done that -“ just press play! You’ll have access to any of the audio that is on your phone’s storage!
Once you’ve set it up once, any time you get into your car -“ the audio system should automatically detect your phone and connect straight away.
2. USB connection
This is fairly straight forward. If you see a USB port somewhere on your car’s audio system, then you will be able to use this method.
You will need a cable that has a USB connection on the one end and whatever your phone’s connection port is on the other end. The cable that you charge your phone with should be perfect, (if it’s one that has a USB connection that goes into the charging adaptor at the plug.) If not, then any electronic store should be able to help you purchase one of these for fairly cheap.
Once you’ve got the cable, just plug the USB end of it into your car’s audio system. Scroll through the menu on your car’s front loader, until you find "Storage" or your phone’s model number. Select that and you should then see all your audio files.
3. AUX Cable
This is also fairly easy -“ if you see a jack or hole somewhere on your car’s audio system. It looks like a normal headphone jack, exactly like the one in your phone. The place where you’d plug your headphones in basically, or if your headphones can fit into it, that’s the one!
To do this though, you will more than likely have to buy an ‘AUX cable’. This is a cable that has the male headphone connector thing on each end. One end goes into your audio, the other into your phone.
What this will do is output anything from your phone, to your car’s audio system. So on your phone, you then choose the music you’d like to listen to and press play as if you were playing it on your phone’s speakers. Except instead of your phone’s speakers it will come out of your car’s speakers!
4. FM Transmitter
Now things start to get tricky. If you’re in the unfortunate position of not having an AUX port, USB port or Bluetooth access -“ this is where you need to ask yourself how much you really enjoy listening to your driving music!
In order to do this, what you’ll need is an FM transmitter. This is a small device that will connect to your phone, (make sure you get one that connects to your phone’s charging port, or just one that’s compatible with your phone.)
What this will do is -“ transmit your phone’s audio output across radio waves. So just like your car picks up the radio, it will pick up your phone’s mini radio station.
You set the the frequency on the FM transmitter, so like 77.3 or something. Just make sure you choose one that isn’t being used by another radio station – otherwise you’ll just hear static.
So once you’ve connected it and set the frequency, when you tune your car’s radio to that radio frequency -“ you will hear whatever you are playing on your phone!
Let me just give some warning -“ you will have many issues with this. The audio quality will come out badly. You’ll have to constantly change and tweak it because of other radio interferences. Unless you’re planning on going on a road trip or something, I’d say don’t bother.
5. New Audio System
If your current audio system doesn’t have one of these, you could get a new front loader. If your car has the manufacturers audio system built into it, well then you’re out of luck. I guess CD’s aren’t so bad? Haha!
