I've just found: www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6469667521.html
It solves the "how do I control it?" problem too, though how the head unit copes with displaying "CD 99" could be interesting.
It looks like it's about £450 in the UK with a 10Gb cartridge.
John
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Looks pricey when a 20gb MP3 player is £150-200.
I use such an MP3 with a not quite legal FM adaptor and it all works fine.
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The Phatbox has been around for a while and is a clever bit of kit. Some manufacturers re-badge it as their own - Volvo is one of them.
The other obvious alternative is an iPod and relevent adapter. If you have a car which can work with Denison's icelink they're excellent - they get round the 99 track limit simply by cycling round again. For example, if you're on Track 99 on a playlist when you move onto Track 100 the icelink will simply report it as track 1 again to the car stereo.
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£70 CD player (Panasonic and JVC each make one) that also plays WMA/MP3 files on CDs. You can get 10 albums onto one CD without too much compression. You'd need to be driving a lot, in a much better motor than mine to notice a real difference.
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Local yokel
Thinking just the same myself. Recently got rid of the radio/ cassette and fitted a Pioneer unit to my car which plays MP3 and WMA on CD. Bit of ripping and burning and I've a huge music selection on a handful of CDs. I normally listen to the radio, which is also excellent, and the quality on MP3, is fine for those times I want to listen to something else.
JS
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Can I just remind everyone that the digital music world does not (yet) belong to Apple? I'm mildly irritated by the lazy media adoption of 'iPod' as a generic term for an MP3 player, when there are so many (hundreds of) alternatives, most of which do not sport silly white headphones.
The same is true of iTunes - there are other legitimate MP3 sources, and most of them cost less. I subscribe to Emusic.com which provides 40 tracks/month for $10, or slightly less than £6. Most of their content is from independent labels, admittedly, but that's half the appeal - you can find really interesting material that high street record shops don't even bother to stock.
[/soapbox]
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It's true that the digital world does not belong to Apple but if you want to connect a portable MP3 player into a car in a neat way (i.e. so you can control it easily, use the steering wheel controls etc.) few solution exists for anything other than the iPod and even then only a limited selection of cars. The same problem exists with aftermarket CD or DVD based MP3 headunits - they frequently mess up the dash which is designed around the standard fit unit and don't work properly with secondary displays, steering wheels controls, integrated SatNav, trip computers etc.
If there was a standard communications interface then it would all be much easier.
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I don't know what the fuss is about with iPods and other similar players.
A hard-drive is completely the wrong concept for a portable player. They're fundamentally fragile items and one knock will kill them. The Zen Micro I had lasted about 2 months before it suffered a fatal hard drive failure and I was always very gentle with it. I've lost count of all the people I've known who've had to send their iPods and similar back to be repaired.
Now compact flash on the other hand has no moving parts. At the moment you'll struggle to get more than a couple of gig on one but they'll improve. Just a year ago 512mb was the limit. I can get about 20 albums on my 1gb Samsung player which is about 30 work-journeys worth. It's the size of a small pen-knife, weighs about 30 grams and will run for a fortnight on a single charge. You can throw it around with no worry about whether or not it'll survive and it'll fit in the little change pocket in your jeans. And don't tell me about software - plug one of these into your PC using the pop-out USB connector and it'll automatically appear as another drive. Copy music to and from it in seconds.
Compared to these things an iPod *is* like carrying round your entire CD collection. Give it a year or two and you'll be getting these things with 10-20gb.
As for the car... at the moment I have a CD changer which does its job, though I loved the MP3 CD player I had in my last car. A dozen albums to a CD and when you're done with that one just chuck in another. It was aftermarket but it worked well with the electrics in my 525.
----
Life is complex; it has real and imaginary parts.
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Don't confuse iTunes with iTunes Music Store (iTMS). You can use iTunes, which is an excellent free music player/organiser/cd ripper/burner, without the store; you could even use iTunes to manage mp3s from Emusic. Emusic sounds like a good deal, but I think part of iTMS's success rests on the relative freedom you get to burn mainstream music to cd and share it around or re-rip without DRM--in some cases you are freer than if you'd bought the cd itself. Apple has so far done a good job of fighting the music industry on that, given that their product is a mainstream one.
On a related note, does anyone know if there is a standard for cd changer input? Is it a standard socket and if not, how do I find out what sort I have without ripping the dash apart?
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"..part of iTMS's success rests on the relative freedom you get to burn mainstream music to cd and share it around or re-rip without DRM--in some cases you are freer than if you'd bought the cd itself."
Certainly concur with that. Sony have recently got themselves into an awful tangle with DRM that effectively puts spyware on your computer. Apple has an ongoing fight over pricing with the music moguls, who don't like the sight of their train running out of gravy...
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even with te 20G cartridge, I can't get all my CD's onto it
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I read often, only post occasionally
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Just get any hard disk MP3 player and rip your music to it in MP3 format.
I would recommend an ipod as the iTunes software really is the db's. Mine came with a dock which sits very neatly on the flat dash and I can see the display quite clearly.
I have an old Sony headunit and cd changer and tried for ages to find a way of connecting it (or any other music playing device). I tried cassette thingies but the Sony just ejected it straight away.
Next I tried an FM modulator that pumped FM directly into the aerial socket (totally legal) but that introduced a few weird whining noises and I also had to fit a switch to turn the modulator off when I wanted to listen to the radio.
Next I tried to input the lineout/headphone socket of the ipod directly into the head unit line inputs but the Sony wouldn't select and play it unless there was a cd playing in the cd changer !
Then I found someone on the internet who had created a cd of 'blank' tracks i.e. complete silence, to put into the changer, fooling the headunit that it was playing a cd and pugging the ipod output into the headunit instead of the changer.
Excellent. Top quality and no interference.
Just had to set the headunit to constantly 'repeat'.
Only downside is that I can't play other cd's in the changer. Not a bad tradeoff though I think, and if the kids bring their mp3 players in the car I can just plug the 3.5mm jack into their player !
I'd prefer an icelink and have the controls and display on the headunit (and inbuilt charging), but that would cost about £99.
My solution cost me a couple of quid !!
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My solution was to just replace the head-unit in my Audi for an Alpine MP3 compatible unit.
I can now fit about 15 albums on one disc using MP3pro compression at 96Kbps (CD transparency).
I wish the car makers would hurry up and make their standard single disc CD players MP3 compatible, BMW seem to have done this on the new 3 series.
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I replaced my Ford OE tape deck with a £90 Panasonic CD/MP3/WMA player and its been a godsend. With 10 CDs you have around 100 albums to select from and its easy to find what you want.
Much better sound quality than the Ford unit as well.
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