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Dension DMP3 MP3 Player Reviewed
An Anonymous Coward writes: "MP3 Newswire has a review of the Dension DMP3, an MP3 player for the car that you purchase sans storage media. It sell for $249 and takes a standard IDE/ATA hard disk. With 100 GB selling for $200 these days the DMP3 gives you a ton of capacity for $450.
The player itself is pretty basic, but I like the way they use a mobile rack frame to handle fast file transfers rather than use USB to spoonfeed tunes at a snails pace.
Dension has also made the internal specs public including the playlist (.ply), logo (.lce), message (.msg) formats as well as the communications serial line protocol for adding third party devices like a mouse. Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates."
Since they don't ship this thing with any storage media (i.e the harddrive), they get away without paying the stupid tarrif/taxes on MP3 players that we have up here in Canada.
That's a savings of 21$ per GB.
Wouldn't hitting potholes, speed bumps, etc. put undue wear on the HD workings? It seems to me like a CD-based system would be more appropriate for a car. I mean, how long is it gonna be before your drive crashes?
It's nice to see a piece of consumer electronics that is upgrade-able as well as have open specs. Most companies void your warranty if you even want to look at the insides, let alone add storage space. It seems that companies benefit by letting the public muck with the internals (TiVo as an example).
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson
We KNOW it's faster than USB. Go use photoshop in OS-X or something....oh wait, that's right, don't have it yet.
CD's skip all the time in my Jeep especially when I drive over parking blocks, I can only imagine what that kind of beating would do to a hard drive.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Exactly how many songs are you planning on listening to at once??
Good question... maybe a laptop hard drive would take the bumps better...
What about ogg?
Checkout the PJRC MP3 player at this link for
a very similar player that costs less and is completely open source.
I've been using my PJRC MP3 player for about a year now in my VW New
Beetle. Great fun.
Heres the full text of the article 4 all 2C!
It was a Wednesday. I was driving home, north on Lawerence Expressway as I ususally do. I turned off onto Benton for the 'secret shortcut' that avoids the three evil, horribly long red lights where the expressway intersects with El Camino Way. As usual, I was late for a dinner appointment.
As I come around the corner, I see three idiots standing in the middle of the road. Two guys and a girl; dressed in t-shirts. Standing in the middle of a road. True, it's a side street; true, it doesn't have a lot of traffic, but still - they're standing in the middle of the road just around a pretty blind corner off a road with a 50 mph speed limit.
So, I brake. The one guy looks over his shoulder at me, and now I can see that he's got a camera and he's taking a picture of the other guy. The girl; she's the bright one. She's moved off to the side of the road. The other two, well, apparently they want a picture of the guy standing in the middle of the road.
So, now I'm going really slow, and I pull around them. And suddenly, it's not two idiots standing in the middle of the road; now, it's LINUS TORVALDS. The guy who invented Linux. Well, he didn't really invent Linux; he wrote the kernel for Linux, but everyone thinks he invented Linux so I'm sticking with that.
Long story short, I didn't hit them with my car and kill them. Truthfully, I wasn't even going that fast when I saw them; and there was virtually no chance of a collision; but, would you have read a story "How I easily avoided hitting Linus with my car?"
Oh, by the way. When I recognized who he was, I waved. But he didn't wave back.
( And, now I'm wondering whether Linus lives in that apartment complex a couple of blocks south of here. I hope he doesn't - heck, I hope he's got a huge house with a lawn and everything. )
If they shaved 20mm from the width it could have been installed in the Dash like a proper car stereo.
Anyone got any experience running normall desktop drives in a car? The shock tolerences are way lower than a laptop drives which would seem to be the better choice for an in-car unit.
Highest compression rates would be the lowest bit rate. Sorry to be a smartass and all that :o)
I hate it when people nitpick my posts.
Yet, oddly, I don't have any problem nitpicking posts other people make. From the summary of this article:
Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates.
I'm pretty sure the poster meant either lowest compression rates or highest bit rates. The point being that a 100 gig drive will let you store a whole mess of MP3s, even when they are ripped at highest quality.I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
NEW /. Based porn!
Which
1
will you choose?
Excellent for running Afghan pirate radio from your HumVee.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD is dying troll community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD is dying trolls account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all trolls. Coming on the heels of the latest GiZ survey which plainly states that "*BSD is dying" trolls have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.
/usr/bin/sh test.
*BSD is dying trolls are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive
You don't need to be a RoboTroll to predict the future of the *BSD is dying troll. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD is dying trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for them because they are dying. Things are looking very bad for the BSD is dying troll. As many of us are already aware, they continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Troll leader Anonymouse Coward states that there are 7000 Taco Snotting trolls. How many "BSD is dying" trolls are there? Let's see. The number of Taco Snotting versus BSD is dying posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 50 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/50 = 140 BSD is dying trolls. Therefore there are about 7 BSD is dying trolls. A recent article put "Kathleen Malda takes it up the shitter" at about 80 percent of the troll market. Therefore there are some trolls. This is consistent with the number of first posts. All major surveys show that *BSD is dying trolls have steadily declined in market share. $lashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is dying trolls are to survive at all it will be among troll hobbyist dabblers. $lashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time.
For all practical purposes, *BSD is dying, is dying.
"Under the iron bridge, we fist" - The Smiths, Still Ill
This thing looked alright until I found this little spec:
So it is basically useless anywhere with a season called winter.Which used to be the Empeg... what I really want though is a DVD/CD changer that can play MP3 DVDs, DVDA and regular CD's... Why hasn't anyone major come out with an elegantly designed changer that plays MP3s? Also... with most head units in cars being sculpted into some ornate ergonomic expression I can rarely find cool cars that accept "standard" head units. At least not without chopping up the look of the dash.
Reasonably good idea, but kinda seems limiting.
There are times when I like to listen to news rather than music - need a radio. I think one of the many MP3 car CD players already on the market would be a lot more appropriate. That way you could play MP3s, regular CDs and listen to broadcasts as well...
take a compact flash card with an ide adaptor. would never skip with that.
;-)
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You heard! Get trolling! You know what they do, you can start by posting this link every where
.and .to .do .wide .posts. use .the .tt .tag .and .put .a .dot .before .each .word .and .keep .doing .it .until .the .webpage .is .about .a .kilometre .long .you .can .do .it .when .you .read .at .-1 .the .true .voice .of .the .community .don't .let .the .crackhead .moderators .kill .off .slashdot .eat .c0x0rs .taco .d13 .j0n .k@+5 .visit .rotten.com .and .adopt .a .penis .bird .and .keep .on .widening!
Heres the link
FUCK KATY ALLEN
I like the idea of 'build your own MP3 player with standard parts.' This product is the start of that market. It would have value long after 100 gigs seems too small.
I bet in a year or two, they'll have a variety of different screens and interfaces you can put on these doohickeys, and you can totally customize your player. I'd like to design my own interface for it, for example, to look like Apple's Aqua interface.
Hmm... how long before these evolve into laptops? Heh
"Derp de derp."
Yes, I know the whole floating point issue; the referece Ogg Vorbis decoder requires FP, and portables don't have FP hardware.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Hmm, didn't you mean No problems with UNDERWEAR!?!
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Select the JukeBox playback mode beforehand, because you can only select songs here (no lists, or albums), and max. 16 songs can be pre-programmed. All you have to tell your guests is to turn the driving knob to search, press it to select and add to the program. This is something even girls can remember, or if not, boys will surly be happy to help
Sorry, couldn't help sharing this 'tip' from their website. Could be a cultural thing - I'm interested to see if the tips have such useful information in the other language on their site.
-Adam
Between the two, I'd pick the hackable Linux one, for several reasons.
It's been around longer.
It's hackable.
There is a community support forum
Looks way cooler
Basically, since the above mentioned review of the Dension DMP3 MP3 doesn't make ANY comparison, it doesn't help 99% of the people in the GENERAL consumer electronics market, because there is no frame of referance at all. Maybe someone could write a useful review comparing the two?
Overall, there are not a lot of reasonable offerings in a marketplace which shows a lot of promise. What I would like to see is a complete car package that offers:
Imagine a car player with built in wireless access so you can easily add songs to your car but also trade songs with others, sort of like a p2p network on the road. Besides trading songs people could also IM each other, I think this would really catch on among teenagers, a demographic that tends to embrace IM, likes to cruise, and many teens tend to have run down cars with nice stereos. Obviously there are safety and security considerations to consider but I'm sure a compromise could be made.
According to this vorbis-dev message, there is an integer vorbis implementation with source available.
checkout flac.sourceforge.net for a truly worth car music player.
What's wrong with a Nomad jukebox and a car adapter?
Since when is a product review considered a product placement?
The whole point of subscribing to Slashdot is to keep the service open, not to have it kiss your ass. "Man, for $5 for 1000 pages, I better send my news telepathically. They owe me big!"
"Derp de derp."
Should be
The review is clearly written by amatour. It doesn't press the fact that connecting this unit requires a line input on a car's head unit. This feature is rare on aftermarket stereos and nonexistent on factory ones. There are workarounds for that- FM or cassette adaptors, but they impose quality penalty, and this is not mentioned either. Sound quality eva;uation was limited to "it sounded good to us". I would expect some measurements.
Why was his post considered off topic? The value of this device is being able to add new storage to it over time. You could keep this machine going for like 10 years! But we don't know that the Mp3 format will be around forever. Being able to support other audio formats such as OGG would ensure that this is a worthwhile purchase.
Could somebody please mod the parent post up? It's a valid point, and certainly not off topic.
"Derp de derp."
"at the lowest compression rates"? Afterall, ripping a CD at 320kbps is a LOWER rate of compression than at 128kbps as it results in a larger file.
People that like fuzzy sounding 64kbps mp3 can get lots on a 128MB flash card =)
Why would you want to pay $450 for an mp3 harddrive when you could buy an mp3/cd player for around $100 and be able to burn mp3's onto cd's from any persons house.
Many MP3 CD players can't read CD-RW because of lower reflectivity, but CD-R costs $1.00 or so every time you change the playlist (add or delete a bunch of songs) because you have to buy a new blank CD.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates.
Compression be damned, with a 100GB drive, arguments of MP3 vs. MD vs. Ogg Vorbis can be moot. You can rip all your music to wav files and still get almost 200 CD's worth on this thing! I think that ought to do, don't you?
-Andrew
there is an integer vorbis implementation with source available.
But it only reliably plays content encoded with Vorbis encoder beta 3 or earlier. Since the release of beta 3, there has been at least beta 4, RC1, RC2, and RC3.
Will I retire or break 10K?
don't pay a dollar for a cd. good cd -i.e. mitsui and TY - can be had for about a quarter a piece when bought in bulk (50-100packs)
http://etree.org
I use firewire with a couple of my linux boxes, workes great... fast transfers, and easy to move one disk from computer to computer...
The canadian tariffs dont apply to standard hard drives of course because they would destroy the PC market. Standard drives are $1.5/gb. The tariffs of around $21/gb on other media dont apply.
Many MP3 CD players can't read CD-RW
Multi-read (I think that's they call it) technology has existed since at least '98-99, and is pretty much ubiquitious now,
in most every device that uses a CD reader.
(Just to confirm this, I dropped a -RW in my ~1 year old, ~$115-dollar Soul Player and it works fine.)
I'd be pretty surprised to find a MP3 CD player that couldn't read -RW, but as always,
buyer beware, do your research, there are always exceptions.
but CD-R costs $1.00
I dunno about you, but I end up paying like 20-30 cents per disk nowadays.
Haven't paid a buck a disk for -R since at least mid 2000.
I'd suggest you shop somewhere else.
MPenis3
Congratulations, it seems as if you have posted the most ignorant, obnoxious, and paranoid post I have ever read.
.smell my feet.
(moderators, this is not off-topic, I'm thinking about my mobile mp3 options here...)
National CyberCrime Prevention Foundation
Is it your goal in life to piss on everyone's parade, or do you just like being proven wrong?
It seems like almost every one of your comments I read is pointing out a flaw that usually doesn't exist or would barely affect anyone, yet phrased in end-of-the-world exaggerated gloom-'n'-doom.
good cd -i.e. mitsui and TY - can be had for about a quarter a piece when bought in bulk (50-100packs)
Not with these proposed taxes. In Canada, the tariffs alone amount to CAD$1.23 per disc. And I have no reason to believe that the RIAA and its satellite organizations in other countries will stop at the border[1]; "harmonization" has lately been a buzzword in IP circles, especially with garbage such as the Bono Act and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (international DMCA).
[1] Strictly, this introduces a slippery-slope fallacy.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I can't seem to find better than 40 or 45c/disk on 700mb media.
Let's do some math:
640 / 25 = ~.04 cent per meg.
700 / 40 = ~.06 cent per meg.
Why buy 700s when the cost-per-meg is higher?
Is that extra 60Mb really that important when storing MP3?
You might have to carry a couple extra discs in your binder, so what?
700 megabyte Penis
Haven't paid a buck a disk for -R since at least mid 2000.
Not with the tariffs that will inevitably be attached as a rider to the SSSCA if it passes. See also my other comment. In other words, I guess I should stock up now.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A buck each for CDR media? What?
Ninety pence a litre (five bucks a gallon) for gasoline? What?
The last batch I bought was a spindlepack of 100 for $17 at Microcenter. Even Office Despot sells 100 packs for $34. Before you complain about the quality of cheap CDRs
How long do you think those prices will last in the face of heavy RIAA lobbying? It's already happening in Canada; see my other comment.
(mods: I cross-replied to get this on the messages.pl radar of all who raised this issue; I checked 'mod myself down')Will I retire or break 10K?
Does standard onboard cheap IDE controllers provide hot-swapability?
delete free(system.gc);
Actually, you'd be surprised. I used to have a 10 disk changer in the trunk, and it would skip at the drop of a hat. I've had no problems with my Neo, and it uses standard drives, not notebook drives.
Remember, the mass of a hard disk head assembly is much less than the mass of a CD laser assembly, and the mass of your car itself provides damping to the system - you get long lasting but low accelerations, rather than the short (10g) shocks that kill hard disks. For normal cars, if you get a bump bad enough to bounce the heads, you probably have other, more expensive things to worry about.
Now, if you are seriously offroading it, that would be different - I'd want a flash based solution for that. But, if you are seriously offroading it, you probably don't need to be listening to music....
www.eFax.com are spammers
I have the jensen MP350 MP3 CD player (I paid $200 for it) in my car and I can fit about a hundred songs at 256kb/s on one CD.
I can't even amagine having 100 GIGs of music at once anyway. I drive 2 hours a day at least and it takes me a good week or so to listen to one cd. That is not only expensive but I can only amagine how long it would take to kill the hard drive on a bumpy road.
Just got an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20 and under USB1
it took 22 minutes to xfer 9 CDs. With the USB2 PCI card it took 2 minutes. Hard drive to hard drive was 1 minute 50 secs. Have 240 CDs @ 320kbps and still not full. Nice toy!
Is there a drive-in CompUSA so that we can get our free copies of Office for OS X?
What the hell you want people ripping CDs and recording from the radio while driving? Why not make cassettes and burn Cds too?
IM?!? Get a grip. The driver has other things to do.
And if you claim you're thinking only of passengers, you shoulda said so, it sure doesn't sound like that in your post.
Infuriate left and right
quite quite low for modern DACs. even cheapie clamshell cd based mp3 players.
guess it won't sound worse than an OEM head unit; but they really should have been closer to 90 than 80. oh well.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
But it's a bitch re-ripping an SVCD designed for 80 minute disks to a 74-minute disk-size.
National CyberCrime Prevention Foundation
Was just using the Photoshop 7 Beta the other day, interestingly enough.
I know that it can't hold as much music as a hypothetical tricked out one of these dealies with a 100 gigger. But in particular:
1. I can take it with me once I'm out of the car
2. It fits in my pocket
3. I can update the music contained within very quickly and easily.
That is a big one right there. My Mp3 collection is constantly changing, and is rarely the same 3 days in a row(probably like a lot of hip young people out there). With iTunes I don't even need to update anything manually as it will download/erase to match my computer files as needed. I love this functionality. I can see myself getting one of these car players and one day deciding that I'd really like to be able to listen to this new song that I downloaded/ripped. My only recourse with this particular player would be to take it out and hook the hard disk up to my PC as a slave drive? Am I grokking this right? I suppose with the Rio Car player one could either bring in a laptop to transfer over USB(slow!) or perhaps wire up their car for 802.11b connectivity with their house/appartment(!!!!)but that would ultimately be a huge pain in the ass.
You know, I would never download copyrighted material.
:P .40 really that big a burden on your poor wallet?!
'Course not.
But it's a bitch re-ripping an SVCD designed for 80 minute disks to a 74-minute disk-size.
My God man! How cheap can you be?
Ya already got the friggin' movie for free...is
C-X C-S
$0.19/ea- 700 MB GQ 32x 50 pack spindle @ $9.50
$0.30/ea- 700 MB TEAC 8x 50 pack spindle @ $14.99
I have been thinking long and hard about the idea of interact communication. I think
that anything that allows the users to directly communicate with their own choice of
words is a BAD idea. Think about it. The road rage would be insane.
Instead the cars should be like ants. When one car passes deer, or other
animals,(maybe detect it with inferred?) it should record the spot and time, and
broadcast it out to other cars within a few miles. This would be very helpful for us
people out in the middle of no where. (Ever see what a car looks like after hitting an
moose?) The cars would be able to sense density of vehicles, and start to broadcast
traffic jams.
I can tell you from experience that hard drives to not last a long time in vehicles... And I always make sure the temparature is up to 55F before I power them up.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
More concerning is potential frost build up, and the effects of temperature cycling (get in your car, heat it up (-20 to 20C), get out, it cools down (back to -20C); repeat several time a day for 4 months) on mechanical components like the IDE harddrive.
Yeah, between that and automotive vibrations, I wouldn't want to have anything more than an old hand-me-down hard drive in there.
Hmmm... 4.3 gig drive kicking aroud here...
It's incredibly nice to know what the filesystem is. I can imagine going out and buying another mfr's player, with the included hard drive, having the hard drive fail, and not being able to simply partition/format/install a new hard drive. Worst case would be a non-standard filesystem. Ick. I'm not interested in paying $400 for a 20 gig hard drive whose only special feature is a proprietary filesystem.
My biggest problem with this thing is the apparent lack of any means to transfer music, short of physically removing the drive and plopping it onto your IDE bus. Note that it's late, I didn't read the review in depth, but checking out the specs I didn't see any mention of network connections, USB, FireWire, or even parallel ports on this thing. I'm not adverse to hiding a covered RJ-45 somewhere on my car. Wireless would be great, but at least I know I'll still be able to dig up an NE2000 ten years from now, and if I'm putting it into the dashboard of one of my cars, it's gonna be there for a while. (Ask me about the 12-year-old Alpine pullout CD player in my '76 Ram...)
At the very least, a serial port and Kermit would be good at this point, RS-232 can handle distance, and for cripes' sake, it's not like they'd have to look too hard to conjure up 12V to run a couple of serial line driver chips. Start the transfer when you get home, let it run overnight, and you might have made a small dent in the old hand-me-down hard drive. It probably already has enough RAM for its OS and playback needs that, in transfer mode, it could be designed to spin up the drive and write to it only when sufficient data has collected, then shut it back down to save the car's battery. (The current draw of a hard disk spinning overnight could make winter starting unreliable.)
The pinout shows RX and TX lines, so one can only hope and assume this is something they're working on. I'm sure as hell not ripping this thing's hard drive out of my dashboard every time I want to add another song to the collection.
A tuner is on my wishlist, too. I need my Howard Stern in the mornings. Internal amplifiers? Nah, I'll just build my own and bolt it somewhere.
Other than that, it's a nice alternative to having an old P100 kicking around in your trunk. I want one.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
4. It erases partitions because the software designers just left kindergarten?
Just put 32 or 64MB of RAM on the thing. Spin the drive up, suck in a half hour or hour chunk and then spin the drive back down. While the drive's not moving, you don't have to worry about crashing the heads, and it'll be moving for all of a couple of seconds every half hour to hour.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The ultimate in usability in my book is if it's something my manager can remember. You only have to tell him to right click to download files with his web browser 3 times a day...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How important is the sound quality when you've got ALL THAT ROAD AND AIR NOISE! At least some of the higher end cars turn the volume down for you when the car stops.
You are definatly not the geeky circuit board typa are you
depends on your car!
when I drove a miata, 70db would be good enough - what a noisy car that was!
I'm now driving a bmw 540i and the level of quiet in this car deserves much more than 80db. even 100db could be appreciated.
so it all depends. and we're only talking about $10 in parts cost increase (taking a WAG) so its not like it would double the price or anything even close to that.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So when is someone going to come out with a portable Ogg Vorbis player?
In theory, it should be possible to build one the same way one would have built one's own MP3 player just a few years ago.
Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates.
:)
Highly compressing your tunes leads to low bit rates.
So, actually people who rip their tunes at the lowest-compression rates need the most storage space.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
Hey, I don't think that's a troll. Who ever made that site was probably a sexist. He even says something like "girls might not remember to turn the knob or something" and then adds, but boys can also help .Which implies women are stupider then men?! Why would a coporate site have such sexist comments and obvious porn? I'm shocked. (look at posts above for the actual comment).
Some people under the misconception that paying money for something means that it is automatically better.
Instead (in this instance), you lube the stupid rich market for money to supply the same shitty service. I'd complain about it, but I do endorse such activities.
* Intelligence is like 4-wheel drive. It only allows you get stuck in more remote places. -- Garr
If you would really like to see Ogg Vorbis support in future players, please sign the petition here.
A poll on the type of MP3 players people own also yield some interesting results.