I've seen "pockets" and sliding drawers that supposedly fit in the space where a radio should go. Has anyone tried that? I hear it's rather hit or miss on whether these "universal" pockets work out on other vehicles.

Edit: I'm not looking for off-topic posts about what your audio setup is like or how you think my audio set up should be.
If your comment isn't addressing the question, kindly give this thread a miss. Thanks.

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Why would anyone want to do this?

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There may not be any radio reception in the state of Jefferson.

They've got Jefferson Public Radio.

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Ah, but the FREE state of Jefferson. No unidentified troops there.

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I can't speak to why anyone else would want to do it. In my case, I have a massive collection of digitized music that I prefer to the radio or cassette player. It's trivial to put that music on a deck-of-cards-sized computer and hook it to an amp connected to the car speakers. Mounting the amp and computer is a little fiddly however. The easiest way for me to mount that in the car would seem to be throwing it in a $10 drawer.

I would like to know more about how You would do this. I too have a huge digitized music collection but I know nothing about creating or controlling a small form-factor server. I use a Slim Devices (now Logitech) Squeezebox and a laptop to feed an analog stereo signal to an old-fashioned hi-fi at home and at my office and I love it.

You'll need to be (or need the assistance of) someone moderately familiar with the Linux command line and very basic electronics to do what I'm doing. Skip to the end for the easier way.

I'm using the Asus Tinkerboard SBC (single board computer). The music engine is MPD, which creates a database for the music and handles the playout. MPC is a command line program that sends simple commands to MPD.

All the single board computers have dozens of "GPIO pins". These General Purpose Input/Output pins can easily have switches attached to them. Then you use a short, simple Python script to tell MPC to tell MPD what to do when the switch is pressed. So you can hook a switch up to two GPIO pins, have a Python script that tells MPC to turn SHUFFLE on, and then MPC tells MPD to turn SHUFFLE on. You can similarly wire buttons for PLAY, PAUSE, RW, FFD, PLAY ROCK, etc.

I'm a dork so I attached a floppy drive to this. Each floppy loads a playlist that I created beforehand. When the floppy is inserted, a UDEV rule calls a script; that script reads the playlist from the floppy and passes it on to MPC, then MPC tells MPD to play it.
I don't recommend getting that complicated though unless you're also a dork.


In my house I just run MPD on an old laptop (a single board computer would work just as well). There are many graphical front ends for MPD. I use Cantata on computers and MALP on Android. Any number of devices can connect to MPD at the same time and manipulate the playlist or change the volume or whatever. MPD is a popular and very powerful piece of software and it is well documented. It runs on Windows and Android but I highly recommend installing it under Linux.

Why not use the Raspberry Pi?

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This sounds like the equivalent of building a Rube Goldberg machine the size of Manhattan to slice an onion.


You're aware that modern head units have USB ports that you can connect your phone, a mobile hard disk, or one of those tiny thumbnail-sized flash drives to, correct? You can fit a hell of a lot of music on a 256-512GB nano drive.

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I have a 1Din android radio with flip out screen in mine.
2 usb, blutooth, and a microsd card slot.

any 1Din solution should work.

just remember to take out the fader knob in the center console and pull the rear speaker wires up to the radio. left and right wires for the front are the same scheme as the rear, so its not hard to figure out.

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It sounds complicated perhaps, but so would a head unit if I walked through how the different components communicated. In practice, it's a tiny, elegant system. For someone who knows basic electronics and a bit about computers, this is a trivially simple project.



Sure, I'm aware of modern head units. For me, the drawbacks are that they're ugly as sin, and they have awful playlist management (usually none at all). With MPD, any passenger can put an app on their phone and see the current playlist, add to it, modify it, load a different playlist, or create an entirely new playlist.

The Tinkerboard is functionally equivalent to a Raspberry Pi. It even fits in their cases and the GPIO layout is the same. I went with the TInkerboard because it's more powerful and it's open source. This project would work on a Pi without any changes.

Thanks for the info! I've never swapped a head unit before so this is uncharted territory for me. I might keep the fader, depending on how many channels and how much power the amp has.

I was thinking the same thing... "what am I missing here?"

There's also spotify, apple music, tidal (pray tell), between which you've access to most music in creation.

There's ample space in the glove for a 50w, 4 channel amp, to which you can connect a blue tooth output, or a simple phono output (which is what I did, because I still have real or imagined fidelity issues with bluetooth), run it under the center console for discreet connection and bypass the bosch unit completely.

I left the radio in because it still looks nice.

I'd also recommend a small, 10" under-seat subwoofer to round out the experience.

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1981 240D 4sp manual. Ivory White.