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The Docking Station Meets The MP3 Player
crazyj writes: "SSI America announced that they are shipping the new Neo 35 MP3 Player which can hold up to 81GB of MP3s. The device, which comes with multiple docking stations (for car, home and PC), can use any 3.5" IDE hard drive, and can even be purchased without a drive if you wish to add your own. The PC dock connects to the IDE bus, so hopefully (but the FAQ deosn't say for sure) it will work with Windows, Linux and Macs. A USB dock is available as well. Finally, I can get my whole MP3 collection into my car!" About $300 gets you player, sans disk -- not cheap, but perhaps the flexibility is worth it.
You can get the equivalent unit at carplayer.com. It's rebranded as the CPM25, but it's the same thing, albeit cheaper.
My roommate has the player, and it works rather nicely. Some people have had problems with some hard drives which are more finicky about power in the car, so a slower spinning (less power drain) hard drive would be the best. Laptop hard drives would also be good, as they have better shock protection.
MP Trip, Mambo X or others. I have MP Trip, it works nicely in my car. I can use it everywhere. It runs on 2 AA batteries for 5 hours.
this device does exist in USB form. another company is selling it as the "napdeck" and has the USB version available on their purchase page.
Isn't this just a napdeck? www.napdeck.com Go here if you want it with a USB docking bay as another option.
They look identical...
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
looking at it, i can see program, select, play, stop, and one big button. that one big button had better do a lot, because i wouldn't want to be navigating through ZZ Top music when i want to go to Ace of Base.
- To install/remove tracks, the device must be plugged into your computer. IDE device, which means a total shutdown and restart each time. Yes, bulk copies are *much* quicker than serial or whatever, but just adding a single song at a time would be tedious.
Get a USB HD enclosure. $60-$80. Leave the cover off and just use the 40 pin cable. It's not as fast, but it allows you to add IDE devices on the fly. If you want the speed, spend a little more and do the same thing with firewire.
pornking
Specifically for the empeg, though, the manual states operating temperatures as "5 C to 55 C" and non-operating temperatures as "-20 C to 60 C".
And in general, the empeg is just damned cool. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
-=-=-=-=-
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Personally, ymmv, but I just use my notebook to fill up my rio, and then use the rio most of the time for short trips - I live in front of a computer, so putting new stuff on the rio is easy, and I have automated scripts to fill it with talk radio & news in the morning before I wake up. If I'm booking for a long trip, I can just connect a notebook directly. The rio has the advantage of not risking damage under, uh, "spirited" driving conditions :). Nor do I have to worry about leaving it in the dash and attracting attention from the criminal element.
I've nuked out a few CDs on long road trips, especially on Highway 101 from Oregon to California, where the twists going 20 mph faster than the limit can really smear the disk surface.
What I want is a non-movable storage system. Flash or something, so I can take a stick of 72 hours driving music and NPR for those long rides to catch the surf.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
First, IDE hard drives do not fare too well in a bumpy car.
Get your suspension looked at. I've used my laptop on many occassions without a single problem. Besides, drives are cheap -- buy the cheapest slowest one you can find and toss it if it goes bad. Or better yet, get a decent one and keep sending it back for warranty. Also, if there were a decent amount of RAM you could spin up the drive, buffer most of a song and spin down. Any MP3 design I've tinkered with uses this since parked drive heads can almost survive anything. Spinup times are about 5 seconds tops.
Second, does anyone really need 80 GB of MP3 storage?
You may not, but that doesn't mean that someone else doesn't either. Personally I have about 8G and that's quite a bit. If it's too much space for you, buy a smaller drive. This is just specmanship.
I bought one of these units as well. Some of my observations:
/. readers it should not be THAT hard to decipher.
1) The rocker/control button sucks! It is hard to control with the front panel rocker.
2) The remote interface button is no better. (it is a steel nub instead of the fat plastic rocker on the main unit, but it is still mounted to a VERY skinny plastic piece that WILL break.
3) The remote control is decent and is really the ONLY way to control the unit with any type of sanity.
4) There seems to be a bit of whine when the unit is first powered on (from the hard drive spinning up) and you will most likely want an engine noise power line filter. (got mine from crutchfield)
5) The documentation DOES suck, but for most
6) Power is a bit of a problem. it requires 12volts at 3amps to spin up a standard desktop hard drive so keep that in mind.
7) The firmware updates have proven buggy. Some of the updates give REALLY cool features, but most introduce bugs. Example: If you are playing a playlist in random mode and turn the unit off, it will not remember the random mode once power is applied.
8) Hardware can be a bit touchy. I had to send my unit back to compgeeks once because it simply would not power up. this was apparently a defect in the early units that has since been addressed.
9) Although they say Maxtor hard drives are flaky, mine has a 40 gig Maxtor and seems to be just fine. YMMV.
10) The start up time has been GREATLY reduced with the later firmware upgrades. about 7 seconds from on to playing!
11) The remote display (tethered) plugs into the top of the slide out part of the unit, so you have to pull the cable each time you want to bring the unit in the house. and the plug is a small IDE like cable with a pretty tight receptor.
All in all i am VERY happy with the sound quality of the unit and the overall value is wonderful! Would i recommend it for the novice? probably not. But for anyone with a bit of tolerance and creativity? absolutely!
(stolen from DaBum) I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
First, IDE hard drives do not fare too well in a bumpy car. Anyone who has ever tried to do anything like this an an automobile can attest to this fact.
You should probably gather some more real-world data before making that assumption. The Maxtor 20 Gb drive in this installation:
http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/cplayer.html
...has spent ~5000 miles in the back of a Porsche 968 with a 7-year-old suspension, ~4000 miles in the back of a Corvette, and over 1000 miles in the back of a Honda Accord with no hard-drive problems at all.
Even if it died tomorrow, I'd stand by the assertion that HD reliability is not a real problem. I think that drive cost $250 when I bought it -- it's probably less than $180 now. A lot cheaper than 10,000 miles' worth of gas, that's for sure.
Second, does anyone really need 80 GB of MP3 storage?
Yes. To many people, variety is as important as content.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
$48,000 per year to keep this thing "fresh"
Nope. The calculation should be 12*$50, not 3200*15.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Has anyone tried the Cybiko MP3 player, much less OWN a cybiko? They kind of remind me of some PDA geared for teenagers, and the MP3 player is free with it.
Of course, I am going to be cautious. I bought a Vlink expecting to talk with all sorts of people, but found out(after buying anotehr one) that the practical range is about 20 feet TOPS.
Vibration (random [RMS]) 0.67 G for horizontal
0.56 G for vertical
From:
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/prod/ ds75gxp40gv.htm
With CD-R's costing less than a buck apiece, and CD burners coming out that can do 12x, does it really make sense to buy a big, relatively expensive piece of equipment that you have to install in your car and hook up to the computer? I don't know about you guys, but it's pretty damn easy and cheap to make audio CD's now.
I'd be more concerned with shocking the drive. A "normal" 3.5" HDD drive is NOT designed for a laptop, and many drives don't yet park their heads on ramps when they're turned off (i.e., the heads rest on a textured region of the media when the disks are spun down). Jarring the drive too hard smacks the heads right on the media, which is usually not a Good Thing (tm).
Gimmie a link?
My laptop's HD is degrading semi-gracefully, it'd be nice to be able to keep some stuff on another drive, and laptop hds are expensive
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
If you look at the bottom of the FAQ, you'll see this:
Where can I buy the Neo 35?
The Neo 35 can currently be purchased online here. It should soon be available in stores. We have stock, so you order now, we ship now.
As you can see, the order link is broken!
__
- Not an SDMI device (i.e., you can copy the MP3s from your unit to a friend's computer)
- Doesn't use a proprietary filesystem (i.e., you can upgrade it yourself, with any laptop IDE hard drive)
- The units you can buy directly from ssitech come in larger sizes than the Nomad (up to 20 GB)
- Good price, compared to the Nomad.
- You can store _anything_ on the drive, it doesn't have to be MP3s. You can use it as a portable hard drive if you like.
Anyone?I modded the Troll Investigation and I got
How are they regulating the temperature of the devices? A while back, the big problem with car MP3 players was that HDDs don't like extreme temperatures. I'm especially curious because they say you can use any normal 3.5" HDD.
Am I going to have to move south just to listen to MP3s in my car this winter?
Looks like a removable drive bay.
And tastes like chicken!
If this is attached by the IDE connector wouldn't that mean you have to reboot the machine everytime you want to add song to the machine?
I guess nice thing is that it is a IDE connector so you wont need any special drivers
I know why they do it - cheaper to deal with customer support when you know you have only a fixed set of things to deal with. But if you can do customer support for WinDoze, you ought to be able to handle swapping a few hard drives around :-)
Still prefer the portable Jukebox one ThinkGeek sells, but I live in Manhattan - no car. Very glad to see more hard-disk devices anyway - I remember telling Sony engineers to use hard disks for music download years ago, and the response was "We don't make hard disks. We make MD." :-(
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Klactovedestene!
It doesn't seem to mention anything on the site, but I wonder if there's anything in the design to cushion the hard drive from the bumps and vibration you get in a car.
I've lost a hard drive before from bumps in the road when transporting my PC around. Since then I've been a lot more careful, making sure the case is cushioned with something to cut out the worst of the bumps.
It seems that the unit is mounted in the dashboard, and could get some nasty jolts when going over speed bumps etc. I know hard drive shock resistance has improved over the years, but this could still be a problem?
Tis not vaporware. I got my NEO-35 awhile back, bout late Aug00 from Computer Geeks (They seem to be out of stock now). I paid $312 w/ shipping. I love it! I had a 233mmx Computer in my truck that ran DOS (also Win98 for networking). It took awhile to boot and worked well. I switched to the NEO-35 and will never go back. Not even sure if I will still buy the Awia cdc-mp3. I have my 20gig mp3 collection neatly stored in playlists and dir's It take about 5-10 to get my music playing. I LOVE IT! I can make those long trip w/o hearing the same song twice or switching radio stations! The docking feature is great. I can pull the unit out of teh truck and place in the computer dock (must power off first) and add more songs. http://www.carplayer.com shows they have some. I plan on getting the remote dash unit soon. The only problem I found is that the unit doesn't fit in many dashes. It 9 1/2" long. I have mine sitting on top of my dash. Also becareful of leaving it in the sun. The LCD turns a blue color if it get too hot. A few mins in A/C and it was fine again.
They have another link that appears to work.. I haven't ordered one (yet) So cant tell for sure
www.ssiamerica.com/ecom/itm00001.htm&l t;/a>
air and light and time and space
Bought one three months ago from Computer Geeks -- http://www.compgeeks.com/ ; now they just have the Neo-25, a smaller one (laptop HD vs 3.5).
The Neo-35 is neat. Comes with a cheapy case, a cute credit-card-sized IR remote, a computer bracket, a standalone bracket, everything the site says.
What it doesnt say:
- Documentation is PATHETIC. Choppy English isnt the worst part, it's just brief to the point of nonexistent. Imagine a a pointy-haired boss asking you the innards of a RPC like CORBA in two minutes or less -- you'd give him a total whirlwind speech, then run away, right? That's the documentation. (Maybe it's improved -- it's on the website.)
If you read SlashDot, you'll probably get it okay, but this is not a give-it-to-mom type gift!
- To install/remove tracks, the device must be plugged into your computer. IDE device, which means a total shutdown and restart each time. Yes, bulk copies are *much* quicker than serial or whatever, but just adding a single song at a time would be tedious.
- You can upgrade the BIOS of the device by copying a magic file to the top-level directory, there's already an update or two which provide lots of good features.
- I really like installing my own drive. They're cheap enough just buy a spare every four months and swap them. They're IDE/Win95: you can dup your entire CD collection in minutes. Drop one? Who cares! I've played with the Compaq jukebox, and it totally rocks, but I was cheap...
- Overall, if you know this is a budget device, it's a good deal. Hardware quality is good, I just havent really had time to mess with the it so maybe I'm just fulla hooey. Your mileage will vary.
At that point, you might as well also swap MP3's with the hot chick in the mazda at the stoplight on your way to work.
He loves his. The only problem is that they are longer than a normal car stereo, so not all cars will work. You may have to do some rearranging.
He's using his with a normal desktop drive, and so far it's been fine. I think he's had it a few months.
.ogg files are Ogg Vorbis audio files. Ogg Vorbis is conceptually similar to mp3, in that it compresses audio data by discarding "inaudible" material, but is a different algorithm, and thus not covered by the mp3 patents. It is open-source, also. OV's designers claim that it should scale to low bitrates better than mp3, and should provide at least equal, possibly better, sound quality at similar bit rates. I listen to both mp3 and OV using WinAmp (there is a decoder plug-in for WinAmp at the OV site, and one for XMMS also for Linux users), and I don't really hear a significant difference, but I like the patent-free, open-source nature of OV, so I think I will be using it instead of mp3 for my own CD ripping.
https://www1508.boca15-verio.com/napdec/purchase_1 .php3
$249 for "pc deck" version
$359 for USB version (with remote and carrying case)
$59 for a car dash or home stereo bay
$69 for wired-remote panel (i.e. trunk-mount the sucker)
... no hard drive though ($139 for 20GB)
Manual is here.
The Neo PC version w/o hard drive is "$309, special offer." Usually about $50 more, I think. They offer a $400 model with a 10GB drive, and a $450 version with 20GB.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Too bad it doesn't have Vorbis support. I've started encoding my entire CD collection into Vorbis format (http://www.vorbis.com).
.ogg extension on your music or the player will try to play it as an mp3 and it will give up.
I encoded Vivaldi's Four Seasons into 128kbps Vorbis format, and with studio headphones and a soundblaster Live, you cannot hear ANY flaws in the music. It has full, rich bass and nice clean highs. MP3 sucks compared to Vorbis. Vorbis is also GPL'd, and the encoder (oggenc) works with grip just fine. In fact, Mandrake 7.2 comes with it already installed. There are winamp and xmms plugins for it too. Just make sure you have a
I must have a Vorbis player for my car, I wonder how hard it would be to add support for it.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Most drives are already built to withstand some pretty crazy g's, both while operating and powered down. And, there are currently a lot of mp3 players available for cars, so they've either solved the damping question or realize it's not an issue. A popular example is here. An another one here.
(By the way, looks like Empeg is being aquired by S3. Yowzaaa.
Jason
Very strange... I've been researching the Neo for three days, and I finally broke down and ordered one from SSI today. I check Slashdot a while later ... and there it is!
One thing I did learn--the Neo's pretty persnickety about the hard drive you put in it. Maxtor and Western Digital drives (apparently) draw too much power to spin up. SSI recommends Seagate, Quantum, and IBM drives. I just ordered the Neo with the drive built in. It was actually a decent price on the drive ($150 for a 30 gigger) and I figured they'd know what would be most reliable.
If anyone's thinking of buying one, the best resources I've found are:
http://www.barncow.com/neo/
The Unofficial Neo Web Site
Has instructions, links to the new firmware, and a very active messageboard. A great site--well maintained and very informative.
http://bboard1.mp3.com/hardware/liststory/?topic_i d=38&month=200008
The Neo "User Reviews" at MP3.com
A pretty good forum with real-world performance reports.
I don't know about your car, but mine is perfectly capable of sitting in it's garage without me in it. In fact, it does just this for approximatly 12 hours a day, more than enough time to keep my mp3 collection in sync.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Very strange...
I've been researching the Neo for three days, and I finally broke down and ordered one from SSI today. I check Slashdot a while later ... and there it is!
One thing I did learn--the Neo's pretty persnickety about the hard drive you put in it. Maxtor and Western Digital drives (apparently) draw too much power to spin up. SSI recommends Seagate, Quantum, and IBM drives. I just ordered the Neo with the drive built in. It was actually a decent price on the drive ($150 for a 30 gigger) and I figured they'd know what would be most reliable.
If anyone's thinking of buying one, the best resources I've found are:
The Unofficial Neo Web Site
http://www.barncow.com/neo/
Has instructions, links to the new firmware, and a very active messageboard. A great site--well maintained and very informative.
The Neo "User Reviews" at MP3.comi d=38&month=200008
http://bboard1.mp3.com/hardware/liststory/?topic_
A pretty good forum with real-world performance reports.
I want a car MP3 player with wireless ethernet that will sync it's MP3 collection with my home (and office for that matter) computer whenever it's in range. No manual labour at all, just a no-hassle, up to date collection of the music I own in the three places I spend the most time (home/car/office).
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I've been tempted by devices like this since the empeg player that came out over a year ago. The problem is that I live in MN, where in the winter it gets damn cold, and I beleive HD's have to operate at above 32 degrees(?). Also I'm not sure at what temp HD's can be damaged when they're not on. When it can get down to -30 in MN once or twice a winter season, I'm not if I like that risk. Does anyone have operating temperature info for HD's?
Although with the price at 300 bucks, even without a HD, it starts to get tempting to use it in the home theatre...
It's already accounted for in the 128kbps.
700meg at 128kbps ~= 12.4 hours.
81gig at 128kbps ~= 23.4 weeks.
I can see it now!
"This is a great compilation disc! What's it called?"
[Showing the hard drive] "'The Eighties'..."
Jay (=
(this is not exact), but
Say the typically mp3 is 5 megs and is 3 minutes of sound.
(((80000 megs / 5 megs) * 3 minutes) / 60 minutes) = 800 hours of none stop music.
Say you have a decent track to work, say 2 hours round trip and work 5 days a week (I know this isn't exact!!
(2 * 5) / 800 = 80 days without hearing the same song twice.
Or roughly 2-3 months without ever hearing the same song twice. If you listen to each song say 2 times, you can go roughly a half a year without "reloading"
On disk, you can roughly fit 16000 songs, say each cd has an average of 10 songs per disk, that is 1600 CDs!
Say you "reload" ever six months with new cds, that is 3200 CD per year. Roughly each CD costs $15 a peice, that is $48,000 per year to keep this thing "fresh"
$48,000 + $300 (for unit) + $300 for 80 gig hard drive = $48,600 or (rounding up) $50,000 per year just on MUSIC!! This does not firgure in the cost of the car stero system, spearks, wiring, etc... (this also assumes one doesn't have access to company or college T1 line and napster)
Roughly this thing costs $137 dollars per day to maintain, or $6 per hour! This does not even account for the price need to maintain the car it is installed in (gas, battery, oil, etc..)
Say the average worker makes $12 per hour working at a factory, this would require 12 hour work days 7 days a week, just to pay for this! Not to menation food, rent or other funcation required to just live.
In closing, I would like to state that this device is nothing more then progranda being pushed on the masses to converted them into factory slavery. The elites vaule the "golden age" of the industrial revoulation and are willing to use this device to manuplate the general public into work camps. Mind control at it's finest gentlemen.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
and by the way, napdeck.com has a USB model on their purchase page.
neo35 doesn't seem to be offering it.
First, IDE hard drives do not fare too well in a bumpy car. Anyone who has ever tried to do anything like this an an automobile can attest to this fact. Flash memory would be a much better (but more costly) choice for automobile MP3's, or even better, Kenwood has a car CD deck with a built-in MP3 decoder so you can burn CD-R's with MP3's.
Second, does anyone really need 80 GB of MP3 storage? I've got around 2 Gigs on my HDD now and I've never even listened to some of those. If you figure that a typical MP3 file encoded at 128kbps will use about 1 MB/min of audio, that's 80,000 minutes of music. That works out to 55.6 continuous days of music. Seems a bit excessive to me.
Now that we've already debunked the portability issue, wouldn't it be more practical (and cheaper) to buy a new hard drive and a nice set of PC speakers.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Isn't .5 CD/hr (1 hr music, listen twice?) * 15 $/CD = 7.50 $/hr an easier calculation? yes, its expensive.
Lets see, a complaint that $300 + a HD is just not cheap for your entire music collection in one device. I paid $1200 for that ability with the empeg, and ahve never regretted it. Having all the music in one device has so many more advantages even over MP3 CD's.
Look at all of you.
:P .
This completely applicable and fully functional device is released. Hack it away, install Linux, do whatever. But quit bitching about features that it's missing. Why? Because if it had those features, you would be damned well bitching about the price.
Be content and show your support for the progress of technology towards our realm of function--something relatively inexpensive and *not* created for the lowest common denominator.
To those that disagree?
Um yea, the story is gone.
Maybe Rob got a call from the network admin with a polite message saying "stop slashdoting me and we will give you a free unit"
I think Rob could use the "slash dot effect" as a form of legal blackmale
"Ok listen Sony; PS2; I know you got em, hand one over by sundown or I am linking to your 24 slot memory card at dusk. On a friday morning. And the only other stories that will be posted will be from Katz"
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
it looks like this is being licensed from some manufacturer.
the exact same unit is for sale as the "napdeck" at www.napdeck.com.
Don't worry about it. I use a notebook all the time in my car, and I'm in New Brunswick, Canada - bitchin cold in winter. The main thing is that the CPU and drive kick up enough heat to keep themselves in operating range. Just watch for condensation when you move it between temperature extremes. The LCD gets slow though when it gets really cold.. Although, I'm assuming that one of the advantages of this device is that you take it with you, preventing a lengthy cold spell.
The really big thing is that hopefully this will put some downward pressure on the stratospheric empeg prices, because those look really sweet, they're just stupid expensive right now (on par with a notebook pc just for mp3s in the car, sans nice interface). Nevermind getting one to work with your existing head unit is a bitch, as they don't play CDs.
Personally, ymmv, but I just use my notebook to fill up my rio, and then use the rio most of the time for short trips - I live in front of a computer, so putting new stuff on the rio is easy, and I have automated scripts to fill it with talk radio & news in the morning before I wake up. If I'm booking for a long trip, I can just connect a notebook directly. The rio has the advantage of not risking damage under, uh, "spirited" driving conditions :). Nor do I have to worry about leaving it in the dash and attracting attention from the criminal element.
Kudos
..don't panic