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?"

Comments

Re:What's next

[Yocto Yotta]

Duh, he could build his own Ogg Vorbis compatible car stereo receiver from scratch. Or perhaps, he could hire lobbyists to blanket the campi of the major car stereo makers and persuade them to build one. Maybe he could even hack into the computers that automatically load the firmware into the receivers and replace MP3 support with Ogg. Is building a time machine and going back to the point before the Fraunhoffer group developed MP3, brainwashing them, and then hypnotizing them and implanting Ogg Vorbis specs into their minds out of the question? I can't really think of anything else.

Oh wait, perhaps buying a reciever with RCA connectors, an RCA cable, an RCA to mini 1/8th inch jack, and an Ogg Vorbis compatible portable audio player would do the trick. I know, I'm crazy.

Re:Portable Ogg Player

[the_bahua]

Cowon makes a fantastic audio player that supports Ogg Vorbis. It's called the iAUDIO x5. I bought it to replace my aging Rio Karma(which also supports ogg), and am ecstatic with the features, battery life(35 hrs), storage(30 GB), and aesthetics of it.

That said, I'd recommend just getting a stereo with an aux-in port on it, and plug your player in whenever you get in the car. That way, you don't have to futz with primitive CDs either.

empeg/Rio Car Player

[tleehane]

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.

Iriver?

[mengel]

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...

PhatNoise PhatBox

[avi33]

...or maybe the 'Kenwood Music Keg' which seems to run the same firmware.

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. ...and no telltale iPod wires hanging out of the dash, or proprietary closed formats.

Re:PhatNoise PhatBox

[dr_dank]

I have a Kenwood Music keg that I bought on eBay a couple of years ago. I paid $300 for it, a good deal considering they went for nearly twice that brand new in Crutchfields catalog. 10 gb of space with a mix of mp3, ogg, & flac. Vince at Phatnoise wrote a bunch of bash scripts that will copy files over to the Phatbox and do the signatures on the playlists. On my main Ubuntu machine, updating my PB goes like this:

1)Rip a cd, use XMMS to make a playlist and keep it in the temp directory.
2)Use the pls2phat script to convert the playlist to a PB playlist, this will also copy over the files to the cartridge (of course it has to be mounted prior to starting this).
3)Run vrfydisc to see that the files are all in their proper places
4)Run a script I wrote to call the signature binary that crytographically signs each playlist on the cartridge so that the machine will recongnize it and play it.

I keep a text file with the name of the album/playlist and its number, so I can keep track of things. This is by no means a pretty or remotely user friendly system, but it has served me well and helped me understand bash scripting when I was learning it.

Linux scripts here.

Specifically

[tepples]

Use of an FM transmitter without a licence is an offence throughout the European Union.

Amazon do one

[seanellis]

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.

Re:Amazon do one

[seanellis]

Well, it arrived this morning and I spent lunchtime fitting it into my Ford, with the help of an adapter kit I bought from eBay for about £15. Piece of cake, even for a clumsy software-jockey like me.

So, here are some fleeting initial impressions. I've only tried it with a USB stick so far, but it quite happily played a stick full of OGGs at ~128kbps (44.1KHz, Stereo). I therefore don't see that it would have any problem with CDs. It picked up the ID3 tags quite nicely, and the scrolling display is muted enough that it doesn't catch your eye when you're supposed to be looking at the road.

Sound quality is certainly better than my old tape deck (not difficult, I'll admit), with an obviously flatter frequency response and better bass. There is audible amp hiss when the volume is very very low, although you wouldn't notice this with the engine running. The tuner also doesn't seem to be as sensitive as the original Ford radio. The entire front panel comes off, which is quite bulky, especially when compared to the nice design of the Fords where one row of buttons comes off.

Overall: £80 well spent, and no need to re-rip my audio collection. Hurrah!

Re:Simple?

[bobbozzo]

Most head units with a CD-Changer control capability can take an RCA-in with a $15-25 adapter.

Crutchfield has some, as do most stereo shops.