Slashdot Mirror
OGG Capable Car Stereos?
ZephyrXero asks: "I'm looking to buy a new in-dash CD player for my car, but I can't seem to find any that support Ogg Vorbis. There are numerous players out there that support MP3 & WMA, but the majority of my music collection is in OGG. I even found a definition of what Ogg Vorbis is at the Crutchfield site, but the only player they have for it is this thing. Have any of you been able to find a simple car stereo that will play your OGGs? Or are my only options to re-encode to MP3, connect a portable music player to it, or try to build something like the Cajun project?"
Or are my only options to re-encode to MP3, connect a portable music player to it, or try to build something like the Cajun project?" Well, that's only 3 other option's... C'mon slashdot people think of more
Have any of you been able to find a simple car stereo that will play your OGGs?
I think your definition of "simple" is a bit different than mine. I have an AM/FM car stereo and was thrilled to have a clock and digital presets! Seriously though, just re-encode or use an FM-transmitter.
I've got a mini-itx that boots FreeBSD from a 64Mb CF card and then proceeds to play whatever is in my NEC MultiSpin 4x4 CD-ROM Changer.
It boots to playing music in 30s from power on.
Use a DVD Rom drive and you'll hardly ever need to change a disk !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yes, your only option is to transcode or re-encode to MP3. Or buy a portable player with an audio input that you can connect to your stereo.
Its nice to think that manufacturers will provide multiple format capability, or (in the more general case) Linux drivers, open specs, real warranties, timely rebates, etc, but its really not worth it to them. For every geek that asks for Ogg, there are 9,999 people who won't. I'm sure at this point, MP3 decoding can be had on a DSP for 8 cents. If they sell 1,000,000 decks, and it costs double the 8 cents to add Ogg support, they just lost $80,000. Believe it or not, companies DO care about this stuff. I've known of guys whose business it was to analyze circuit board layouts, so that by optimizing trace patterns, they could take advantage of natural capacitance and inductance, and reduce the board component costs. Fractional pennies add up in this kind of volume.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm not just trying to flame or be a know-it-all, part of this issue is adoption of ogg for personal audio.
Support is one of the main reasons why my music isn't in a format like Ogg Vorbis. I know the whole argument of "If more people used it they'd support it!" but that's putting the chicken before the egg, so to speak. Vorbis is very good, but LAME encoded VBR mp3 is very good and portable to boot.
My advice would be to re-encode to mp3. It's a car, so you're not going to have some kind of audiophile experience, and if they were high enough quality vorbis files, encoding them as high bandwidth mp3s shouldn't hurt the sound too much.
vk.
OGG want people not laugh at ogg name!! Ogg name not funny!! Ogg smash head of people who laugh at name!! MP3 more stupid name than Ogg!
There are a few portable players similar to the iPod that play Ogg Vorbis, though I admit too few. One is the MPIO HD300. I've been trying to buy one on eBay, but I'm too cheap to pay more than $200 for the 40GB model. If I recall, Neuros, iRiver, and possibly Creative had a model or two with Ogg support. Except for Neuros, Ogg support is hit and miss among the various models availabe. But at least you do not have to transcode and possibly lose quality. Just snag an Ogg player and use an FM transmitter or cassette adapter. Plus, you can use it outside of the car!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 67LYFW/002-8910153-5526422?v=glance
I have one of these and it works well. It plugs into the headphone jack of your music player. The only downside is turning it off and on every time turn your car on or off.
You're not going to find a "conventional" car stereo that supports .ogg for under $500. There are a few that do, if I remember right, I think one was a Kenwood. The only way you're going to .ogg support in a car stereo other than dropping ~$500+ is to do one of the "homebrew" or "DIY" solutions that have been posted on Slashdot before. Possibly a mp3/ogg player with an FM transmitter would be the best/easiest/cheapest solution.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
I know in the past it was choppy with ogg vorbis playback. But I would think with the new iPod photo and video players, it will surely have enough horsepower for Ogg.
Unfortunately, they have limited features working on the newer models. I'm a sucky programmer, but maybe there are some others out there who could contribute...
The empeg/Rio Car player is a Linux-based, HDD pullout car stereo (I've had one for years and love it). Although the product was discontinued in 2003, there are still units available on eBay and user-supported sites like riocar.org. According to the FAQ on riocar.org, there is a 3.0 beta version of the software that added .ogg support. I don't know if it's easy to find the image for the beta, but the folks in the user community are very helpful and can probably help you find it.
It looks like the latest firmware for the iRiver imp550 cd players does ogg vorbis audio; but I'm not sure how "car-stereo" it is...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Either use a portable music player (I use a Rio Karma), or transcode your files. If your car's anything but off, it's going to make some background noise. The more background noise it makes, the less important the audio quality of your files.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
...or maybe the 'Kenwood Music Keg' which seems to run the same firmware.
...and no telltale iPod wires hanging out of the dash, or proprietary closed formats.
The ogg question is addressed here.
I bought a PhatBox that works well for me, on account of the fact that it can handle flac - Free Lossless Audio Codec. flac gives you the option of compressing like MP3 or OGG, but at best those are still lossy, that is, you lose some data. I ripped my entire CD collection to "full quality" which, the claim goes, gives you the identical information as the original WAV file, but it's only about 70% of the size.
A 20 GB media player gives me 800-900 songs, though some of those are MP3s, so a flac-only disc would be 750+ songs. You can also get up to 120GB of storage now.
The other draw for me was the fact that it took the place of my 6-disc changer, and I just had to plug it in; no head unit surgery was required. It took seconds to install it, though I also opted to rip the unit out of its 8 pound steel casement and jam it in where my 6-disc changer was. It works with your existing head unit, that is, you use the 6 CD buttons on the existing stereo to browse the songs by playlist, artist, genre, etc.
The downside is that they have a 'list' price of $800 (not sure about the Kenwood Music Keg). I happened to find one on a VW enthusiast site for $120. The firmware is written to particular type of car stereo, so the same piece of hardware will be $800 for a Porsche, $600 for a BMW (as my BMW-owning boss discovered to his irritation), $400 for a Toyota, or $120 if a VW dealer is trying to get rid of them, as in my case.
http://www.yakumo.de/docs/man_1037880_31_2_yakumo_ hypersound_car.pdf
According to the manual it plays Ogg.
Even if you get a car stereo that supports ogg, you haven't solved the problem. The real issue is that even though ogg is a better format, not everything supports it. I decided on a solution a year ago.
I have reencoded all of my CDs as FLAC. It takes some time, but it was well worth it. I use a script out there on the Internet called oggify.pl to generate mp3s and oggs. When I can use ogg, I take my ogg files, and when I can't, I use mp3s.
I've started to rip my 2.000 CD collection in ogg. This was a mistake. MP3 has won. I know it isn't free, it has patents and licensing, but it is better than any closed format. All the big corp hate MP3. They can't lock you with it. They must support it. They (and you) will have to live with mp3.
I'm now re-encoding everything in high quality MP3 VBR. Portability wins.
use an FM-transmitter.
Many developed countries where English is the national language (and which are therefore part of Slashdot's audience) do not allow private citizens to transmit on the commercial FM radio band at all, not even a couple milliwatts. I seem to remember the UK being one of them.
Use of an FM transmitter without a licence is an offence throughout the European Union.
They used to make a single-DIN in-dash unit, but it's discontinued...
Anyway, the fanless model in the first link has SPDIF outputs, and (of course) normal 1/8" phono, which you can slap an RCA adapter on. If you can't use that to play OGG through your stereo, you ain't tryin'.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
...that with so many corps trying to push flash-based phones and other cramped audio players, that they would take the tiny step to support Vorbis.
I guess ideology isn't dead after all.
There are numerous players out there that support MP3 & WMA, but the majority of my music collection is in OGG.
You made a bad choice in going with Ogg Vorbis. Reencode your collection to MP3 and move on.
You probably bought into the malarkey on Vorbis.com:
Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.
What good does the "completely open, patent-free...source code" do? You can only make use of it if your passenger seat has been replaced with a Sun Blade workstation or if you have kludged together some ergonomic disaster car-mounted mini-ITX PC.
The Open Source evangelists tediously blather on about how Open Source gives users so many choices, but, had you gone with MP3 or WMA, you would have had far more choices for an in-dash MP3 player.
Get a stereo with audio in and plug in the portable ogg player of your choice.
Seriously, I think that's your best bet.
I bought my stereo with one and although it also has the capability to play mp3 CDs, I plug in my portable player nearly as much.
Get a car tape player, and a 2.5mm to tape adapter. Done. Plug in a CD player, and no need to worry about the built in one dying. If you want power, get a cigarrette lighter power adaptor, or a 120 V car inverter... or just charge a lot of batteries.
Hey, this is slashdot, not pimp my ride.
I have freaks! I did something right...
I know this is not simple but it plays ogg and you can take it with you but the real down side is space and its ugly. lol :( but you have to give it to me i found something different than everyone else. :)
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000953056118/
Stan M. ~~~Verbal~~~
Amazon UK sells the Yakumo Hypersound car, an ogg-capable in-dash CD unit with USB and SD card support, for £80.
Link to Amazon Page
According to Amazon, mine's in the post and should arrive monday. The OGG support isn't made obvious, but if you go to the manufacturer's website and download the manual, it's there in the back. NOT a high profile promo for OGG, but it's a nice cheap unit and my tape player was dying anyway.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
30 seconds is a pretty long time to boot. I have an Mp3 deck with the annoying 'feature' that when playing an Mp3 file, it will start from the song beginning after the power has been turned off. That's annoying enough (if you take a trip with lots of short stops you hear the same song over several times).
Having the thing need 30 seconds to boot is even worse though... that's just way to long a delay. Have you looked at ways to trim-down boot-time? I've have a mini-ITX system originally intended for the car (until I got a new car and DVD-mp3 deck).
I've been looking at the possibility of having a good 'session' saved using the suspend-to-disk feature (obviously needs >64MB space). Restoring the memory contents from a disk-based suspend could cut your boot-time down significantly, especially if you're loading from a fairly fast cardreader (I know my USB2 memory stick is very fast for loading files, I'm not sure how fast the Epia M-2's cardreader would be though since I've never bothered to get it working).
It's funny...ya know, when I wrote this article, I specifically ended it by stating how I was already aware of my options to re-encode/transcode, get an external player and attach it to a jack, or install some sort of file server in my car, yet if you look up at the majority of these posts they go on to suggest these things to me like I've never heard of them. Thanks guys...this has been alot of help ;)
It's always funny to me as well how so many people are so quick to write off vorbis. About 7 years or so ago many people would have told you it was crazy to expect a plain jane car stereo to be able to read Mp3s, let alone a CDR, but look at things now. If people would just stick to their guns and wait it out, it would happen...giving up will never get you anywhere. I hate how apathetic most people are these days...
To those few people who actually gave relevent replies, thank you.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."