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Portable Music Storage for Your Car?
Randy J. Parker asks: "Why don't cars provide input jacks for devices like MP3 players? My car has spectacular audio quality, but forces me to feed it with a handful of CDs. Unless you have a 'CD Text' supporting CD player and a fairly recent CD from the right company, once the CDs disappear into the changer, they become anonymous numbers: 'Disk 1', 'Disk 2', and so on. Devices like the iPod solve the problem of locating and feeding music, but can't be hitched to the car. Is there an after-market solution that doesn't sacrifice as much fidelity as a crappy cassette emulator or FM near-casting? Are there some cars with input jacks? What mechanisms are available to lobby for audio input jacks? Car manufacturers could even sell detachable storage as part of the car, at a huge margin, just like they do with radios and CD changers. This enables customers to finance the purchase of the portable storage device along with the car, opening up another demographic segment of buyers. I don't really want permanent music storage built into the car, since that would just be another device to synchronize. Ideally, I'd just carry my device, and attach it to speakers at my house, my friend's house, or the car I'm in."
There are many head units availible as aftermarket upgrades that provide inputs. Aiwa is one brand that's known to have them, and there are several others. Some have a headphone sized line in jack on the front, and some have full RCA jacks on the back. Personally, i've used a 5 year old Aiwa tape deck with an input on the front, hooked up to both an MP3 discman and my Pocket PC. Sounded great in either setup, and the deck was less than $100.
My Pioneer (Premier) DEH-P730 came with an ability to hook something up to the head via a box that took two RCA jacks and turned it into their proprietary connector that they use to connect CD players to mutli-CD players and even the satellite radio service XM receiver. The connector box is the CD-RD20 and looks like it conditions the signal (although I would not know either way). I know that the newer models support MP3 and WMA discs and probably support the file name, if not the ID3 tags. The one I have supports CD Text. It's MSRP was $400 at the time, but I got it from one of those eBay stores for $200, new. I'm not exactly sure, but it looks like only the lowest level Pioneer CD player does not come with CD text. I know that this is not exactly what you wanted, but I hope it's somewhat helpful none the less.
-Peapod
oh yeah, and here's some compatibility info on various head units that are supported. not suprisingly, the kenwood unit only supports kenwood heads. i can however highly recommend kenwood's in-dash mp3 players. just burn a cdr with your mp3s and hit the road. you're still left juggling cds, but with roughly 10-12 albums on each disc it's at least a little easier. the top of the line model (KDC-X959) even allows you to upload your own mpgs and jpgs to the unit for display on the road. i like it so much i run a site for 959 movies to download and info on hacking the movie format for optimal playback (and even a handy perl script to do it for ya!).
Check out http://www.rcainput.com/
If you're lucky you'll have a late-model car that has the ability to plug in one of these adapters. It seems they plug into the wiring harness of factory units that have an option to add an OEM cd changer.
You don't always have to look to an "mp3 ready" head unit.
:P ) So, I just popped the face off the center of the dash, popped the EQ, plugged the cord in and snaked the other end down to the lower storage compartment, and ta-da, I have a fixed input for the player in the Grand Am.
I kinda just went through this. I have two cars -- one is a 1999 Grand Am, and the other a stock 1969 Cadillac convertible. For a rather looong road trip I was taking, I recently purchased an Archos 20GB MP3 Jukebox. It has a few quirks, but it's a nice unit.
For the Cadillac, I bought Cendyne's Gruv-X wireless FM transmitter. The Caddy's still got the stock radio, and I do *not* want to rip it out. The Gruv-X was the perfect way to go. It was about $25 (Slightly higher at ThinkGeek.com.), runs off of one AAA battery for about 8 hours. Works well. I can tune it to any frequency, and play my tunes.
For the Grand Am, I kinda lucked out. I dropped a pretty nice stereo system when I bought it, including an in-dash EQ that has *two* sets of stereo RCA inputs. (I wish I could remember the make/model, but I don't, and it's raining, so I'm not running out to the car.
And, of course, the optional accessories, like a portable power invertor for the car, so that I can recharge the player on those loooooooooong road trips, like this last one. All in all, not a bad set-up.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
There's more than just those listed out there. Do some searching if yours isn't on that rcainput.com page.
Pacific Accessory Corporation makes several different adapters, as does Precision Interface Electronics.
Note that some of these require that you have a CD Changer or some other form of accessory slave device (like a factory XM receiever, perhaps) already in the vehicle. For an example, the Chevy Impala has the capability to have a CD Changer and the newer Impala's have the built in XM slave device. These use the same connection (a 12 pin connector) to talk to the radio. If you want to use PAC's AAI-GM12, you must have some form of slave. These don't emulate the CD Changer, they simply provide a switch to the audio signal inputs.
It's entirely possible for someone to make a device to interface with the radio as a slave unit in the same way the factory devices do. The advantage to this method would be that stuff like text could be put onto the Radio's display. Newer GM cars, for instance, use the Class 2 Serial Bus (J1850 VPW for those of you in the know) to talk between the radio and the radio's slave unit. The text you see on the screen is actually coming from that slave unit over the data network. That's why you see different things for the XM slave unit, the radio itself is identical, the data it's getting is not.
Nobody I've found makes a device to do specifically this task, but it actually wouldn't be difficult to roll your own. Devices to convert J1850 to RS232 Serial can be had for $75 or so, and usually have a "sniffer" type of mode so you can easily reverse engineer the protocol. If you're into this sort of thing, you could probably write some code to actually display song titles and such from a laptop playing MP3's without a heck of a lot of difficulty. And all your steering wheel controls (which are also on the bus) could work too.
Cars are getting more and more networked, and it's only a matter of time before some bright boy creates a portable MP3 player with an in-car docking station to let it:
a) get power from the car, and possibly recharge
b) send and receive serial type data to the car's network thus allowing in car controls to work and stuff like ID3 tags to be displayed on the radio.
Nearly all modern GM cars have this potential right now. Most Ford's do too. Probably many foreign cars as well, albeit I'm not familiar with their systems. If I could find a MP3 portable device with connections that could allow a docking station in car to be made, I'd roll my own.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.