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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."
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/
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.
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
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."