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iRiver to Build In-Dash Digital HD Players
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like iRiver is going to take over where the Rio Car left off. Their CEO announced today that they are near completion on a new plant in China that will produce HD-based in-dash digital music players for automobiles. The new plant can push out 700K units a month. With the iPod dominating the digital portable market, iRiver sees this as a wide-open area they can move into. According to MacWorld iRiver is the third leading seller of MP3 portables with 5.6% of the market, following the number two seller Rio which holds 6.4% of the market. And the Apple iPod? No surprise, only a whopping 65.8% of all units shipped. 92% if you only count HD portables."
These numbers cover only US and are based on August sales. Since the new Ipod was recently launched, it isn't suprised that it sold well in the August.
Apple's global marketshare in the digital audio player market is about 20%.
Any market can be regarded as "wide open" if you have products of superior quality. Well, unless you face a big bad wolf-like company or state-owned monopolist that's giving you plenty of headaches and lawsuits.
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No wonder iPod has the lead. iRiver HD players really are great, and they sound better than iPods, but unfortunately they're still a bit pricey in comparison. The only contender atm would be Rio Karma, but for those not feeling like smashing them repeatedly every now and then the Karma isn't really an option... About time someone put an effort into car MP3 playback - I'm surprised it hasn't been done properly earlier.
How do you sync up? By taking the drive out of your dash and plugging it into the computer? Wouldn't it be much more valuable if it was an actual portable that you could buy a dash docking station for? Sure, it might cost $10 more to build, but the value to most people would shoot up.
How does the US system of patents apply to a product manufactured in China and marketed in the US? iRiver could be violating a lot of patents in the US, I guess...
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
If this retails at less than £250, I'll get one - I've been putting off buying a CD multichanger due to space - in dash HD - fantastic!
I've been using an Empeg (rio car) for about a year now, and they truely are incredible machines considering they were produced 5 years ago. Not many people cruise around with two 12gb drives and a 220mhz strongARM linux box in their cars :-).
I mean can YOU telnet into your stereo system? Seriously though, I look forward to see what new things they come out with as it is sorta hard to explain to passengers that no, they can't buy one of these anymore.
which will crash first- the player, or the car?
Anybody know if iriver plans a competitor to the ipod mini? I have an iriver flash player that I absolutely love, but I am jonesing for 4 Gb of storage. Their little 1 Gb circular player was a little too soon and too small in capacity. However, I don't want to give up my FM radio and I don't want one of the bigger 20 Gb players. So I keep waiting...
Download my free songs!
few people are willing to have the stereo shop monkey around behind their dash to wire in an aftermarket stereo. Especially one that costs $500+ as I'm sure these HD players will. Also they're unlikely to have good built-in amps so probably you'll have to put on of those in too...
Unless you have an older car, it's generally a bad idea. Nearly all the decks you can buy are of vastly inferior mechnical build quality to your factory deck anyway. The guys at Empeg made a great product but it's just too niche... I don't think this is going to take off until someone partners with the auto makers to get it built in at the factory.
iRiver is the third leading seller of MP3 portables with 5.6% of the market, following the number two seller Rio which holds 6.4% of the market. And the Apple iPod? No surprise, only a whopping 65.8% of all units shipped.
Reminds me of the old adage: "Second place is the first loser"
I always thought that was a rather annoying way to look at it. In this case I think it applies. 65.8 : 6.4 is just over a factor of ten. Damn Apple really does dominate that market. Hopefully this works out for iRiver. Otherwise there probably not going to last long. They're getting creamed (at 5.6%).
Though I suppose one can say by the same logic Apple is getting creamed in the computer market. Though I wonder how their numbers compare to other vendors (ei Dell, HP, Toshiba, Sony, etc) as opposed to apple vs. the entire PC market.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
fuck off.
These numbers are applicable for the US. I guess the situation is a bit different on a worldwide scale, as iPods are not an "in" thing in Europe by any standards, as well as fairly unknown here in Finland.
"92% if you only count HD portables." It's apple, so it's a good monopoly, right?
If I told you that was last year, would you know what I meant?
This is great. Kudos to iRiver. Now, all I need to make my driving experience more enjoyable is a car and driver's license.
Remember children, all generalizations are wrong.
Why the heck is it taking the auto industry so long to add simple network connectivity to cars? I know it's a price sensitive market, and potentially a security problem, but I've been anticipating this "no brainer" option for years....where is it???
I bet if apple had an actual kit to put an ipod in a car rather than all the hacker mods that are out there it would help in that area.
Personally, I don't want a device just for my car. I want one I can have in my car, home and anywhere else I go.
Evolution or ID?
I have an Omnifi for my home and car.
The car version, a 20GB hard drive that I had professionally installed under my rear passenger seat, lasted a week. Made by Rockford-Fosgate, in a large case to support the hard drive, you would think it could take the bumps and shocks of the road. It couldn't.
It would skip when I would hit a bump, even at 15 miles per hour pulling into the gas station. At the point it would skip, it would lock up for 30 seconds, then resume, but every 30 seconds would pause for another 30 seconds. Ejecting the hard drive and putting it back in would reset it to the point of the bump, then it would play fine until I hit another bump.
The pro's of the unit were you could plug a USB 802.11b card into the casing, and automatically transfer your music wirelessly right into your garage. If you didn't have a wireless network, you could eject the hard drive and it had a USB port to hook up to your PC. It had a really slick interface in the car, and setting up a wireless network over the in-dash spin dial thing was a breeze, they did a a really good job with that, with the different ways you could input your WEP key.
The cons were the bumping of the car made it pause, the USB wireless network adapter just kind of hung out in your car, no where to mount it. And the software interface on a Windows pc (SimpleCenter) was one of the most horrid music applications I have ever used. And it didn't do Ogg.
I'm skeptical of any hard drive based car player until they can more than account for the shocks and bumps, and it needs to come with some kind of warranty plan. How long will those hard drives last?
Best...+5 Insightful...Ever! :)
I always like a swift 'fuck off'. It solves so many of lifes little problems.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Are you REALLY that far out of touch with the aftermarket entertainment offerings or is this a Troll? Most of what the OEMs offer is utter crap and built by the lowest bidder. MANY people replace their stereos with aftermarket components and $500 for a good headunit is CHEAP. Hell, there's an entire industry revolving around aftermerket entertainment systems for vehicles and several magazines devoted to it as well. Pull your head out once in awhile and look around for kripes sakes. Crutchfield http://www.crutchfield.com/ is but one example of a thriving online business revolving aorund this and if you take a look around one day you might even notice stereo shops in your community. I can think of three within a 5 minute driving distance of my home and I do NOT live in a city...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
But the thing that closed the deal for me? USB hosting. I no longer have to lug my laptop around on holiday because I can plug my camera into the iRiver and store the files on it's internal HD. All the colour screen, upgradable firmware, internal mic, radio, remote control, not needing custom software by appearing as just another drive, etc. is just icing on the cake.
The user interface had better be clear, simple and easy to use while driving, or no one is going to get one of these. Based on my small iRiver experiance, I don't see that happening.
I've been putting in car stereos for 20+ years. It is easy and rewarding. I can't believe a geek on /. wouldn't do it. Stock stereos in general suck, low quality components abound in that arena. Bad tuners and anemic CD players. I replace and throw out the stock stereo in each new car I get.
The one thing the automaker can do for you is give you a good speaker rig, and i'm not talking about chest thumping bass either. I am talking about quality sound reproduction including the high range above 10khz, which I can hear just fine, but in most cars is muffled because the speaker grilles point towards my feet or in the rear have to bounce off a rear window.
You aren't going to get that rig without spending an arm and a leg on the high end stereo package that the automaker offers. If you aren't willing to pay the extra $1k for the stereo, or waiting the week or two it takes to get your special order in. You're going to have to start mixing and matching speakers too. Not that that is the end of the world either.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Various people have spoken about wifi in digital media players (including Apple advertising for wifi engineers to work on future iPods) but this is a real case for it.
;-)
A car media player with a Wifi link would be ideal as the owner could then download tracks to it without the need either to walk a laptop out to the car or the car stereo back to the house.
the benefits of being able to browse people's music collections while driving would be entirely incidental
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I think that one of the aftermarket companies may be doing this actually. Unfortunatly most of what has been offered aftermarket for MP3 playback other than off of CDs has been encumbered with either DRM nastieness or with some sort of oddball format where they want to force you into buying their hardware for media - ick. As the market moves forward offerings have gotten better but so far I've yet to find something better than my CD playing Alpine for MP3s and it's transport finally died after umm more than a few hours of play time ;-) Radio, wazzat? A small portable might be okay for this, I have a Karma, but hookup and ease of theft aren't to great. A device like you've envisioned would be better.
:-(
Unfortunatly there's no one standard for this kind of thing so they would have to build multiple interface boxes. Doable but unfortunatly not a one shot design deal
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Can someone please make a car with a stereo that has an audio input? Does such a thing exist even in aftermarket? Assuming I already have a portable music player, I could just plug it in to my car stereo. Instead, I'm stuck using some pathetic mini FM transmitter, or cassette adapter if I have a cassette deck, or buying a whole new HD car stereo.
*sigh*
Since all digital music formats on these devices have some compression, audio quality will suffer. Maybe not discernable to most ears, but it is still there.
The large HD device is commendable for portability, but I would also like to see cars retain at least a CD-player. It is also time to get the better-than-CD audio formats into mass-production and use. A DVD-Audio/MP3/Sat/Radio auto system would be ideal.
It is now a +5 insightful! Huzzah!
I see an interesting possiblility for HD-based in dash units. I have grown accustom to the instant replay feature of my Tivo box, and I find that I wish all sorts of things had it, including my car radio. If I am listening to NPR, and I zone out a little, or have to refocus all available brain cells to negotiate an on-ramp or something, I would love to just mash on the instant replay button to go back to what I missed. I know people are gonna jibberjabber about all the goofy devices and programs out there to timeshift radio broadcasts, but I really just want instant replay, and really only like 60-120 seconds. That would sell me on something like this in a heartbeat.
Mr. Cheney, is that you?
They sorta do.. If you have a new BMW that is.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
I surely hope they ramp-up on their support staff. Has anyone ever had to call iRiver? I did. I honestly think that they've got maybe 4 people working there. This includes management.
And their support department's sucky-ness rivals LinkSys.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I'm surprised no one has mentoned the Pioneer DEH-P90HDD. This is a head unit that will play from an internal 10 GB hard drive, memory stick, or an audio/mp3 cd. Nice looking player, and I've alwaysed loved Pioneer, but it isn't cheap.. $500 to $600 on ebay.
I ran out of Empeg/Rio Car units, and need something for my new car. If this is even half as good as the Empeg, I'll be happy.
Anyone have any guesses as to how much this will cost? It should technically cost less than a high end portable MP3 player (seeing that less has to go into the r&d...it's a lot easier to build an mp3 player the size of a car stereo than it is to build one the size of a minidisc player)...but how much do you want to bet it costs much, much more?
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
It's surprising that iRiver manages to sell so many of them in the US then isn't it. Can you guess why that might be ?
My MP3 car player works fine with CDRs. I suppose if you really don't want to carry around CDs in your car there's a use. What I want is a car MP3 player that will read DVD+Rs.
I mean, really. they are like 99% of the way there. They have a dock. they have the airport express with wireless. Make a deck that will show up on my mac, lemme drag my songs over to it, and you are good to go. Or make a deck that I can slot my ipod into. OUt of mind, out of sight.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
When you introduce an abbreviation that is not ubiquitous, you should define it first. What is HD? High Density? High Definition?
Surely, it can't be hard disk, since we all know that the abbreviation for hard disk drive is HDD.
HDD, hard disk drive. I was thinking "who wants a in-dash digital high definition player?"
HDD!
78.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot...
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
HDD, hard disk drive. I was thinking "who wants a in-dash digital high definition player?"
Anyone with kids on a road trip.
what we need are MP3 on DVD+-R players.
This is completely the wrong direction.
Let's turn the iPod devices into cassette tapes of the 21st century.
Hey, they're the same size as a cassette tape, right? Plug in your iPod-sized music player into your car deck (with an industry standard common interface), the deck charges the iPod (or similar)'s battery and can access music and play lists. The iPod remembers where you were in your book-on-tape or the song you were last playing.
Then just pop out the iPod when you're done. Having a completely separate hard drive and media library seems redundant to me.
"With the iPod dominating the digital portable market" Funny, ive know many people with mp3 players, not one owns an ipod.
Why is
Except for the hdd based palyers that are hardwired, and use WiFi to xfer music, my 10-disc CD/MP3 changer is the best solution I've seen. I carry around about 115hrs of music with me constantly. It's nice having all of 50Cent, 2Pac, and Eminem's stuff ride along with Garbage, and Audioslave. It's a little mini-melting pot, and it only cost me $110 and the time to install it.
-bZj
.sig
lmao "in Soviet Russia, road forks you!" ~ Family guy
I think this is really somewhat age dependant. For most people under 25, you're not very likely to see a 100% stock stereo system in a car.
My parents, on the other hand, seem to be fine with stock: even a stock tapedeck. I think it has a lot to do with what media you carry - if your old CD's are fine in the stock deck then leave it be. If you've got a lot of tapes then leave it be.
For myself, I travel a lot and love music. It's a pain swapping CD's so when mp3-CD players came out I shelled out for a deck with mp3 capabilities. At 150+ songs (at 128kbps) per disk, it saves me a lot of swapping, and any new media I stow the original at home and just add it to an mp3 album.
I don't really see a big use for a car mp3 player though. How about just a CD-deck with a digital interface for my portable, or a multicard slot for common flash-type storage cards? Right now I'm just finishing up a small VIA pc for this, but alternately I probably would have gone for something like an mp3-enabled DVD deck (a few DVDs of 128-256KB mp3's/oggs and most of my albums at my fingertips).
I've got a Goodmans CD/MP3 player in my car and I love it. It plays ordinary CD's, CD-R's and RW's and can play mp3 files with ID tag display on the front.
And this cost me just under 100 pounds (uk). For 200 I could have got one with playlist support.
Until you add in a wifi adapter, I don't see what this one will give you that I don't get.
I've been using my empeg since 2000, and after 4 years of running strong, there is still no other product out there that comes ANYWHERE near the quality or functionality of it. The 12gig drive is starting to feel a bit small, but with room for 2 laptop drives, adding a 40gig drive seems like nothing. As others on the empegbbs feel, Rio has droped the ball by not doing any new development in the car audio arena. They only made 4500 empegs, and everyone thinks they gave up way too fast on them.
I worry about the day that my empeg stops working, I don't know of any other car audio unit that could come close to replacing it. Having to go back to swaping CDs in my car would feel like going back to the stone ages.
What would be even cooler if that when you pulled into your driveway the headunit and your home PC automagically sync with each other. Wouldn't that be badass?
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
So now that I can play HD in my car, I need to rearranged the dash- get rid of the not-so-content-rich odometer and gas gauge and so on to be able to fit the plasma screen in.
For the life of me I can't figure out why no one has offered a headunit that supports USB jump drives.
They're so damned ubiquitous nowadays -- just a single USB port to plug in media -- a card reader (for CompactFlash cards), a jump drive, etc. Let the end-user deal with buying the storage, I just want a unit that PLAYS what I put into it.
Is this REALLY TO MUCH TO ASK FOR??
I've seen a grand total of ONE manufacturer that has a unit with a USB input, and it goes for over $3000. And there's no internal amp.
This is what you're looking for. It gives you the option to either sync with your home PC via 802.11b at regular intervals or to copy files via USB to the drive caddy. It's Linux based, though you need a Windows app to enable the wireless sync. It's also not particularly cheap. Still, this sounds like what you're looking for.
It would seem to me that a simple USB port and the ability to read the structure or database off a mass-storage compliant digital audio player would give you full artist/title browse access and full playback of anything from a thumbdrive to a 60GB player.
The catch is that the 65+% iPod isn't mass-storage compliant, and their wire remote protocol is proprietary.
It shouldn't cost much: if I can have a DVD player that sits on my home ethernet and reads anything uPNP, plays DVDs in progressive scan, has full digital audio outputs for $100, I should be able to get all the features I want for $50 over the cost of a standard head unit.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Yes, and where's the promised .ogg support for UMS firmware which was due January 2004?!
We don't want a stupid Manager firmware, get rid of it.
Strange that nobody heard about Phatnoise or the Kenwood Music Keg. Beats anything on the market.
http://www.phatnoise.com/
Denison has two versions of the iceLink system.. Version 2 information can be found at www.denison.com. It mainly supports foreign cars, but has more advanced capabilities.
The older iceLink 1.1 can be found at www.denisonusa.com. It'll support many other types of cars, with less capability.
A much wider range of support can be found in the iPod2Car adapter, available from www.ipod2car.com. It's similar to the iceLink 1.1 box, but supports more car types. Even very much older rides without more advanced in-car networking protocols and such.
- 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.
In my experience, mini- FM transmitters sound cleaner than jacks, unless they're good quality RCA jacks. The mini-microphone-type jack you're likely to get on the front of a car stereo will eventually create enough static to drown out all the music, as will the pigtail you might use to connect to an RCA jack on the rear.
FWIW, I've seen head units with these jacks on the front, and/or RCA jacks on the rear. I even had a cheaper Blaupunkt unit with an rear RCA input. It was fine for awhile, but in the end the mini- FM transmitter was a much cleaner, better sounding solution.
Now, a head unit with an RCA jack on the front would be another story, but do you really want wires and crap cluttering up your car?
I say make CD players ogg/mp3 compatible, and burn your own discs. You can get 11 hours of audio on each one -- enough for almost anyone. The theft risk would be a lot less than the latest-greatest-all-encompassing audio magic-box too.
You can fit 11 hours of good quality audio on a CD-R. This is enough for most people. It's also easier to find stuff by organizing it on your own CDs, than trying to search through 10,000 tracks on a fiddly little gadget interface. So get an mp3-compatible car stereo and burn your own disks. You'll enjoy less theft risk, too.
King Kaufman of Salon.com was recently discussing Barry Bonds' dominating stats for this year and looking for a new term for second when second is so far behind; when the difference between 1st and 2nd is the same as 2nd and 11th.
The term suggested by a reader was : Mondale.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Do you hear me iRiver/Clarion/Alpine/Anyone!
I ALREADY HAVE AN MP3 PLAYER!
I already have MP3s on it.
It's just that the user interface was not designed for in car use. Read my current MP3 player as a standard mass storage device and give me a better user interface. Once designed for a guy who's driving.
I don't want another MP3 player, I just want a better interface for the one I have.
Life is too short to proofread.
That's exactly what I was looking for! Thanks!
Sad news, Britney Spears dead at 22
I just heard some really sad news on Fox - Singer and Popstar Britney Jean Spears was found dead in her Louisana home this morning.
Apparently, the cause of death was excessive bleeding after a sizzling night of hot anal sex with her ex. boyfriend, Justin Timberlake.
"We were just having good sushi, and she asked me if I would please her", said Justin. Although he has since turned gay after his breakup with her, Justin was willing to please Britney as long as she would take it up her ass.
Following a night of sex for 10 hours, Britney sustained an injury in her lower vaginal area and subsequently bled to death. Her husband Kevin Federline, who is at the moment spending time at a federal prison for sexual advances towards Natalie "hot grits" Portman was not available for comment.
However, President George W Bush offered his comments on the incident. "Here is the reason why anal sex is bad and why gays are unAmerican, they kill Americans and American icons", he was quoted as saying.
There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will surely miss her - even if you didn't enjoy her work, there's no denying her contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
*sob*
Hit me baby, one more time. I'll miss you, oh baby baby.
Indeed, Britney. Indeed. Rest in peace, child.
Suck my dick. BITCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.