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Dension DMP3 MP3 Player Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the a-thousand-hours-but-no-ogg dept.

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."

6 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. PJRC MP3 is similar for even less $$$ by zilym · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:PJRC MP3 is similar for even less $$$ by zilym · · Score: 3, Informative

      I have it in the trunk jacked into the plug that would otherwise
      be used for a CD changer. I had to build a CD changer protocol
      interface board and it's been a real pain since VW doesn't
      document it (AFAIK). But now it works, and works well.
      Currently I'm running the protocol interface through my
      EZ-USB Protoboard, but now that I've got the protocol pretty well reverse engineered I
      think I'm gonna port the code to a cheap little PIC16F84
      or something.

  2. A car player that's too big for the car dash? by dan+the+person · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Integer Vorbis decoder by mbrubeck · · Score: 3, Informative

    According to this vorbis-dev message, there is an integer vorbis implementation with source available.

  4. Skipping... by wowbagger · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  5. Re:affordable by BadlandZ · · Score: 3, Informative
    Blatent Flame Follows, please don't take it personally asv108, you obvisouly DO know more about this than me, but I had doubts about what you said

    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.