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."

Comments

Re:What about HD wear?

[zilym]

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.

It's A Jeep Thing

[DeadBugs]

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.

Ogg Vorbis

[Spoing]

I have to ask, is there anything out there like this that supports Ogg Vorbis files?

Yes, I know the whole floating point issue; the referece Ogg Vorbis decoder requires FP, and portables don't have FP hardware.

Apparently even girls can remember stuff!

[stienman]

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

affordable

[asv108]

What makes this player so nice is the fact that it is reasonably priced compared other offerings such as the RioCar or the Kenwood Music Keg, which is actually the same thing as a phatnoise phatbox, but phatnoise decided to supply the traditional head unit manufactures rather than compete with them.

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:

• Large Capacity with standard drives
• Radio and CD player
• The CD player doubles as a ripper
• Wireless Access
• Car 2 Car IM
• Easily Navigable

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.

80db s/n? lousy!

[TheGratefulNet]

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.