Music Babble

My main mix-CD recipient usually listens to them in the car on the four-hour drive (each way) to and from his farm but his old car broke down and he's driving his wife's until he can get a new one. Her car is newer and has no CD player; he doesn't have a player in his home stereo, and he has only a Jewish laptop without a disc slot, either. This puts us in a tough situation.

eBay has mostly expensive, more high-end players for the stereo mixed in with cheap garbage. Amazon is cheap, mostly no-name Chinese shit. There's a promising portable player that's basically a prettied-up version of those old iPod radio transmitters which put out a weak FM signal that you could tune into to hear your music, but it's expensive ($99) for a 20-plus-year-old technology that has never worked well.

I was at the thrift shop the other day and they had three or four of those shitty all-in-one turntable/CD/radio/built-in speakers units, but you'd have to be mad desperate, plus it doesn't fit into either car audio nor does it fit into a stereo system.

Any advice? Abort, retry, fail??