'23 BRZ, Starlink necessary to play music through USB?
 

Thinking about getting a USB CD player for upcoming road trip. Do I have to have Starlink or can I just plug into USB and play through the stereo?

TIA!

One thing you could try is formatting a flash drive as FAT32 then loading a WAV file on it and try to play the file. I have no issues running WAV files on my head unit, but I'm also running an aftermarket Pioneer head unit, so I wouldn't be able to verify if even the older head units will play them.

You can't hook a USB CD player up and expect it to function, that's not how the car's USB port works.

My understanding is that the USB port works with FAT32 formatted USB sticks (probably with a maximum size limit of 32gb) and/or smartphones.

In the past few years, there has been significant progress made to allow these external-type CD drives to work in some (not all) factory systems. Some newer Toyota cars in particular can utilize these drives. Whether Subaru has made the same progress or not, I can't say, but I haven't seen any evidence yet that proves they WON'T work in our particular vehicles. It wouldn't hurt to try. Let me make a call and see if I can get an answer....

Edit:
So these USB CD drives are relatively new on the market. I called my local stereo installation shop and they have had some experience with them, with mostly good results. The only notable problem he had was one drive needed to be returned (cheap Chinese electronics) and the customer had to get a replacement, (the customer had purchased it from Amazon and brought it in), once the new one arrived, it worked like it was supposed to.

He also stated that he has installed some in Toyota AND Subaru vehicles, such as the 4-Runner and the Forester with no unexpected issues, however, he also said that he hasn't had one of the 2nd gen cars in his shop yet.

So, @ZDan you wanna be our guinea pig? If it doesn't work, you can always just return it. Amazon has a pretty good return policy.

Well I'll be a monkey's uncle.

A trunk monkey's uncle?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WFqr3_...b3RlY3Rpb24%3D

So the more I research these external USB CD players, I've learned that the cheap ones seem to require a head unit that uses Android as it's operating system, specifically Android version 4.4. These cheap ones are the ones that plug directly into the USB port and are also powered by the port at the same time. They have no other power requirement.

On the other hand, the more expensive versions of these drives can work not only with Android powered head units, but other operating systems as well. There is one that you can load the information from a total of 12 CD's and it stores the information on a flash drive accessible from the front. So basically, there is a CD drive, an interface to store the information from the CD media onto a flash drive, and the USB interface from the flash drive to the head unit. It is unclear whether this particular unit also requires an additional power supply, but there are additional connectors and wiring that it comes with it along with an infrared remote control and a front control panel and display. Here is the link to it:

https://www.amazon.com/Premium-Drive...4-dc28e6d374b3

This would be the one I would purchase for my old lady's RAV4 since her head unit is not Android based being a 2019 model with the JBL 11-speaker system.

Interesting. At this point though why not just rip the music to wav/flac files and play them back via a USB thumbdrive, or use a lossless (or even lossy) streaming service from a phone like Tidal or Spotify?

And bear in mind, this is coming from someone with an extensive physical media collection of vinyl and CDs. I just don't really see the point of spinning discs in the car in 2023.

Yeah.... I am struggling to understand how a USB CD drive is a better option than a thumbdrive. Then again I use Spotify(Free) so what do I know about music enjoyment LOL

@Clipdat @autoracer86

Gentlemen, it may not make much sense to you, but there are still some of us old-schoolers on the road that don't particularly want to stream the music that we have spent a great deal of time and money collecting over the years. And if you really think about it, streaming is not free, since you (or whomever's internet you are connected to) have to pay for that streaming data in some way or another. This basically means that every time you play a song, you or that person/company pays for it. Play a song twice, pay for it twice. Three times, well you get the idea.

Another reason I won't stream is that I would rather give my money to the artists that produce the music I love up front, rather than allow the faceless data companies to trickle the royalties down to the artists slowly while keeping much of the profit as fees for the "services" that they provide.

Yeah, call me old-school, call me old if you want, it won't hurt my feelings.

What does that have to do with using a thumb drive over a CD ?

What you said makes sense for why you would want to use physical media. I just don't know why you would make it a CD lol

I have unlimited data on my phone, but yeah ok, points heard re: not being a fan of streaming services.

I guess if you don't have your CD library digitized then yeah, you're still going to have to spin those discs.

I don't have all of mine digitized, but again I'm only interested in playing CDs at home these days.

Different strokes for different folks. If I were to transfer everything I have to flash drives in WAV format, it would probably take several months non-stop. That's just too much time for me to spend. I could be...driving and enjoying my audio system instead.