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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.
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.
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.
According to this vorbis-dev message, there is an integer vorbis implementation with source available.
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?
As I understand, most MP3 CD players can read CDRW discs. I got a Rio SP90, by no means a high end MP3 player, for Christmas. It plays any CD or CDRW I've thrown at it. I think you can get SP90s for like $60 now.
A tip for any of those considering the Rio MP3 CD players - don't spend an extra $50 or so dollars to get the SP100. The only difference is upgradeable firmware. This problem with the SP90 can be fixed with a simple change to the upgrade file.
MP3 CD players are great. I've got about 20GB of MP3s. Before school or a long car trip I burn about 10 CDs on a disc and have more than enough music for the rest of the day. Since I always use CDRWs and most of my friends have burners, I can always score some new music if I'm at a friend's house.
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
Unfortunately, the Rio Car (formerly empeg) has been EOL'ed by SonicBlue. It's a shame, since they rock. I got my when they went on sale as Sonic Blue started selling their leftovers, and I absolutely love it. Unfortunately, they never sold well before the sale because of the extremely high prices ($1000+).
Hopefully, this one has a shot, it seems to be almost as cool of a product.
BTW, you can find some Rio Cars on ebay, but they are a bit overpriced compared to the SB sale prices. Worth every penny, though, in my book.
What I would like to see is a complete car package that offers:
* Large Capacity with standard drives
Car Rio will take up to two standard laptop drives. That's up to 120G of storage using easily avalible IBM Travelstar or Fujitsu drives.
* Radio and CD player
Car Rio offers an radio tuner option (might want to get an antenna signal booster, reception is "average" and if your in a remote location, it can matter, most people it doesn't). As for the CD player, if your so sad you have your 40G to 120G full and STILL don't have the songs you want, CD player isn't going to help you.
* The CD player doubles as a ripper
Why? I'd rather rip and sort at home, FOR the drive, not WHILE driving. And at what speed? 16x laptop CDROM speed? I'd prefer my home 56x CDROM and Athlon XP 1700 for ripping than a 16x CDROM with a Strong Arm processer, thanks anyway. Your thinking of tech that's 5 years off (to be avaliable at a reasonable price commercially). I'll take the real, today alternitive thanks...
* Wireless Access
Abso-frigging-lutely! But I see hacking a 802.11b USB device into a Car Rio much more likely than a commercial head unit that has integreted wireless. War Driving anyone?
* Car 2 Car IM
And you thought talking on a Cell phone made for bad driving!!!! Shit, I would RATHER see this on a cell phone than in a car stereo ANY DAY. Yes it's there, sort of.... So why bother? In the US, it's lame, and we need to cetch up to the EU. But, anyway...
If you really want it, at LEAST on a Cell phone, you can hold the phone in your hand while doing it, and still sort of hold on to the steering wheel. NO WAY do I want people to be trying to IM people from their stereo head unit! KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. And as long as it's already in the phone, what's the point?!?!?
* Easily Navigable
Any unit is easy once you get use to it. There are no "standard ways" to navigate 60G's of MP3's in your car anyway... so it's more practice than progress... If I can simply have 10-20 play lists to pick from, that's MORE than enough. That's all I need for navigation.
Now, I don't OWN a Car Rio (yet), and I sure don't work for them. But, given that it's Linux based, hackable, and been around longer, I'm strongly leaning towards that.