I bought a new grand touring last week so I gave my dad my 2017 touring. He loves the car but he misses having a CD player. Part of the problem is he does not have a smartphone and refuses to get one soon we can't do Pandora or android auto. My thought was to buy a portable CD player and run it through the USB port. Has anyone done this Or do you have any other thoughts?

 

Hi... I am still smiling from reading this post.... I am 68 years old and I understand the issue and empathize completely. While I do have a smart phone with about 100 CD albums stored, I gave the Mazda salesman a very hard time (in jest) last winter when I bought this 2019 model by insisting that I still wanted to play my CDs. ok, I am going off topic here ...

If you cannot run a CD player through the USB port, you could go back to some older technology and get a portable CD player like a SONY discman and a FM transmitter. Run the audio cord from the discman to the transmitter (needs to use the cigar lighter) and pick up the audio on a preset FM frequency.

... or get yourself a new smartphone and give your dad the old one to use as a bluetooth music player with no phone package. then you will have to get his music stored on the phone.

Ah ain't technology great. It changes and makes things obsolete so easy..... I also laugh at my 39 year old son who just picked up a used 2006 CRV and in his words..... "all it has is a cassette player and a CD player ... no bluetooth . WTF !!!!!! " .. so for now he just listens to the radio. I offered to give him some cassettes, but he flatly refused my offer.

 

Another option is to simply save the music to a usb drive. Plug it in and it is like having a 100 disk CD changer.

I use it for audio books. I have saved dozens of books on a 32 gig usb drive.

 

Although mine was a 2018 I have a BOSE system which made for some challenging stereo upgrades. You can either use a portable CD player or mount a CD player only and use a USB input.
I mounted mine in the glove-box and also relocated my other input from the console as well installed a glove box light.

 

+1

This is indeed IMO the easiest solution. You just need to convert your dad's CD's and store them on the USB drive.

 

This USB method is indeed the simplest solution. I made a long playlist of a couple dozen of my wife's favourite music and story CDs this weekend and she is very happy to have this easily accessible.

 

I always find to read the first thread starter completely before replying...
read the concerns and complete question from gatordave641 ...
just guessing here but his dad is not wanting to learn new media technology

 

I too have a 2018 CX-5 with BOSE sound system and want to install a CD player. My system is a portable CD/DVD player that I use withy my laptop(which plays a CD with sound just fine). As you can see from the attached photo it has a double USB output cable. I have tried connecting it up to the USB ports in the center consul but am unable to select the USB1 choice in the Entertainment option on the Infotainment screen. It is there but not allowing me to scroll down on to it. The CD player powers up but could it be that no audio signal is being sent to the Infotainment unit on the dash via the USB cable? FYI, there is no other jack output on the back of the CD player that I could connect to the AUX input on the center consul. Any suggestions as to what I am doing wrong?

 

I copied my CDs to a USB Stick. Takes some time but more elegant than using a CD player.

 

I am aware that copying CD's to a USB stick is an option, but, like the OP and Callisto (post #4), I want to connect up a portable CD at this time like Callisto did. Do you have any ideas how he did it? I have tried but as outlined in my post above the connections don't seem to have worked.