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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?"
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.
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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.
...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.