On Sat, 22 Jul 2017, micky wrote:

Is my 2004 original equipment CD player likely to be able to play Mp3
cds (in the car I just bought)?

There is one I want to buy (though I dont' have the url now) that had
far more songs on it, maybe 50 or 100, than the 15 that I'm used to, and
another poster made me realize that this might be a set of MP3 files.

The owners manual says nothing about mp3. That probably means no,
right?

I don't think it's a matter of age. I think that some CD players could
play MP3 discs, and the rest couldn't. I know in buying used portable CD
players, some specify that they can play MP3s, others don't, and I take
them for their word.

And I think it's a relatively brief period. After MP3s took off, maybe
some time later, but before MP3 players came along, or maybe some overlap
into the era of MP3 players. An MP3 player is so much better, they took
over.

There was an issue of older CD players not playing CDRW discs. I forget
the details, but after a certain date, CD players didn't seem to have the
problem. So something was changed there. But that's different from
playing MP3s, though for many people it did matter, since they put MP3s on
a CDRW disc and then played that.

Maybe DVD players are more likely to play MP3 discs. Now I can't
remember, but I vaguely recall making an MP3 disc to try in my circa 2003
DVD player. But that's different circuitry, and have more of what's
needed to play MP3s.

Michael