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Hardware

Dension DMP3 MP3 Player Reviewed 167

Posted by timothy from the a-thousand-hours-but-no-ogg dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "MP3 Newswire has a review of the Dension DMP3, an MP3 player for the car that you purchase sans storage media. It sell for $249 and takes a standard IDE/ATA hard disk. With 100 GB selling for $200 these days the DMP3 gives you a ton of capacity for $450. The player itself is pretty basic, but I like the way they use a mobile rack frame to handle fast file transfers rather than use USB to spoonfeed tunes at a snails pace. Dension has also made the internal specs public including the playlist (.ply), logo (.lce), message (.msg) formats as well as the communications serial line protocol for adding third party devices like a mouse. Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates."
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Dension DMP3 MP3 Player Reviewed More

Dension DMP3 MP3 Player Reviewed

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  • Since they don't ship this thing with any storage media (i.e the harddrive), they get away without paying the stupid tarrif/taxes on MP3 players that we have up here in Canada.

    That's a savings of 21$ per GB.

  • What about HD wear? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by seinman ( 463076 )
    Wouldn't hitting potholes, speed bumps, etc. put undue wear on the HD workings? It seems to me like a CD-based system would be more appropriate for a car. I mean, how long is it gonna be before your drive crashes?

    • Re:What about HD wear? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by zilym ( 3470 )
      It's been a year for me and my IBM Travelstar 12GN
      hard disk in my PJRC MP3 player used for playing
      music in my car. No problems with undue wear.
    • Why would you want to pay $450 for an mp3 harddrive when you could buy an mp3/cd player for around $100 and be able to burn mp3's onto cd's from any persons house. If you had the mp3 harddrive then you would have to have special wires and people dont like carrying extra stuff around.

      • Why would you want to pay $450 for an mp3 harddrive when you could buy an mp3/cd player for around $100 and be able to burn mp3's onto cd's from any persons house.

        Many MP3 CD players can't read CD-RW because of lower reflectivity, but CD-R costs $1.00 or so every time you change the playlist (add or delete a bunch of songs) because you have to buy a new blank CD.

        • As I understand, most MP3 CD players can read CDRW discs. I got a Rio SP90, by no means a high end MP3 player, for Christmas. It plays any CD or CDRW I've thrown at it. I think you can get SP90s for like $60 now.

          A tip for any of those considering the Rio MP3 CD players - don't spend an extra $50 or so dollars to get the SP100. The only difference is upgradeable firmware. This problem with the SP90 can be fixed with a simple change [geocities.com] to the upgrade file.

          MP3 CD players are great. I've got about 20GB of MP3s. Before school or a long car trip I burn about 10 CDs on a disc and have more than enough music for the rest of the day. Since I always use CDRWs and most of my friends have burners, I can always score some new music if I'm at a friend's house.
        • Many MP3 CD players can't read CD-RW

          Multi-read (I think that's they call it) technology has existed since at least '98-99, and is pretty much ubiquitious now,
          in most every device that uses a CD reader.
          (Just to confirm this, I dropped a -RW in my ~1 year old, ~$115-dollar Soul Player and it works fine.)
          I'd be pretty surprised to find a MP3 CD player that couldn't read -RW, but as always,
          buyer beware, do your research, there are always exceptions.

          but CD-R costs $1.00

          I dunno about you, but I end up paying like 20-30 cents per disk nowadays.
          Haven't paid a buck a disk for -R since at least mid 2000.
          I'd suggest you shop somewhere else.

          MPenis3

          • Haven't paid a buck a disk for -R since at least mid 2000.

            Not with the tariffs that will inevitably be attached as a rider to the SSSCA if it passes. See also my other comment [slashdot.org]. In other words, I guess I should stock up now.

            • Christ, Chicken Little, the sky hasn't fallen yet!

              Sonny Bono is still rotting in his grave, the gov't is still fairly distracted, Canada isn't a state yet, and it doesn't look to me like S3CA will pass.
              (Although if it did, one of the odder artifacts would be paying exorbitant prices for "pre-ban" parts at a computer show just as if you were buying a pre-ban AR15 at a gun show... :D)

              PPPENIS

        • Re:Many players not compatible with CD-RW (Score:5, Insightful)

          by swb ( 14022 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @08:31PM (#3175373)
          A buck each for CDR media? What?

          The last batch I bought was a spindlepack of 100 for $17 at Microcenter. Even Office Despot sells 100 packs for $34.

          Before you complain about the quality of cheap CDRs, I have been using these mostly in my car for the past year and I'm brutal with them. They get flung around the interior, sat on in the passenger seat, broiled in the summer sun, frozen in the winter, jammed 3-4 at a time into a single visor slot and I have yet to have one go bad.

          I'm sure they're not national archive quality, but for $0.17/ea who cares.

          • A buck each for CDR media? What?

            Ninety pence a litre (five bucks a gallon) for gasoline [guardian.co.uk]? What?

            The last batch I bought was a spindlepack of 100 for $17 at Microcenter. Even Office Despot sells 100 packs for $34. Before you complain about the quality of cheap CDRs

            How long do you think those prices will last in the face of heavy RIAA lobbying? It's already happening in Canada; see my other comment [slashdot.org].

            (mods: I cross-replied to get this on the messages.pl radar of all who raised this issue; I checked 'mod myself down')
            • How long do you think those prices will last in the face of heavy RIAA lobbying? It's already happening in Canada

              Too bad for Canadians. Price you pay for universal health care, I guess...

              I can't see the RIAA managing to do this in the US without some serious concessions to consumer media rights. I think they're getting close to the point of stepping over the line with copy-protection and general fear-mongering now. Trying to accomplish a RIAA tax on one of the few aspects of the computer industry that hasn't been crushed by the tech industry downturn will be pretty unpopular with a rather large and influential lobby.
      • Why would you want to pay $450 for an mp3 harddrive when you could buy an mp3/cd player for around $100 and be able to burn mp3's onto cd's from any persons house.

        Personally, I don't understand why anyone want to waste time burning, carrying, inserting, ejecting, swapping, mp3 CDs when you could have a HDD player - ALL your music, ready to play. Without fuss.

        So I guess it depends on the person.
        Personally, I wouldn't buy this either - I have a portable pocket-sized HDD mp3 player (only 30 gig, since it uses a slimline laptop drive, but that's still 10 times my music collection), and that can both drive a car stereo, or be slipped into a pocket in my jeans to go wherever I go. I wouldn't want my music chained to the car. But some people want their car system to be stand-alone and shit hot. In which case this thing is great - but wireless download would make it better! :-)
        Each to his own.

    • Just put 32 or 64MB of RAM on the thing. Spin the drive up, suck in a half hour or hour chunk and then spin the drive back down. While the drive's not moving, you don't have to worry about crashing the heads, and it'll be moving for all of a couple of seconds every half hour to hour.

  • It's A Jeep Thing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DeadBugs ( 546475 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @06:23PM (#3174939) Homepage
    CD's skip all the time in my Jeep especially when I drive over parking blocks, I can only imagine what that kind of beating would do to a hard drive.
    • take a compact flash card with an ide adaptor. would never skip with that.

      ;-)

    • Skipping... (Score:3, Informative)

      by wowbagger ( 69688 )
      Actually, you'd be surprised. I used to have a 10 disk changer in the trunk, and it would skip at the drop of a hat. I've had no problems with my Neo, and it uses standard drives, not notebook drives.

      Remember, the mass of a hard disk head assembly is much less than the mass of a CD laser assembly, and the mass of your car itself provides damping to the system - you get long lasting but low accelerations, rather than the short (10g) shocks that kill hard disks. For normal cars, if you get a bump bad enough to bounce the heads, you probably have other, more expensive things to worry about.

      Now, if you are seriously offroading it, that would be different - I'd want a flash based solution for that. But, if you are seriously offroading it, you probably don't need to be listening to music....

  • usb at a snail's pace? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by vena ( 318873 )
    Exactly how many songs are you planning on listening to at once??

  • PJRC MP3 is similar for even less $$$ (Score:3, Informative)

    by zilym ( 3470 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @06:27PM (#3174950)
    Checkout the PJRC MP3 player at this link [pjrc.com] for
    a very similar player that costs less and is completely open source.

    I've been using my PJRC MP3 player for about a year now in my VW New
    Beetle. Great fun.
    • I'm intrigued -- I own a New Beetle as well, and have been thinking about adding MP3 playback capability for those long trips through Pennsylvania. However, the player at that link looks like it's just the circuit boards. What sort of enclosure did you use? Where did you mount it? How does it connect to the stereo?

      Also, I'm assuming you have the standard (non-Monsoon) head unit. Any quirks I should know about?
      • I have it in the trunk jacked into the plug that would otherwise
        be used for a CD changer. I had to build a CD changer protocol
        interface board and it's been a real pain since VW doesn't
        document it (AFAIK). But now it works, and works well.
        Currently I'm running the protocol interface through my
        EZ-USB Protoboard [ajusd.org], but now that I've got the protocol pretty well reverse engineered I
        think I'm gonna port the code to a cheap little PIC16F84
        or something.
    • Hmm... It might be cheaper, but...

      PJRC [pjrc.com] Dension [mp3newswire.net]

      Look at them again...

      PJRC [pjrc.com] Dension [mp3newswire.net]

      Which one would you rather put in your CAR?
    • Or check out YAMPP [myplace.nu]. It's a pretty neat design and should be relatively inexpensive.

      Or check out the MP3 project liast at mp3projects.com [mp3projects.com].

  • A car player that's too big for the car dash? (Score:4, Informative)

    by dan the person ( 93490 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @06:32PM (#3174966) Homepage Journal
    If they shaved 20mm from the width it could have been installed in the Dash like a proper car stereo.

    Anyone got any experience running normall desktop drives in a car? The shock tolerences are way lower than a laptop drives which would seem to be the better choice for an in-car unit.

  • I hate it when people nitpick my posts. [slashdot.org]

    Yet, oddly, I don't have any problem nitpicking posts other people make. From the summary of this article:

    Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates.

    I'm pretty sure the poster meant either lowest compression rates or highest bit rates. The point being that a 100 gig drive will let you store a whole mess of MP3s, even when they are ripped at highest quality.
    • Incorrect, the rate of compression is at it's highest quality level, so the term stands...

      Okay, Im just kidding. I know what you mean. I hate when people write something thoughtful, and some dipshit comes in and says 'You are wrong because [INSERT STUPID OBSERVATION THAT HAS NO BEARING ON YOUR POINT HERE] and Im going to ignore the rest of what you said now.' One thing that bothers me about some of the people that post here is that they'd rather find fault with your details than your ideas. I made the mistake once of confusing Hitler with Communism. I learned more about Communism/Fascism than I ever cared to, but correcting that detail had 0% effect on my point. For some reason, I'm an idiot because I didn't get a Trivial Pursuit question right.
      • i agree that it would be nice if i could understand you without you having to explain yourself correctly, but it turns out that this is a very hard thing to do. your mistake sounds trivial only in the sense that, as long as you don't rise to a position of power, your lack of historical/political comprehension has no real impact on me.

        maybe we could see a link to your post???
        • I tried to find the thread and I can't. I think the title is 'DMCA = Communism or something like that.'

          I don't think the metaphor I made was that bad. I explained what I meant. It was along the lines of "We own everything we sell after we've sold it, and we'll destroy people that don't follow our way." I described the RIAA as being like Hitler for trying to sue places like Napster out of existence. One kind person pointed out that Fascism instead of Communism would have made more sense with the Hitler reference, but he got what I meant. Everybody else basically said I was stupid, even though my metaphor still held. One little detail and I'm an idiot for it. I love that about Slashdot. Heh.

          It's funny how people measure intelligence by trivia. "Man, that guy knows the names of the entire cast of Green Acres, he must be smart!" My area of expertise is Animation/Visual Effects. People commonly mistake Special Effects for Visual Effects. Visual Effects is when you have an effect made off-camera, like using a computer generated character in a scene. A Special Effect is an effect generated on-camera, like a squib that explodes a blood pack when somebody gets 'shot'. People mix these terms up all the time, but I don't go on a 'holier than thou' rant about how people are stupid and get the terms wrong. Why dont I do this? Because I understand what somebody says when they say 'special effect'. That's what the world taught them it means. In order for somebody to know the difference between Special and Visual effects, they'd have to study it like I have! That doesn't mean I'm smarter than them. There are people here on Slashdot that I'd like to learn that lesson. Now history really is something I should have known better about, don't get me wrong there. I'm not saying Hitler is trivia, but I have had a number of people call me an idiot over similar (non-history) things.

          In any case, there should be more flexibility on calling somebody an idiot if you know what they're talking about.
          • I agree with you. people really should cut others some slack during discussion, if they did you might actually be able to *communicate* with them. the only thing i'd like to point out is that many people would probably take offense to your comparison between Hitler/Communism and visual/special effects. dismissing a psychotic genocidal tyrant as trival seems like a serious lapse in judgement. other than that your point is very valid and has been expressed here more than once.
          • don't get me wrong there. I'm not saying Hitler is trivia, but I have had a number of people call me an idiot over similar (non-history) things.

            I am guilty of skimming :/ please forgive me!
            • No forgiveness needed, you were basically right the first time. I realized that I wasn't quite clear on what I meant. When I said the trivia bit, I was also thinking about other posts at /. I've had nitpicked. It was a poor organization of my post in the first place that I later band-aided with the 'don't get me wrong...' line. I really should have moved that line up to where I mentioned the trivia, so that the reader wouldn't sit there for like 4 setences thinking I was passing Hitler off as trivia. Heh. I should take more time to write my posts.

              I appreciate you taking the time to read and understand my post. I have a lot of respect for you right now. :)

  • Excellent for running Afghan pirate radio from your HumVee.

  • What is with the temperature rating (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bishop ( 4500 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @06:44PM (#3175018)

    This thing looked alright until I found this little spec:

    Operating temperature: 0 - +50 C
    So it is basically useless anywhere with a season called winter.
    • Well, everyone knows that as electronics get colder they slow down. Duh. Next time, *think before you post!*
    • Or anywhere with a season called summer - car temps can easily reach 70 degrees C after a few hours in the sun.
    • Operating temperature: 0 - +50 C

      This sounds about right - that'll be the tolerance range of a typical hard disk. I remember from the empeg car player (I worked on that) that the temperature tolerance range could have been something like -20 to +70 if it weren't for the hard disks. There are some laptop drive manufacturers (can't remember which) making extended range drives now, so this could be better.

      Then again, the Dension appears to use an LCD display, and those tend to handle temperature very poorly. You can get around the change in response time using a temperature sensor and programming in a different contrast, but you can only go so far. That's one of the reasons you'll see most car stereo units using either LEDs or a VFD display.

      • The LCD on my nokia gets really slow at -20C. It is kinda cool to watch. I didn't bother to check the temperature specs on it. I figured a Scandinavian company would understand cold, and design their phones appropriately.

    • Operating temperature: 0 - +50 C
      Storing Temperature: -20 - +70 C

      Yes, I was wondering how this thing would handle in Canada. I've parked the car on the street in winter on one of those -40 days and come back to frost on the dash board. That's well below the storage temperature. Of course when you turn the car on, it will be operating far far below it's operating temperature. Then in summer, when the car gets left in the sun, I'm pretty sure the interior get's well above 50C (122F).

  • Which used to be the Empeg... what I really want though is a DVD/CD changer that can play MP3 DVDs, DVDA and regular CD's... Why hasn't anyone major come out with an elegantly designed changer that plays MP3s? Also... with most head units in cars being sculpted into some ornate ergonomic expression I can rarely find cool cars that accept "standard" head units. At least not without chopping up the look of the dash.
  • Reasonably good idea, but kinda seems limiting.

    There are times when I like to listen to news rather than music - need a radio. I think one of the many MP3 car CD players already on the market would be a lot more appropriate. That way you could play MP3s, regular CDs and listen to broadcasts as well...

  • Mp3 player like a PC? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @06:57PM (#3175056) Homepage Journal
    I like the idea of 'build your own MP3 player with standard parts.' This product is the start of that market. It would have value long after 100 gigs seems too small.

    I bet in a year or two, they'll have a variety of different screens and interfaces you can put on these doohickeys, and you can totally customize your player. I'd like to design my own interface for it, for example, to look like Apple's Aqua interface.

    Hmm... how long before these evolve into laptops? Heh
    • Except that today's IDE controllers only support 137GB max.
      • Of course, yesterday's CD players only supported one disc at a time, too. That's why CD changers were developed. You could always have a RAID array in the trunk wired into the player.
        • Yeah, I was just replying to the original point that said such a device would (paraphrased) "have utility well past after 100GB became small", i.e. you could keep upgrading it.

          I guess you could keep upgrading it, but you have a "major guts upgrade" coming at the 137GB barrier with today's technology, that's all I am saying.
      • Out of curiosity, didn't the IDE standard have a limitation a few years ago that didn't support higher than a certain # of megabytes? Wasn't the standard modified?

        In any case, I see and agree with your point, I am just curious about how the IDE standard works.
        • Currently, IDE controllers use 28 bits to address the drive.

          We are just running out of address space.

          Maxtor devised ATA-6, with 48 bits for addressing. This will allow us to not have to change addressing until we hit 144 petabytes, probably a pretty long way off.

          Maxtor has been selling, in conjunction with Promise, a 160GB IDE drive. The drive comes bundled with a promise controller to use, that supports the higher amounts of space.

          This isn't something we can do in software this time. This is a hard physical limitation, and it will require new chipsets to support it.

          People always give Maxtor shit about their drives, It is my opinion that Maxtor is the market leader in quality, price, and size, in the IDE market currently. I've built large IDE arrays based on Maxtor and 3ware technology. Right now all of our non-scsi servers at work that I have built are Maxtor. We have almost 100 Maxtor disks in the server room, and we have yet to have one fail.

          Actually, to be honest, we havn't had ANY drive failures lately, Seagate SCSI, and a few other brands are mostly what else we run (a few WD IDEs scattered around the plant, and some Seagate IDE, probably about 100 more IDEs in general in the plant).

          I think hard disk quality in general is very high right now, and people are overestimating the importance of brand. It's not 1995 anymore, and drives don't fail nearly as much, no matter what brand or interface.
          • Thanks, that was very interesting. :)

            I agree about Maxtor. I have a couple of Maxtor drives, and they're both so quiet I cannot hear them. Nobody ever gives them credit for that.

            Hmm.. I wonder if they'll make a new device like this with the new chipset in a year or two. Poppin a terrabyte drive in it some day would be totally cool. But man... that'd be a hell of a lot of MP3's.

            I can't believe the RIAA is trying to put a stop to MP3s, they're the only way we have to be able to listen to all the new music out there! It'd be a pain in the ass, without MP3's, to buy 10 CD's at the store and try to listen to particular songs on each of them.

  • Ogg Vorbis (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @07:00PM (#3175066) Homepage
    I have to ask, is there anything out there like this that supports Ogg Vorbis files?

    Yes, I know the whole floating point issue; the referece Ogg Vorbis decoder requires FP, and portables don't have FP hardware.

  • Select the JukeBox playback mode beforehand, because you can only select songs here (no lists, or albums), and max. 16 songs can be pre-programmed. All you have to tell your guests is to turn the driving knob to search, press it to select and add to the program. This is something even girls can remember, or if not, boys will surly be happy to help

    Sorry, couldn't help sharing this 'tip [dension.com]' from their website [dension.com]. Could be a cultural thing - I'm interested to see if the tips have such useful information in the other language on their site.

    -Adam
  • I don't find the review very useful. It would seem to me, and I could be wrong, that there are only about 2 of such things out now, this one listed, and the indash CD player with a by SonicBlue [sonicblue.com] which is Linux based, the Rio Car [sonicblue.com] unit. They have a nice developer/user .org site [riocar.org] too.

    Between the two, I'd pick the hackable Linux one, for several reasons.

    It's been around longer.

    It's hackable.

    There is a community support forum

    Looks way cooler

    Basically, since the above mentioned review of the Dension DMP3 MP3 doesn't make ANY comparison, it doesn't help 99% of the people in the GENERAL consumer electronics market, because there is no frame of referance at all. Maybe someone could write a useful review comparing the two?

    • ...that there are only about 2 of such things out now, this one listed, and the indash CD player with a by SonicBlue [sonicblue.com] [sonicblue.com] which is Linux based, the ...

      Should be

      ...that there are only about 2 of such things out now, this one listed, and the indash MP3 player with a by SonicBlue [sonicblue.com] [sonicblue.com] which is Linux based, the ...

    • Unfortunately, the Rio Car (formerly empeg) has been EOL'ed by SonicBlue. It's a shame, since they rock. I got my when they went on sale as Sonic Blue started selling their leftovers, and I absolutely love it. Unfortunately, they never sold well before the sale because of the extremely high prices ($1000+).

      Hopefully, this one has a shot, it seems to be almost as cool of a product.

      BTW, you can find some Rio Cars on ebay, but they are a bit overpriced compared to the SB sale prices. Worth every penny, though, in my book.
      • Unfortunately, the Rio Car (formerly empeg) has been EOL'ed by SonicBlue

        Your KIDDING? For a company that constantly reported being backordered [riocar.org] on the Rio Car, that's sooo stupid.

        If they gave the Rio Car ANY marketing, it would have done well.... Look at XFM, everyone want's MP3 in their car or a new Cell Phone, and XFM is marketed out the ass... The ONLY reason XFM is being sold is marketing. If Sonic Blue had a marketing division worth a shit, they would have owned that market.

        I always wondered why they never cut a deal with Circut City or Best Buy, I guess now I know, because they are MORONS who don't know MARKETING. Good product, bad marketing, sad loss to the Linux World (so, what's new?)

  • affordable (Score:4, Interesting)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asvNO@SPAMivoss.com> on Saturday March 16, 2002 @07:19PM (#3175129) Homepage Journal
    What makes this player so nice is the fact that it is reasonably priced compared other offerings such as the RioCar or the Kenwood Music Keg [kenwoodusa.com], which is actually the same thing as a phatnoise phatbox [kenwoodusa.com], but phatnoise decided to supply the traditional head unit manufactures rather than compete with them.

    Overall, there are not a lot of reasonable offerings in a marketplace which shows a lot of promise. What I would like to see is a complete car package that offers:

    • Large Capacity with standard drives
    • Radio and CD player
    • The CD player doubles as a ripper
    • Wireless Access
    • Car 2 Car IM
    • Easily Navigable

    Imagine a car player with built in wireless access so you can easily add songs to your car but also trade songs with others, sort of like a p2p network on the road. Besides trading songs people could also IM each other, I think this would really catch on among teenagers, a demographic that tends to embrace IM, likes to cruise, and many teens tend to have run down cars with nice stereos. Obviously there are safety and security considerations to consider but I'm sure a compromise could be made.

    • Yeah, until the media demonizes it after some idiots kids shoot each other after talking shit on IM. People that "cruise" are usually pretty stupid.
    • What the hell you want people ripping CDs and recording from the radio while driving? Why not make cassettes and burn Cds too?

      IM?!? Get a grip. The driver has other things to do.

      And if you claim you're thinking only of passengers, you shoulda said so, it sure doesn't sound like that in your post.

    • Re:affordable (Score:3, Informative)

      by BadlandZ ( 1725 )
      Blatent Flame Follows, please don't take it personally asv108, you obvisouly DO know more about this than me, but I had doubts about what you said

      What I would like to see is a complete car package that offers:
      * Large Capacity with standard drives

      Car Rio will take up to two standard laptop drives. That's up to 120G of storage using easily avalible IBM Travelstar or Fujitsu drives.

      * Radio and CD player

      Car Rio offers an radio tuner option (might want to get an antenna signal booster, reception is "average" and if your in a remote location, it can matter, most people it doesn't). As for the CD player, if your so sad you have your 40G to 120G full and STILL don't have the songs you want, CD player isn't going to help you.

      * The CD player doubles as a ripper

      Why? I'd rather rip and sort at home, FOR the drive, not WHILE driving. And at what speed? 16x laptop CDROM speed? I'd prefer my home 56x CDROM and Athlon XP 1700 for ripping than a 16x CDROM with a Strong Arm processer, thanks anyway. Your thinking of tech that's 5 years off (to be avaliable at a reasonable price commercially). I'll take the real, today alternitive thanks...

      * Wireless Access

      Abso-frigging-lutely! But I see hacking a 802.11b USB device into a Car Rio much more likely than a commercial head unit that has integreted wireless. War Driving anyone?

      * Car 2 Car IM

      And you thought talking on a Cell phone made for bad driving!!!! Shit, I would RATHER see this on a cell phone than in a car stereo ANY DAY. Yes it's there, sort of.... So why bother? In the US, it's lame, and we need to cetch up to the EU. But, anyway...

      If you really want it, at LEAST on a Cell phone, you can hold the phone in your hand while doing it, and still sort of hold on to the steering wheel. NO WAY do I want people to be trying to IM people from their stereo head unit! KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. And as long as it's already in the phone, what's the point?!?!?

      * Easily Navigable

      Any unit is easy once you get use to it. There are no "standard ways" to navigate 60G's of MP3's in your car anyway... so it's more practice than progress... If I can simply have 10-20 play lists to pick from, that's MORE than enough. That's all I need for navigation.

      Now, I don't OWN a Car Rio (yet), and I sure don't work for them. But, given that it's Linux based, hackable [riocar.org], and been around longer, I'm strongly leaning towards that.

  • What's wrong with a Nomad jukebox and a car adapter?
  • The review is clearly written by amatour. It doesn't press the fact that connecting this unit requires a line input on a car's head unit. This feature is rare on aftermarket stereos and nonexistent on factory ones. There are workarounds for that- FM or cassette adaptors, but they impose quality penalty, and this is not mentioned either. Sound quality eva;uation was limited to "it sounded good to us". I would expect some measurements.
  • "at the lowest compression rates"? Afterall, ripping a CD at 320kbps is a LOWER rate of compression than at 128kbps as it results in a larger file.

    People that like fuzzy sounding 64kbps mp3 can get lots on a 128MB flash card =)
  • Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates.

    Compression be damned, with a 100GB drive, arguments of MP3 vs. MD vs. Ogg Vorbis can be moot. You can rip all your music to wav files and still get almost 200 CD's worth on this thing! I think that ought to do, don't you?

    -Andrew
  • The canadian tariffs dont apply to standard hard drives of course because they would destroy the PC market. Standard drives are $1.5/gb. The tariffs of around $21/gb on other media dont apply.
  • Does standard onboard cheap IDE controllers provide hot-swapability?

  • 80db s/n? lousy! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @11:15PM (#3175811)
    quite quite low for modern DACs. even cheapie clamshell cd based mp3 players.

    guess it won't sound worse than an OEM head unit; but they really should have been closer to 90 than 80. oh well.
    • How important is the sound quality when you've got ALL THAT ROAD AND AIR NOISE! At least some of the higher end cars turn the volume down for you when the car stops.
      • depends on your car!

        when I drove a miata, 70db would be good enough - what a noisy car that was!

        I'm now driving a bmw 540i and the level of quiet in this car deserves much more than 80db. even 100db could be appreciated.

        so it all depends. and we're only talking about $10 in parts cost increase (taking a WAG) so its not like it would double the price or anything even close to that.


  • I know that it can't hold as much music as a hypothetical tricked out one of these dealies with a 100 gigger. But in particular:

    1. I can take it with me once I'm out of the car
    2. It fits in my pocket
    3. I can update the music contained within very quickly and easily.

    That is a big one right there. My Mp3 collection is constantly changing, and is rarely the same 3 days in a row(probably like a lot of hip young people out there). With iTunes I don't even need to update anything manually as it will download/erase to match my computer files as needed. I love this functionality. I can see myself getting one of these car players and one day deciding that I'd really like to be able to listen to this new song that I downloaded/ripped. My only recourse with this particular player would be to take it out and hook the hard disk up to my PC as a slave drive? Am I grokking this right? I suppose with the Rio Car player one could either bring in a laptop to transfer over USB(slow!) or perhaps wire up their car for 802.11b connectivity with their house/appartment(!!!!)but that would ultimately be a huge pain in the ass.

  • I can tell you from experience that hard drives to not last a long time in vehicles... And I always make sure the temparature is up to 55F before I power them up.
  • So when is someone going to come out with a portable Ogg Vorbis player?

    In theory, it should be possible to build one the same way one would have built one's own MP3 player just a few years ago.
  • Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates.

    Highly compressing your tunes leads to low bit rates. :)
    So, actually people who rip their tunes at the lowest-compression rates need the most storage space.

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