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Adding More Space to the Nomad Jukebox?
A member of the Anonymous Coward clan asks: "A Nomad Jukebox would be great with a 20 gig HD! I'm impatiently waiting for someone to confirm that it can be hacked by replacing the standard 6gb HD with a larger one." Has anyone tried this yet? With the popularity of digital music increasing, I don't think 6gb will be enough for some users (including me!).
The PJB-100, available from a variety of vendors (I think that thinkgeek advertises it on here) and the original seller here. WILL take a 20 GB hard drive. It also seems to be a better unit on the whole, certainly in terms of battery life.
I took out the old 4 gigger and dropped in a Toshiba 20. Once connected to its Windows application via USB, the thing formatted instantly and was ready for lots and lots of songs. Do keep in mind that the PJB-100 is not compatible with all IDE drives - just some IBM and Toshibas - without extensive modification.
I'd advise anyone looking for a truly useable portable music libary with lots and lots of capacity to check it out.
I'd presume it would be easy if:
* They're using a standard interface, prolly IDE. Likely as it would keep things cheaper.
* There's nothing terribly propietary on the drive itself. Formatting, some type of id blocks, etc.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Be forewarned that the Jukebox is already pretty slow, and adding two or three times as many songs to its index will only make matters worse. It's been reported that it takes about 2 minutes just to get a 12GB unit to finish booting.
I'm currently trying to hack the IR. Am dying to use my Palm as a playlist/remote control device... If anyone has any info on the IR controls, please drop me a line.
Eric
well, it wouldnt be useful to non-geeks, cause only a geek would be willing to open up his nomad, and perform surgery on it (swapping the hard drive, and any other changes necessary) :-D
and as far as who has more than 6gb, im on 12, and expect to hit 20 before the end of the month
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
how do you fit that in your car when your go driving around? you must have one hell of an adapter!
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
According to nomad world there will be some expansion kit in the future. Plus a car adapter (RF this time, not some crappy cassette tape), and a remote control (there's an IR receiver on the front of the nomad). I haven't opened mine up, as I like it and I'm not an EE by any stretch of the imagination.
6GB is a lot of space, even if you encode at 160kbps, as I do. There's about 1.5GB taken up by pre-encoded music, including readings of Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein, plus a lot of classical and a nice mix of other music. Since then I've put a good number of my CDs on it and I still have 2GB free.
Now for the real question: anyone hacking a USB interface to let me upload music?
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That said, my quick search on google didn't turn up much
Most Volkswagon factory stereos have (since ~93) had an 1/8" stereo input jack on them... cassette, radio, and input for the line-out from your CD or (now) Nomad. The best of both worlds. No crappy tape adapter, no crappy RF (both of these are severely bandwidth limited compared to CD).
I have a probably ~6GB of mp3s (after my last purge), and 80% of those I wouldn't need with me in the car...
Jon Katz - the worlds biggest waste of time and bandwith.
Where did I search?
o Google. Nothing. Zilch. Just lots of reviews.
o mp3board.com. No discussion of hacking.
o deja.com. Useless these days, nothin' doin'.
So I'm curious, make that *very* curious. Does anyone have one of these? Opened it up? Examine the hard drive? I have a laptop, and it can take multiple hard drives...perhaps if I could mount the hard drive from the PJB, get a bigger one, copy the old files to the big one...?
Has *anyone* hacked around with this beast? Can you imagine the potential of a 25GB (my laptop drive) or bigger MP3 player?
Post any info please!
I checked out that puppy.. gee 700 samolians! The Neo 35 I bought from a vendor (I am no spammer) cost me @$250.00, you add your har drive. So I am adding a 20 Gigger! Complete with backlit LCD screen, IDE interface (You slap this puppy in a drive bay and copy the file that way) Car Bay, remote.. I am going to modify the car bay to be both a home and car bay. I thought the price was pretty good, considering I was going to build my own from scratch, It would cost me more. There's a neat controller board design out that's based on a third generation 8051 stype processor, cpld interface to hard drive.. but to build the board it would cost @ $150.00, then add the price of building a nice case w/dispaly (the board does not support an LCD yey, you need to design your own interface and code) So I think the neo 32 is a great deal. just search the net for it if you are interested. Be carefull some high rolling yee-haw dealers charge much more than what I paid for this puppy. Good Luck! And the answer to your question is you don't know untile you try. There's no way of knowing if the opeating system on your puppy will only see the geometry of a gigger.. the only way to try is slap a different drive on and see if it's recognized!
I think he's got a good question. Notice your google search didn't show anything?
I'm not sure this has been done before - there really is no information out there that I could find, but its a great idea. It probably just isn't useful to non-geeks because who has more than 6GB of mp3s?
This is pretty niche, but it would be incredible if it worked...