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Rio Car (Empeg) Sounds Like History
An Anonymous Coward writes: "An unoffical announcement on the empeg BBS (home of their finatical user base) is that SONICblue's current aftermarket car linux product, the Rio Car (formerly the empeg Car Player) has been EOL'd. While it remains the most advanced car player available, there was not enough demand to keep that group profitable. It will continue to be sold through their e-stores (Non-USA and USA) until inventory is exhausted.
This was/is the ultimate in car stereo for MP3 playback. Disappointing."
For the average user the $999 price tag is a little steep whe you compare it to an $300 AIWA mp3 cd player.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
For a mere cost of $1000-1900, why weren't people buying these in droves? Seriously, while cool, I'd just buy a car stereo that plays mp3 cds and burn some CDs. It's a cool idea what they did, it's just way overpriced.
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
These players ROCK. I have a 60GB model and I better go get another one before they are all out. I can't believe that they EOL'd it. Don't have time to post a witty comment here,.. I gotta go buy another one for my other car.
--Aaron
Looking at their "summer specials", a 30 GB player costs $1499.. Thats way too much for anyone to pay
how much time do you spend in your car ? What would require you to need to play 30GB music in one trip ? The idea of having this sorta player is nice, very nice, but the cost is just too much.
If they had been able to make it below $1000, then
they might still have a shot.
$1499 is my insurance for the year, I'm better off buying a mp3-cd player that fits in my deck for $300-400, and just carry a bunch of MP3 cd's with me.
Considering it cost $1000 for the cheapest one, why wouldn't I just buy a laptop with a decent sound card? Hell, my car isn't even worth $1000. I'd use an old P/133 in the trunk before I spent this much on a Rio Car Player. I mean it's a car. The sound in a car is bound to pretty much suck since you're out there driving anyway. How is any car audio worth this much unless you are a truck driver and spend more time in the cab than anywhere else in the world?
I do not have a signature
I had wanted an in-car mp3 player for the longest time, but once they started making totally-portable playes with 4+gigs of space on them, I prefer them much better. Right now I have an archos jukebox and plug it into my car stereo which has a aux-in plug in the deck. (and yes, I bought a new deck unit just so that I could have an aux-in to plug my mp3 player into). The unit is totally portable, so I can plug it into my stereo at home, in my car, or at a party at my friends place. I feel this is is a more convenient (and cheaper) solution than the in-car units.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. I had planned to buy a nice high-end portable mp3 player for my car, back when Napster was Napster. Now I have serious questions about the validity of the whole mp3 format. The RIAA has said time and again it wont use them, it wants a more "secure" form of digital music. Without confidence in the viability of mp3's, the players will not do well.
Sickman's spinfusor catches Anonymous Coward by surprise.
Do any of these things play oggs?
Not wanting to risk patent infringement suits causing me problems, I removed all of my mp3s and re-ripped everything as ogg vorbis files. Does anything out there play them? I'd love to have an ogg player that can replace my measly 10-disc changer.
Use MSFT's AutoPC. It plays back .wma files as well as .mp3s.
.wma files compress tighter than .mp3 with no drop in quality.
A side benefit is that
this really sucks, i've got a 40gig empeg MKII and love it. i've been wondering how long it will last before i start having problems with the hard drives but it's been rock solid over the last year. still, i've wondered when the day will come that i'll have to replace it or just want to upgrade.. i certaintly hope that if any company picks up the flames they will keep it open (and linux based). i'm not familiar if all the empeg source was under the gpl or just kernel mods, but it would be nice if any remaining closed code was opened..
Car audio is funny; look at the fact, for example, that many low-end cars still come with tape players. In cars, people want audio that is simple, but works. I think that the general pulic would never be crazy about transfering music to their car... Plus you can't listen to Imus on it.
That, or EOL simply means that somthing much cooler is coming soon!
I'm aware of the alternatives below. Anything else out there of interest?
-CDR/CDRW players from Aiwa, etc.
-PhatNoise (damn thing still isn't available)
http://www.phatnoise.com/products/
-Route66 project
http://www.anders.com/projects/route66/
http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/cj510/
Looks pretty freaking rad, but is it coming out? the website says "Summer 2001"...looks like it needs to be updated one way or another.
Anyone have any insight on this company?
I remember signing up to be notified when my name hit the top of the list to be able to purchase one of these.
I never heard anything.
It seems to me like the people driving the MP3 craze are actually people who can't afford to buy CDs, especially when 9 out of 12 tracks suck (people like me). It also seems to me that people dealing in MP3s are technically adept... adept enough not to buy a specific, specialty product when a general product like a laptop will suffice. It also seems that most people who buy cars are also old enough to not know how to operate most MP3 players. In any case, it seems like the margins for this product are infinitely small. So how does this company expect MP3 users to afford or actually choose to purchase this product? I wonder who does the market research for this kind of thing.
w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
I thought long and hard before I coughed up the mere $300 for the AIWA MP3 player. Sure, it only holds one ISO9660 disk at a time, but that's 15-18 albums, better than most changers. And I keep a stash of ISO disks under my visor, making for more than 10 GB. And it plays VBR encoded tracks at my preferred higher bitrates.
Scrolling to find a track on a HD with 4,000 tracks would a pain on the freeway too.
Downside is that the AIWA is the *ugliest* thing around; It fits in with my old pickup though.
MS Word has an excellent spell-check feature. You should try it.
Now what would be COOL would be a car player that played more than just mp3's...like one that would play .ogg and .wma files, too.
Wouldn't that be spiffy?
dont forget it looked awful ,looking like someone made it out of radioshack parts and a home electronics kit, gimme a tft screen with extra funky goodies and i might of bought it
asthestics people asthetics!
Better would be to get an SBC that supports Linux, throw on a microdrive, add an 802.11b card, and then write a set of scripts that rsync to your home MP3 DB when you get in range of the access point (and after you exchange some cryptographic keys, of course). You can then use the apmd stuff to sleep your machine after the transfer.
I planned on using an old Palm IIIx and a serial cable for the GUI. PalmAMP works really well (for my purposes, anyway). Of course, it doesn't beat the Empeg's really fancy display. It's very nice. But worth an extra $500? Probably not.
Bad to see them go. Hopefully, they'll keep their software on the Net so others can play with it still.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
hmm suspect that they just didnt want the expense of makeing the units
lets face it as soon as they where taken over they had lots of money and no motivation to keep selling the product
they did the development on the homePNA systems so got alot of revenue through development work
but what really killed them was that ARM went out and did them an core that they could use to do MP3 and WMA decode in the RIO 800 so its mostly hardware now compared to a mostly software solution
like other things the funtionality it got moved into hardware
regards
john jones
p.s. check out the photo of taco on the BBS
p.p.s. ed I am writeing a compiler for Xscale (-;
From geek.empeg.com - "A key design feature is that the car player uses software CODEC's and as such is not tied in to any particular format. Version 1.1 of the player includes both Microsoft WMA and raw WAV support. We also have the option to introduce AAC if the demand arises. The car player, even the Mk.1 version, is not a product that is expected to become obsolete any time soon!"
Hmm, maybe one should think first, and speak later..
Any audiophile who is willing to spend $2000 on a car stereo will NOT go the mp3 route, because they sound like CRAP. Yea, they sound fine coming out of your $10 headphones, but amplify that signal by 800watts/channel, and pump that through some JL or Infinity speakers, and it doesn't sound nearly as good as a cd would.
It doesn't surprise me that they are EOL'ing it, because it tried to serve a niche market in a niche market (rich tech-savvy people with no ear)
Need to get away?
Adirondack Vacations
I guess people aren't into spending $1000 for a radio
//m
Why they didn't make a model like this one that plays burned CDs is beyond me. If I was going to put a 60 gig hard drive in my car it better do a lot more than play MP3 files.
$999? Kiss my ASS.
I just bought Aiwa's $349 mp3 cd player (with AM/FM and Auxiliary input)
Reads cdr's, cdrw's, this thing , Rio player looks like a fsking Joke to me.
a built in HD? give me a break, kiddies.
I can stash 2-300 songs (at 128k and higher br) per cd which take me 5 minutes to burn.
Hell, when a friend likes one of the songs, I GIVE THEM THE CD.
Rio, go screw. Your product blows. Most 'advanced' mp3 player? Please. Not even an AM radio built in.
One actually did try to get to that site but it was /.'ed for one pretty quickly. One instead went to the product homepage and found nothing other than it played mp3 files.
One would think that if the manufacturer was going to add features that they would put it on the product page in case one wanted to actually consider buying the product.
Yeah, right. It isn't and wasn't /.ed at all.
"Finatical" ? ... my current theory is that it's a cross between "fanatical" and "financial"... so, perhaps a valid description of rabid MBA candidates...
09
BTW, is it easy to pull out? I'd hate to have a $1K device in my car that's easy to steal.
Oh yeah, the hard disk can hold as much music as 100 CDs. So you can only fit 10 hours of listening onto a single CD. I guess with 60 gigs you can drive around for about a month without going home to change your, uh, music files. But would you really want to?
I tried to go to the announcement instead of the empeg home page, it appears. Nevertheless, not updating the product home page to show such expanded functionality was either a dumb move or signs of impending death.
it appears that there is only a client for windows released with this baby. utter lameness.
all i can say to the Rio Car is, buh bye!
Seriously though, they should have realized that a CD-MP3 player would have blown them out of the water. Even a little further down the road (pardon the pun), cars will probably have some kind of wireless thingy to listen to streams.
Just my $.02.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you less.
...in a few weeks. Here is a link with pictures. It features in dash 6.4" LCD touchscreen, DVD, GPS (via VMware), MP3s, 5" LCD's in the headrests, integrated PSOne, etc... It currently runs Gnome. See the pictures on the page. It's a homebrew project costing much less than emPeg.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I know it's an unusual idea not to announce new features before they reach a consumer release, but that's the wierd kind of ethics we chose.
WMA and WAV are currently present only in test versions of the product. They will be available to the wider userbase in about a week.
We can support other formats if the demand arises (oh, nobody here bothered to mention the part of the announcement which said "software development will continue, with a major new release due shortly").
We've looked at Ogg, but we need to see an optimal integer implementation for our StrongARM platform before we can seriously consider it. I understand that some effort is going into this.
Rob
The phat box by phatnoise is still listed. So maybe theirs will release.
I didn't see anything about price just now, but I believe I saw it at well under $1000, the last time I was there.
But it doesn't list ogg vorbis as a supported format. X-(
I think their biggest problem is that the kind of consumer that would want mp3s in their car, aka Slashdot users, are often willing to build their own, for a lower price.
I've wanted something like an Empeg, a system which uses a hard drive to play music. Many people have told me to just get a MP3 CD player which is a lot cheaper; but it's just not the same: I want a system so that I don't have to carry around cds anymore. The Empeg provides that.
Furthermore, the sytem isn't exactly overpriced. I've seen build-your-own systems and in order to get it as compact and as nice-looking as the Empeg, it costs over $1000. The problem for the Empeg is that it's too expensive for how much most people would use it: Most people don't drive around all day, and they're only in their cars for a very limited time. Spending $1000 on just a receiver (especially one that isn't a chick magnet like an in-dash DVD player) doesn't exactly fall into the budget of most people.
If I had $1000 to burn, I would definitely have bought one; it's exactly what I want. However, if I had a $1000 to burn, I'd also spend it on something else first...
How does the HD in this cope with shocks - I would consider one but I would think if you went over one pothole it would be fsked....
Or is there some sort of stabilisation going on?
Anyone know ?
I wanted a funny
Actually, ogg has plugins for XMMS, Winamp, and even Windows Media Player. You can get more info from the FAQ or just go straight to the software page, which also has players for most modern OSes (sorry Amiga). Thanks.
It has laptop hard drives, completely custom electronics, real audiophile-quality sound circuitry, it's built like a tank and the software is amazing and a lesson in good interface design.
It has a *parametric* equaliser which is worth a couple of hundred dollars alone and it even has ethernet. You can even hook up a base station and make it wireless.
It costs a fortune to build and the support is top notch - they've been invaluable in helping me with a custom install, why beyond what they would be expected to do.
Why is it that when a company makes a unique, well designed and built product, at a realistic price, that people put it down?
Remember - the component cost alone is very high, and no, it isn't justa hundred dollars worth of parts. Remember that these were built in small quantities and the parts people overlook are the most expensive - the metal case, plastic front panel, the packaging.
The empeg guys never intended for it to be mass-market and appeal to 18 year olds. They built a box that lets you store your entire music collection and carry it around. This isn't competing with portable players and people using laptops.
Look beyond what *you* can afford and what *you* want. It does what it set out to do perfectly. Just because it isn't the product you'd have designed doesn't mean it isn't a good product.
I'm going to post a detailed review later, it'll be up at http://pobox.com/~jaffray/phatnoise.html. In the meantime, I posted this short review to rec.audio.car, and it would seem appropriate here as well:
I've had my PhatNoise system for about a month. The physical design is very slick, and so is the software. It installed with no difficulty, just like a normal CD changer. The sound quality seems excellent to me. I'll admit that I'm not a golden ear, and my car system, while decent, isn't audiophile quality; but in general listening, and in a few short non-blind A/B tests, I can't distinguish quality of playback of my MP3s (encoded at 192kbps) from the PhatNoise from playback of CDs in the head unit.
In usage, it behaves exactly like a really big CD changer, up to 99 discs. In a way, that's good - your head unit controls are nicely refined to work with such a changer. On the other hand, if you're trying to find a specific album and song, you really want to have a tree-structured storage, with folders containing subfolders of songs. On the third hand, it could be argued that such an interface would be unsafe to use while driving, between the cognitive load and the need to look at the LCD between button presses.
Some aspects are still a bit beta-ish. I had problems with occasional skips; very infrequent, very minimal compared to CD skips, but still, MP3s shouldn't do that. They went away when I upgraded to the most recent firmware release a week ago. The PhatMan client software isn't fast enough when handling huge collections (100GB+), even after speed improvements in recent versions, and I've made it crash a few times. The firmware update process isn't as smooth as it should be.
The system is very hackable. I swapped out the PhatCart's 6GB hard drive for a 12GB drive I had lying around, which was easy, and I expect a larger drive would be just as simple. (20GB 2.5" drives are $110 these days.) The PhatBox itself is an ARM Linux system, the system files on the PhatCart are unencrypted and in fairly obvious formats, and the PhatDock is just a standard IDE-USB bridge. I've already written a simple client which uploads albums to the PhatCart from Linux, so I don't need to use PhatMan in Windows. Overall, the combination of excellent production values and relatively open internals is refreshing. Hopefully they can be persuaded to open the source to the PhatBox's main player daemon as well...
Compared to the competition: The Rio Car (AKA empeg) is way cooler, without a doubt, since it has its own display and controls and can use them more flexibly. Unfortunately it's much more expensive, and it must be installed in-dash and does not have a detachable face. For me, carrying around a DIN-sized unit and inserting/removing it for every car trip is unacceptable. On the other end of the price range, SSI makes a unit (the Neo 35) that's somewhat cheaper, but they seem to be cutting corners (like using 3.5" drives which are not intended for mobile use), the system doesn't seem nearly as polished in general, and there are some reports from unhappy customers out there.
Probably the most significant competition is from the various CDR-based MP3 head units. Carrying around a handful of CDRs, each containing a dozen albums, is a reasonable and cheaper alternative to hard-drive units for many users. highwaymp3.com reviews such units, which have gotten a lot better recently. Do your research carefully before buying one, though. They generally don't have upgradeable firmware, meaning that any bugs or missing capabilities will never be fixed. They also won't change in response to emerging standards, so the useful lifetime may be short. For example, imagine if you'd bought a MP3 player several years ago that didn't support VBR, or that glitched when playing back tracks with id3v2 tags. You'd probably want to replace it by now.
On the whole, I'm very glad I bought the PhatNoise. It's cool, it's useful, I've really enjoyed having it in my car, and for $600 (plus another $100 or $200 to bump up the capacity to 20-30GB), it's not all that expensive for what it offers. I never have to change discs or plug in or unplug anything, I just have hundreds of hours of music available to me, all the time. I'd definitely recommend it to gadget fiends in its current state, and when they ship the final release with up-to-date firmware and options for more capacity, I'd have no reservations about recommending it even to non-techies who just happen to want hundreds of hours of music on tap in their car.
It was never a good idea. Why?
Price: Two billion bucks for a car radio is just stupid. A few nerds will buy em but then the average consumer says "wha?!?" when they see the price. It was just too expensive. Even for car audio nuts.
Ease of use: Very silly. You had to get it out if the car to put tracks in it? Hello. Stupid and clunky way of getting the thing to work. An MP3 cd player in your car does a better job. Blank cd's are about 0.30 cents. A much better option with a very cheap media.
Why are people shocked when a bad idea dies?
The best ideas always win because people vote with money, not the OS it's based on.
Jebus
MP3Public is a PIC-microcontroller based MP3 player, using a MAS3507D DSP chip for decoding. It supports both CD-ROM and HD's. The HD uses a custom filesystem, with tracks/albums being downloaded through the parallel port. I built the original a few years ago (actually, I think it was one of the first working HD-based players), and others have contributed significantly to the code/design.
Firmware/schematics/PC-side source code are all open-sourced. There's a fairly clean C++ library for talking to the player and downloading tracks. I'm really hoping some kind soul will use this to write a nice GUI download application for Linux and Windows. (The current software is Windows only, and crashes fairly regularly).
Needless to say, this is a fairly complex project - don't try building one unless you've got a fair deal of soldering experience!
The "viability" of the mp3 format has nothing to do with its acceptance of it or lack thereof by the recording industry. The have NEVER supported it, and are unlikely ever to. It is the de facto standard because of piracy, of course. Even before the Napster fad came along, record companies were trying to push sales of three-dollar-a-song files in crap, proprietary, "secure" formats like liquid audio. Then something equivalent came along, for free, and naturally people preferred that price. You will always, no matter what encumberances are put on future recorded music, be able to find it pirated, and the pirated files will always be mp3. Hence, it will be valid.
The patent issue actually is only important if you plan on buying and selling them...most pirated, free mp3s nowadays seem to be made either with the "hacked" radium FhG codec (which is clearly illegal) or LAME, which because it produces unlicensed mp3s is at least of questionable legality. But anyway you will never have to pay for files made with them, so the patent-free ogg format doesn't seem to have much of an opening where it counts.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
The EMPEG and PhatBox are both software upgradable, Linux-running ARM computers. As soon as there are free OGG libraries that will run on that ARM CPU (no FPU), you can run OGG on them.
I DO know she needs a good bath.
Little econ review - demand is a function, it's a relationship between price and quantity. It is typically inverse, thus the higher the price the lower the _quantity demanded_. There is plenty of demand out there, I'd love to have an empeg for my car. Problem is at the price they're charging, I'm not willing to buy one. If they want to make money off the thing, they need to reduce their costs to a sufficient level they can sell the device for a price that a sufficient number of people are willing to pay. Then, maybe they can cover their expenses and turn a tidy profit - not by banking on rich audiophiles and techno-geeks burning their money irrationally. If any group of consumers behaves rationally, it ought to be the educated ones...
my $0.02
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
and I love it. There is nothing better than driving from San Diego to San Francisco 8+hrs with never hearing the same song twice, or being forced to listen to crop reports and country music going through California's Heartland.
/. that can afford to spend $1000 on a really cool car stereo (and for those that complain that its just a stereo I currently have it attached to my work computer and am listening to it).
Many people here are upset that the are loosing this product, but let me ask you this. Do you own one? If not why are you surprised that it's being EOL'd? I've heard many people shout there undying support to any Linux based product. Here is a perfect example of one, yet no one is buying them. I can't be the only person who reads
If we don't support Linux products who will?
Give me a break with your it costs too much. This is a Linux box that offers unlimited upgradability. They have software to initialize a new drive so that in the event your drive(s) craps out you can put in a new one. The only thing that you have to worry about with the hardware is the Mobo.
So quit your whining about a Linux product being discontinued and go out and buy one. If everyone reading this who doesn't own one would do that then they wouldn't EOL them.
If your big concern is money then you have no reason to bitch when there aren't and good Linux products out there. This is a quality product that costs what it does because a small company ~10 employees at it's height built it from scratch. They didn't have any venture capitol, or some grand scheme to IPO and make millions they just wanted to make the best product they could. And I for one believe they did, hell I believed in them enough to get one of the first MKI players S/N 00055, while they were still in Beta.
So if you want there to be Linux products then you need to support them. If you don't support them then don't bitch when all you have is WinCE products.
I'm not sure they were marketing to audiophiles. I think it was more like the mp3 crowd. And anyone who hates lugging CD's around. I don't change the CD's in my trunk-mounted 6-disc changer nearly as often as I'd like to because of the inconvenience.
.wav file. If CD audio sounds better on a system, it's probably because the CDROM's audio output bypasses a cheesy D/A converter on the sound card.
And while I don't claim to be an audio engineer or anything, I thought that the MP3 format was tested with audio experts versus CD in double-blind tests on systems far better most of us could afford, and they couldn't tell the difference. So your statement that mp3's sound like crap seems naive.
I mean, sure, MP3's sound like crap played through a $20 sound card on tinny speakers, but then so would a 16-bit 44.1 kHz
I'll bet very few of us could reliably tell the difference between a good MP3 encoding and 16-bit 44.1 kHz in a blind test.
I bought one back before sonicblue got their hands on it. I'm really happy with what I got. There is Linux software for it, but it's CLI only. I believe the Windows software works under WINE (not positive though).
The great thing about it, is that is makes an awesome MP3 appliance as well. When I get to work I drag it into my cube and plug it in. I get to listen to MP3s without consuming any HD space, using any CPU cycles, or RAM. Just like this.
The ability to build playlists, and the search feature makes finding a song you want to hear VERY easy. I never have to change CDs, I don't even have to burn CDs.
I've noticed people posting the current pricing as being overpriced. They cut them back a couple hundred aswell. The starting price for the base model was $1200, not $999. Perhaps when they start getting desperate and they come down in price, I'll consider picking one up.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
All I want is a little box with an LCD screen and a few basic controls. Give it 1394 and USB2 interfaces. Let me drop my own damn hard drive in there, whatever size I want. And give it RCA or minijack out, so I plug it in wherever I want. And let it play Ogg and MPC and crazy-high-bitrate VBR LAME rips.
Just the box with the little screen, controls, interfaces and codecs. Let me add my own hard drive (and update the codecs). Is it so much to ask?
I'm sure that they are cheaper elsewhere.
You are correct they Sonic Blue (Rio) should have put up the full specs of the product that Empeg (the creators) made. Unfortunately they didn't, but I don't think that's what is keeping people from purchasing it. Since /. ran a story on Empeg when they first came out. I think the problem is that most people here are all talk.
Ohh well, what do I care I have one and will treasure it and use it until one of us dies.
I looked at the PhatNoise when they first announced it,.. I think at CES last winter. After checking their site everyday for more news on when I could buy this thing,.. I finnaly gave up. They would not post any information on which headunits they would support or when the damn thing would be available. Less than a month after I bought my Rio, they finally announced the limited availability and then only for a few Kenwood headunits. So I was out of luck anyway,.. I had previously run strictly Eclipse head units because they sound so much better, so if there would be no support for them,.. then I was wasting my time waiting anyway. So if you're thinking about getting one of these things and you dont have a kenwood that is supported, then think twice. The $999 Rio will probably still be cheaper overall.
A cool atlernative is the Neo Player.
http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/neo35/
I bought it over a year ago for my '97 Chevy Silverado. It put a 13GB hard drive in it.
The only other upgrade I'd like to see on it is
wireless ethernet so I can park my truck by the
house and upload new tunes. Ahh for now I just
brink it in the House, plug it into my home chassis w/USB, fire up Linux and dump the songs
to disk.
What the heck. I paid $189.00 at computer geeks
for it. Direct from the manufacturer it's more.
It's still much less than $999.00, you don't have
a cool flourescent display, but you have a decent
black on green LCD display.
You are wrong I'm afraid. The major parts of the software, the player software and the Windows client are both actually closed source.
It's the first post and it's marked as redundant. Someone needs a dictionary.
I have Steven Levys book called "Hackers" and take my inspiration from it. I can relate to some of those guys at MIT. What a shame that the very word that made most of what the computing industry is today, is now associated with criminal behaviour. Very saddening.
Tux
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So you're looking at hard disks just because they're sealed? Yet you're having trouble finding an affordable drive that can stand the shock. I would think it would be easier to find a CD drive for rough conditions than a hard drive. True, CD drives aren't sealed, but you can put them in a dustproof enclosure. Get something with fat buffers so skipping won't be a big issue. That just leaves you with the problem of finding a device sturdy enough, but you've got that anyway.
But it sounds to me like you need a system that doesn't have anymoving parts. This MMC-based system (or your home-hacked alternative) would seem to fit the bill. Yeah, MMC cards are horrendously expensive compared to hard disks. But if you're budgeting, say, $200 for your storage medium, you can afford 256MB of storage. Puny by today's standards, but still enough to hold several hours of music.
This is indeed sad. I have a 18 gig unit. It phucking rocks. Where am I going to get upgrades from now?
Well, since slashdot took away my empeg BBS reading ability, I'll post here for a bit. Lets see, the complaints that I have seen so far are:
1. The cost. $1000 is too much.
Ok, you probably don't realise what that $1000 gets you. It allows you to listen to your entire music collection whenever you want with a few button presses. (The interface is very slick and easy to use. No need for "next next next x130 times" to get to a song). It also gets you a very hackable in dash Linux computer. Someone already has basic navigation software working on it, and others have added web servers and streaming support when it's on an ethernet connection. Oh, that last point is a good one. I can use the unit in my house, or at work as well. Thats saved me money compaired to getting a portable HDD player, or a home MP3 player. You also get awesome support. You botched a software experiment on the player, doing things way beyond playing MP3s? Well odds are, you would post to the BBS, and have the creators of the product replying to help out. And one last point, you don't have to own a CD burner and a constant source of media to get songs you like. Also, the software is upgradable. The empeg has the power to decode Mpeg4 video, so it's going to be a while before it can't decode an audio format. (Mpeg4 video is decoded decently on an iPaq, and that uses a slightly slower StrongARM)
2. It has no radio.
Check again... The Mark 1 had an integrated FM tuner, and the Mark 2 has an optional AM/FM tuner, on an interface that could be used down the road for additional formats. (XM, etc...) It's doubtful that will happen now, but only time will tell.
3. I could build it for less.
Sure, if you don't count the time needed to build a player that is useable in the house as well. Also the time needed to develop advanced software that dosen't require your complete attention.
4. No CD support.
For the rare need of a CD in the car, I just hook a portable player into the Aux in. If you want the niceness of the empeg, with a CD player, then you are going to probably pay $2000 or more, once Pioneer gets their unit out. Plus that will be locked into the dash.
5. It could get stolen easially.
Well, yes, slightly easier then most assuming your stupid enough to leave it in the car all the time. Removable face plates are no security feature. The empeg offers the best security, since you know it won't be stolen from your side.
6. It's a hassle to hook up to add music.
Not really. You connect it in house to an ethernet cable, or USB and can sync. Just a slight bit more hassle then portable players, since you also have to have power. But what portable player allows you to stream your music via ethernet? Besides, to me it's much easier then burning a ton of cds to try and match my mood.
7. It has no built in amp.
This is a legitimate complaint to some extent. But the market empeg was aiming at, most people would have their own amps anyhow.
8. It looks like crap.
Not really. The empeg actually looks like it belongs in my dash, compaired to the cheap plastic look of most car stereos. Plus, it dosen't have 15 billion tiny buttons all over the place. And when it powers up, the screen is awesome with it's size.
I have enjoyed my empeg (both Mark 1 and 2) quite a bit. It was well worth the money, and I look forward to the rest of the market catching up many years down the road. It was a geeky product, but it did everything I wanted and more.
Most car stereos have Auxiliary jacks on them, so you can plug in other sound sources. Sometimes they're installed properly; sometimes the jack isn't reachable but it's still back there if you want to look for it. Portable MP3 players range from $100 El Cheapo sets to $260 Archos jukeboxes with 6GB laptop drives in them. Plug in , Turn on, Rock out. Depending on the voltage your MP3 player uses, you might want to get a cigarette-lighter adapter to power it, or hotwire from the back of the lighter, or especially for one of the lower-capacity units, just use rechargeable batteries (or builtins, if they have them.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...is actually pretty easy. you end up memorizing the positions of artists, albums, even singles that you play most. for instance, "mule variations" is down down left left left down right down down. and "super bon bon" is down down right right down left left left left left left left left down right down. which sounds complex, but i do it in about 4 seconds without ever looking at the empeg.
of course, if the remote hadn't sucked so much i might've never learned the buttons on the faceplate and probably would've crashed by now.
I'm glad you can get away with 30 min a few times a week...
Just to drive to work is 30 min for me. Not to mention that I just got back from a road trip last week - around 3500 miles in a week. As you can imagine, even a few CD's full of MP3's start to get a bit old (OK, all apart from the Wierd Al of course). I guess you must not like to travel.
But even aside from that, if I was back to only driving my car every now and then (I used to live just three blocks from work!), I would still like the 3000+ songs for one reason - selection. There are some songs I don't like to hear very often, but sometimes I'd really like to have them on. With my whole CD collection in the car I would be set for anything that I suddenly thought good to listen to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I recently purchased the Neo 35 MP3 player from carplayer.com. Its also available from the manufacturer, but I didn't realize that until AFTER I received the unit.
/car" as user, and use Konqueror (or cp, whatever hits the mood) to manipulate the directory structure. To remove it, I just umount /car, hdparm -Y /dev/hda (my main HD is SCSI), power it off, and slide it out. No rebooting required.
/mp3 store as well, freeing up space on your existing partitions.
For about $800 CDN, I received a very complete and well thought package, including:
- the head unit
- with a 30 Gig drive
- remote LCD on a nice long serial cable
- docking bays for the car and PC
- IR remote (don't use it much though)
- RCA/antennae (sp) cables
- extra velcro straps, IDE/power cables, etc
- Music Match (~$20 value, but for Windows so I don't use it)
- carrying case for head unit
You can also get the Home Stereo docking bay, which is appealing to those with nice surround sound home stereos...
Since I already had a good CD deck (top Panasonic unit from '99), I had the Neo 35 mounted in the trunk instead of in the dash. This means I can still listen to AM/FM/CDs using the Panasonic deck, and switch to AUX IN and use the Remote LCD to control the jukebox. The only issue I currently need to resolve, is that I'm getting some feedback coming through the speakers while switched to AUX IN. By feedback, I mean I can hear a high-pitched whine of the engine as I accelerate and decelerate. It appears that I need to get a ground loop isolater and/or better RCAs.
What others have done, is plug this jukebox into the Kenwood or Aiwa decks... so that you have all your own MP3 cds on the 20-80 gig drive, but can still play CDR/CDRW/MP3 cds from your friends or that you have already.
To copy files onto it and otherwise manage the contents, I just slide it into the the PC docking bay, power it on, run "mount
The playlist is really nice as well... Since it has a four line display, its really easy to see where you are in your directory structure. Just remember to organize by Genre->Artist->Album->Song.
$800 CDN may seem like a lot more then a $4-500 Aiwa or Kenwood unit... but remember that it does have a 30 Gig drive, which you can use as a backup drive in your system. It's also really simple to move between your car and PC, so you can use it as your
To upgrade the firmware in the unit, all you have to do is copy the update (neo45.bin or whatever) to the root of the drive, and powerup the unit while holding in the P(rogram) button.
Just remember to scandisk (or dosfsck) the drive once in a while. The system gets pretty finicky about problems with the file system, even when Win2k/Linux can see/mount it just fine.
Overall, I give it two thumbs up, and highly recommend it to anyone else. This may not be the prettiest unit, but it definetly makes it up in functionality and ease of use.
I own a neo35, and it cost me about 5x less than an empeg would. I'll admit the empeg is better, but bang for buck, I can live with the industrial athestics and its few bugs. Whether an mp3 cd player is good for ya depends how you collect your music. Myself, my home stereo is my computer, and the rare times I buy a CD, I just rip it, and never touch it again. (To TPTB, I would definately buy mp3s online, but its your loss) If I owned tons of CDs, and I already burn my mp3s to CD, then a CD/mp3 player makes sense. But for me, I just slide the drive into its pc bay, and syncronize it. In my car, I have my whole collection, no time (or blanks) wasted burning CDs, no CDs to switch around and keep track of. I read someone saying the neo35 has a built in amp?! Mine surely doesn't. Thats ok, cause deck amps are all crap, and I just fed mine directly to an external amp in the back. There was some buzz about getting SSI to make the neo35 firmware open source... 'cause they were doing a shit slow job with BIOS updates. One guy even talked about getting a linux build to work with it. In the end SSI gave the source to some other company, and they've been doing a somewhat better job with updates. Basic conclusion, the neo35 is typical "bleeding edge" technology. Cool idea, worked out ok, it'll be better later, geekware, have fun with it.
" This ' mp3 thing' will never catch on. "
MILLIONS of people and damn near billions of downloads to are not wrong.
This comment by an apparent teenager really caught me off guard with its naive assumptions about the technically inept grumps. It's cute and all, but it made me think that the ultimate lameness filter would be to categorize posts by user age.
Not only would this clean up a lot of the technical discussions, it would lure away a lot of the hardcore trolls who are trying to reach the younger audiance with their whacky scatagraphical antics.
It's not a realistic suggestion. Slashdot thrives on anonymity, so such measures can never be put into place and really shouldn't be, but I had to post. I've got mod points to burn, but I thought it would be more appropriate to put on my cop hat and tell the youngins to mind their own business and let the adults worry about what the other adults know how to do. If you've got a contribution, share it. If you're just speculating that everybody over eighteen is an idiot then you're more redundant than I'm being right now.
As one of the early adopters (Serial #235) I am happy to report my Empeg is in daily use. I bring it to the office in the handy carry bag, and have music all day, then again during the commute.
The industrial design of this unit is simply excellent. I wish the developers the best of luck in the OEM market, and believe there's still a place for this in high-end car audio. Sure, the price is a little higher -- but in my opinion fully justified. It would probably even keep working in the dash of a Humvee heading through the Khyber Pass....
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
good gawd, give me the kenwood at half the price that will play both CDs and MP3s burned on CDs, who cares if I have to carry around 10 cds to get 6 gigs worth of songs, at least they will be better organized...
www.crutchfield.com
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
What do you expect. After the Linux community did so much
to promote it, they stabbed us in the back and only provided
support for uploading songs in Windows.
Barring city dwellers, most people become car owners around the same time that they leave home and/or college: 23 at most.
Or do people go 18 years between graduating college and owning their first car? Because those numbers are asinine.
I did a car mp3 player and it was playing songs after about
10-15 seconds. Most BIOS have a quick boot option, and
Linux can be made to boot very quickly.
This was a headless unit, so no X or anything...
A 6.4" lcd touch screen would fit perfectly in my truck.
Which model did you use? Can it run 6' away from the
PC?
...or check out Audio Review. Just be aware that "real" audiophiles tend to turn their noses up at Bose speakers, citing the same tired lines ("more spent on marketing than on research and design") but I've got a pair of Bose 201s that sound nice enough on my computer.
As nice as the Wharfedales hanging off my Marantz? Not hardly, but still listenable enough.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Why the hell would you want to buy one when you can build a mp3 player that could match feature for feature and then some. Get a SBC (Single board computer) and a 5 in lcd, mpeg123, and create a small linux distro with samba. Put a WiFi card in it, plug it in the aux port of your head unit, and upload your songs from the comfort of your own computer chair.
I will bend your mind with my spoon
I looked at these, and ended up with a Nomad with 6GB, a stereo with auxilary input, 20 cds(all indies thank-you), and $400 left over. I really think I got the better deal, it is really easy to yank the Nomad inside and USB it to the PC for a new music change. Granted it is not as COOL as the Empeg, but as an added BONUS, my palm omni-remote will drive my NOMAD, sort of :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I lost interest in the empeg car player when SonicBlue (or whoever owns Rio) bought the system from the guys in England working outta their garage. I really, really wanted one, and at one was in dialog with them about support other formats besides mp3. But then Rio got a hold of it, made it look all pretty on the outside and just kinda spoiled my interest in the thing. I was gonna order one of the whoppin' huge ones (read: large hard drive), and I almost preordered it but ended up not having the cash available. After the Rio purchase, I stopped looking at them and instead looked at building my own the way I wanted it. Now I just don't bother. I don't have a radio or anything in my vehicle currently, and I actually have grown to like it that way.
So, Rio/SonicBlue saying they are gonna drop it doesn't really surprise me. I wouldn't be surprised if most folks that were going to buy one (past tense) changed their minds when the sale to Rio happened.
my 2 cents
Things you can say to your dog that you can't say to a girl: "How about a nice bone?"
The encoder you use matters more than you might think. In short, using anything other than LAME is not a fair test to determine your bitrate needs. Try LAME at 160k VBR, and compare to your 320k encoded with anything else.
And if you're using Xing, then nothing can help you, it'll sound like total crap at any combination of settings.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm using my hearing and my backside to tell you MP3s at less than 320k do not have the same sonic quality as an original CD.
First off: I had at one point in time a very expensive stereo system in my car. I have a nice system now, but no quad subwoofer anymore :). Kinda hurts accelleration..
Anyhow, what you are hearing isn't the difference in "sonic quality" from the mp3. It's more likely the deck you're using. Most decks have much more time devoted to the circuitry and preamps on the CD than the auxillary in, or even the internal mp3. Most aux in jacks will hurt quality because they assume you've already done all the processing.
How to test this theory? Take a CD. Rip a song (you still can do that, I think.. but hurry) and encode it at 192 or 128. 128 for the sake of arguement. Play it. It'll sound different, because the circuitry needs to be retuned. Then take that mp3, decode it, and burn it again. You'll notice all that "lost" quality reappeared, because it really didn't go anywhere.
Unless your ears are trained, you'll never hear a difference. At least I don't. If you think mp3s suck that bad.. have fun with the mountain o cds (or limited selection).
..don't panic