Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's been a year for me and my IBM Travelstar 12GN
hard disk in my PJRC MP3 player used for playing
music in my car. No problems with undue wear.
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/
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.
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
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.
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
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."
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.
Currently, IDE controllers use 28 bits to address the drive.
We are just running out of address space.
Maxtor devised ATA-6, with 48 bits for addressing. This will allow us to not have to change addressing until we hit 144 petabytes, probably a pretty long way off.
Maxtor has been selling, in conjunction with Promise, a 160GB IDE drive. The drive comes bundled with a promise controller to use, that supports the higher amounts of space.
This isn't something we can do in software this time. This is a hard physical limitation, and it will require new chipsets to support it.
People always give Maxtor shit about their drives, It is my opinion that Maxtor is the market leader in quality, price, and size, in the IDE market currently. I've built large IDE arrays based on Maxtor and 3ware technology. Right now all of our non-scsi servers at work that I have built are Maxtor. We have almost 100 Maxtor disks in the server room, and we have yet to have one fail.
Actually, to be honest, we havn't had ANY drive failures lately, Seagate SCSI, and a few other brands are mostly what else we run (a few WD IDEs scattered around the plant, and some Seagate IDE, probably about 100 more IDEs in general in the plant).
I think hard disk quality in general is very high right now, and people are overestimating the importance of brand. It's not 1995 anymore, and drives don't fail nearly as much, no matter what brand or interface.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.