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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?"
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
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.
A B A C A B B
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.
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.
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'
I'd like to see a nice Linux powered car stereo head unit that would read flash or SD memory cards. A built in card reader could replace cd's. Also it'd be nice to allow recording from the radio to the card. I think I'll go build one. Who wants to buy one?
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
...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.
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.
My method was just a pair of amplified computer speakers, plugged into an inverter and into the media playing device (which in my case is now the amazingly good "The Core Media Player" running on an IPAQ- does everything the link in the summary does and then some thanks to also having iGuidance, a 2 GB Hitachi CF Format Hard drive, and a bluetooth GPS unit, for a lot less cost). I believe that media player plays OGG, or at least, you can install a codec for it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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
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
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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.
Nothing to see here; Move along.