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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?
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??
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.
This thing looked alright until I found this little spec:
So it is basically useless anywhere with a season called winter.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.
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.
According to this vorbis-dev message, there is an integer vorbis implementation with source available.
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 =)
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?
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.
A buck each for CDR media? 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, I have been using these mostly in my car for the past year and I'm brutal with them. They get flung around the interior, sat on in the passenger seat, broiled in the summer sun, frozen in the winter, jammed 3-4 at a time into a single visor slot and I have yet to have one go bad.
I'm sure they're not national archive quality, but for $0.17/ea who cares.
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
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
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.
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."
Your KIDDING? For a company that constantly reported being backordered on the Rio Car, that's sooo stupid.
If they gave the Rio Car ANY marketing, it would have done well.... Look at XFM, everyone want's MP3 in their car or a new Cell Phone, and XFM is marketed out the ass... The ONLY reason XFM is being sold is marketing. If Sonic Blue had a marketing division worth a shit, they would have owned that market.
I always wondered why they never cut a deal with Circut City or Best Buy, I guess now I know, because they are MORONS who don't know MARKETING. Good product, bad marketing, sad loss to the Linux World (so, what's new?)
How long do you think those prices will last in the face of heavy RIAA lobbying? It's already happening in Canada
Too bad for Canadians. Price you pay for universal health care, I guess...
I can't see the RIAA managing to do this in the US without some serious concessions to consumer media rights. I think they're getting close to the point of stepping over the line with copy-protection and general fear-mongering now. Trying to accomplish a RIAA tax on one of the few aspects of the computer industry that hasn't been crushed by the tech industry downturn will be pretty unpopular with a rather large and influential lobby.
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
Would you rather carry around four or five cds full of mp3s, or fourty to fifty original cds? I've got a cheap little mp3/cd discman, and I love not having to cart around a giant folder of music. I'd already burned the mp3 cds as backups, so it took me a grand total of 0 minutes to prepare discs for my player when I bought it.
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.
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?
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."
No forgiveness needed, you were basically right the first time. I realized that I wasn't quite clear on what I meant. When I said the trivia bit, I was also thinking about other posts at /. I've had nitpicked. It was a poor organization of my post in the first place that I later band-aided with the 'don't get me wrong...' line. I really should have moved that line up to where I mentioned the trivia, so that the reader wouldn't sit there for like 4 setences thinking I was passing Hitler off as trivia. Heh. I should take more time to write my posts.
:)
I appreciate you taking the time to read and understand my post. I have a lot of respect for you right now.
"Derp de derp."