Dang's Weblog

So, I’m vaguely in the market for a built-in mp3 player for my car. Ideally, I’d get a Rio Car (formerly known as an Empeg), but they were discontinued when Rio was aquired by S3 and then split up. Now, if you’re lucky, you can find one on ebay for tons of money. There aren’t really any viable alternatives out there. iRiver is supposedly going to start producing these some time, but all anyone knows about that is a press release from a month ago that they’re finishing a fab to build chips for them.

So, here’s my list of non-negotiable requirements.

• In dash controls
• Random, non-repeating play of entire contents of disk, with re-randomization
• Enough drive space (>20 GB)
• Can start playing automatically when the car is started
• Does not need to be stopped before the car is stopped (ie, stops automatically when the car is stopped)
• Can be removed and brought into the house so I can upload music
• On-screen display of artist and title from the tags on the file, not from some filename

And, here’s my list of bonuses.

• Plays Ogg Vorbis
• Plays Flac
• Is completely contained in the dash
• Is also a head unit (ie, contains radio/CD/volume/etc.)
• On the fly playlist creation
• On the fly play by artist, album, genre, or year
• Shows up as a mass storage device when plugged into the computer

Here’s my use cases for an in-car mp3 player.

• I get in my car. I put the key in the ignition. I start the car. Music plays, picking up where it left off.
• I’m in the car, driving, and listening to music. I arrive at my destination, and turn the car off. The mp3 player correctly powers down, and remembers where it was and what it was playing
• I’m in the car, driving, and listening to my random list. I decide I want to play a particular song or album. I select the song or album, by scrolling through the avaliable lists. I play the song or album. When I’m done, I want to return to the original random selection that was playing. I should be able to easily do this, without having to re-randomize.
• I buy a new CD, and rip it on my computer. I want this new CD in the car. I extract the unit from the car, ideally by hitting the equivilent of an eject button. I take the unit inside, and plug it into my computer via USB. It shows up as a hard drive. I drag the music from the new CD onto it. I disconnect it, and return it to the car. The new music is automatically randomized into the remainder of my current random playlist, and will be automatically included in any future randomizations.
• I’m in the car, listening to music. I pick up a friend, who hands me a CD and says “This is a great CD, you should listen to it.”. I put the CD into the CD player. The mp3 player stops playing, and the CD plays. When I eject the CD, the mp3 player picks up where it left off.

In general, what I want out of my car mp3 player is to “Just Work*” It should be optimized for playing all my music randomly, because that’s what I most want it to do. It should be capable of playing a particular artist, album, or song, because that’s the other way I play music. It should be able to pause it’s random list and come back to it, because I most care about the random list. It should start when the car starts, and stop when it stops. It should be preempted by the CD player, the same way the radio is now. If someone was to come up with this, I’d be willing to pay 50% more than I would pay for an equivilent portable player, although it should be possilbe to make them cheeper, due to the lack of a size requirement. Please? Someone?

* “Just Work” ™ is a registered Trade Mark of Project Utopia

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