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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 loads of car stereos with an input jack for your MP3 player. Some of them call this feature "MP3 ready" or some misleading thing like that, but that's what you want, so head down to your local car stereo store and go for it!
I recently went through a search for a car audio system that allowed my iPod to hook into it.
I tried a cassette adapter and FM broadcaster but they didn't sound too great and were a pain to deal with while driving. My situation was also special because I have a jeep CJ7 with a soft top (ie no door locks) and live in the city so I needed to have a theft-resistance system which meant not leaving random electronic components laying around.
My solution was to ditch the in-dash unit altogether and install a cheap amp under the center console. I then ran a 1/8"-to-RCA jack directly to the pre-amp input of the amplifier.
Now I can just jump in the car, plug the jack into the iPod and hit the road. It has great sound since the music goes straight from the iPod into the amp, and it is as theft-proof as you can get since the amp is tucked away and bolted down. If I want to play a CD (I never do), I can just take along an old discman and plug the line-out into the jack.
If you had a look around the open source scene you will have noticed that there are a number of projects to reverse engineer the protocols that the headunits use to 'talk' to CD autochangers etc.
The one that I'm involved with is for Sony headunits, can be found here:
http://gnunilink.sourceforge.net
This little hardware dongle fools the headunit into believing there is a CD changer attached and can be interfaced with a PC or other MP3 player to put track/disk names onto the headunit's display.
Simon.