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Rather than sitting through annoying DJ banter and repetitive music (how many times have you heard Alicia Keys's No One this week?), consider bringing your own music collection in the car instead.

Sure, radio still has its place - news, weather, traffic and talk - but with today's technology, you can remain entertained between home and work (and vice versa) with your own picks. After all, you've likely amassed an impressive collection of digital songs on your home computer.

You might already own an iPod or other portable media player with hundreds (if not thousands) of tracks and custom-made playlists (such as "Driving Tunes" or "Mellow Mix"), but aren't sure how to enjoy it behind the wheel, sans headphones.

The good news is you can listen to all this great music through your car's speakers - and below you'll find a few ways to pull it off.

Oh, and keep in mind the following advice can also be applied to listening to audio podcasts on your daily commute - you know, those free downloadable shows you can subscribe to, covering a wide range of topics be it movie reviews, political rants, narrated children's books, sex advice or celebrity gossip.

MP3 player options. If you own an iPod or other MP3 player, you can connect it to your car's stereo in a number of ways. While the quality won't be the best, if your car still has a tape deck you can purchase an inexpensive cassette adapter from your local dollar store (I've seen them cost as little as $1.50). These plug into your iPod's headphone jack, while the other end, which resembles a cassette tape, is inserted into your car deck. If you don't have a tape deck but have an FM radio, you might want to pick up an FM transmitter for your iPod, which usually snaps underneath your portable music player and wirelessly beams your music to a nearby FM radio. These typically start at about $30.

Finally, some car stereos have a line-in audio jack or USB port for MP3 players, making it easy to connect and listen to music or podcasts with an optional $5 to $10 cable.

MP3-ready car stereos. Starting at about $80, you can replace your car's existing CD player with one that not only plays regular audio CDs, but also recordable/rewritable discs with MP3s (or other digital audio formats) on them. The advantage of the latter is you can burn more than 250 MP3 songs onto one disc, as opposed to being limited to only 18 or so songs with a regular music CD. Some higher-end models can also read recordable DVDs, which can store 6.7 times more music than a recordable CD. This sure beats that six- or 10-disc CD changer in the trunk or glove compartment (not to mention that these players usually show the name of the song on a small screen at the front of the unit). The only downside to these players is you need to create the discs on your computer first.

GPS units, cellphones. Because they have built-in memory to hold maps of Canada and the United States (or expandable memory with those postage-stamp-size cards), many GPS units today also let you play music or podcasts on them. Since all GPS units have speakers, so you can hear turn-by-turn directions while driving, many people are listening to their music collections through the same device. Granted, a small speaker on your dashboard or stuck to the windshield won't sound as good as your car's multiple speakers, but it's not bad in a pinch. Plus, in many cases you can connect the GPS to your car stereo via an audio cable. Many cellphones also play music (personally, I keep a two-gigabyte microSD card in the back of my BlackBerry), which can allow you to store your digital music or podcast collection.