I know you can buy a ready built car MP3 player (Rio ?) but has anybody on here manufactured their own from the ineviatable pile of out of data pc's that clutter up the average IT bods house ?

I have had a look at some stuff on the net and their seems to be a few sites dedicated to this (American), just wondered if one of you lot had tried ?

Have a look here:

http://www.chiark.com/scooby/limp.asp

our very own ICE forum moderator has done just that :)

[Edited by simes - 3/20/2002 10:55:38 PM]

Yup :) It's worth the hassle. Though the amount of people that have said "why not just use..." followed by "...a laptop", "...an mp3 player", "...an in-dash MP3 cd player" is getting out of hand now :)

The software that I've written is based on Cajun, but has been completely hacked around to use a MySQL database for the playlists and MP3 file information. There's a few bugs yet, but it works ;)

See the link above for some info. Drop me a mail, or post here, if you've got any questions.

Cheers,

Nick.

Chiark,

Your site is superb, basically all the hard work done for me. I am going to give it a go as irt looks well with my area of "Expertise"
apart from the Linux, but I do use Unix on a regular basis.

Just need to find a suitable pc, all my old ones are just that, too old or otherwise the other two are too powerful.

If you can find a 486DX4/100 or something like that you may find that you've got the power - particularly if you run an efficient OS...

Failing that, I paid 20 quid for my "donor box" which is a P90 with 32MB RAM. There was a PSU in it and drive bay which got hacked out with a hack-saw. I daresay you'll find the same at any computer fair. I do have a spare motherboard (I bought two of the boxes as I thought there'd be a chance that I'd blow one up...) but I'd rather keep that as a spare :D

One bit of advise is to use a good soundcard. Inbuilt soundcards on motherboards, or laptops, seem prone to picking up noise whereas the Soundblaster Live that I'm using is excellent at rejecting noise. This surprised me (pleasantly).

Yep, I shall be off to Bowlers (Manchester computer fair) to see what I can get for twenty quid !

I have just built a new pc and tried using the mobo sound to see what it was like compared to my SB live Platinum, no contest whatsoever Creative every time. I think a low spec pentium is the favorite, it really winds me up cos I have been scrapping loads of these at work as they are replaced, I purposefully didnt bring any home because I have to stop myself filling the house with crap.

I am off work at the mo so am gathering the info so I can source all the bits and get moving on it. I used to write industrial control software, handily a serial link was used to communicate between the industrial stuff and a pc so a lot of the stuff applies.

Couple of questions

I have a 486 laptop with a colour screen which is fairly small, I am wondering whether I could utilise this ?

Has it been reliable ?



I reckon over the next few years the in car MP3 player will become commonplace


Cheers for all the info !

wrt the laptop, I mean just the LCD screen by the way.

have answered the LCD question, seems to be a big no !

Re: LCD, I was in the same position. I considered using an SBC (single biscuit computer) from Advantech that had everything on-board including an LCD driver. Unfortunately, these were about 300 quid, which rather negated the "use the cheapo parts lying around" ethos of the project.

Reliability is excellent - never any problems. I have caused myself a problem by changing the LCD screen for a VFD and in doing so appear to have introduced a fault into the LCD processor board, but that's down to my ham-fistedness with a soldering iron and needs sorting sometime when I've got a spare few hours...

Mark,
Do you never get enough of I.T !!!

Speedy

Apparently not !

It is wads of cash and loads of time that I lack.

Where are all the P133's when you want one, I skip upwards of 200 of the buggers at work and when I want one I have to pay for it.

Glad to see you're feeling better, the Databases are missing you !!!

Speedy.

nick and others,

for the sake of all this hassle, for neatness what is the problem with buying say a kenwood 6090 and just recording all your albums on mp3?

Am I missing the point?

The downside with the current batch of mainstream car MP3 players is that:

1) units that can read MP3 format CDs require you to burn your MP3 collection onto CDs. It's not getting rid of the requirement to have media

2) the very few units that are head unit "jukeboxes", i.e. have an internal hard disk, generally require you to rip to the hard disk either from the CD slot or via memory card. Slow!

3) mStation-type devices don't integrate with head units well. (Watch this space. Vested interest here. Banner ad coming....!)

4) The nicest product (the Phatnoise) is now OEMd to Kenwood, Visteon, etc and still expensive ~700GBP for the Kenwood MusicKeg.

As I see it, the "right" product is

a) hard disk based so that i) you can store loads of music and ii) you can transfer files from your PC in a quick way via IDE, USB, FireWire, etc

b) can be controlled from an existing head unit using the CD changer bus

C) sensible money

I'm sure it's on it's way http://www.theunholytrinity.org/crac...ezpi_wink1.gif

Hope this clears things up for you.

[Edited by 12LEE - 3/22/2002 2:46:24 PM]

Your going to find it hard navigating all those files from an existing head unit.

Phatbox solved it in two ways:

1: using the headunit to navigate playlists
2: with a text to speech function that reads artist, title, etc

I think that playlist is quite neat - not vastly different to selecting from 10 CDs.

Cheers

Lee.

I read with interest your website Chiark... one main thing I wondered was how do you get the head unit to control it, or rather the sound to go from the Soundblaster card to the head unit?

I am tempted by one of these Kenwood KDC-C719MP CD changer with MP3 capability which I believe is out next month for about £240.
But again I'd have to copy everything to CD with my CDR/W.

Would be rather nice and flash to have a PC etc...

I have an old laptop, how would I get the sound from that into my head unit? I suppose I'd need a head unit with a preout style input? or could I use the cd auto changers inputs? It is a Kenwoord head unit and tried (dying) 6 disk CD changer I have at the minute.

Cheers

JGM :)

You could get an FM modulator and pipe the sound from your PC to the head unit as an FM frequency channel (e.g. 87.1fm)

:D

they dont cost much (£30 mark from memory)

or you could get a connector which goes into the CD-Bus cable to your head unit (this option works - but depends on your Head Unit and if you can make the cable or buy one).

For kenwood, you'll need something like an SCA-210 which allows you to connect either two Cd changers or a CD changer and aux input...

Failing that, upgrade to the newer high end 10 disc changer and you get aux input "for free" :)

Control is via a keypad linked into the serial display, or you could just use a numeric keyboard?

Snowcrash,

The FM Modulator - I had forgotten about them... good idea!

Chiark - If I upgrade to a new 10disk CD player then I wouldn't need to add the PC :)

As to connecting into the CD bus I would know where to start.

JGM :)

http://www.carplayer.com/ssi/cpm25/fmmod.shtml

just doing a search on yahoo brings up a loada hits on FM modulators.

PC is cooler :D

i've got a crappy P133 laptop doing naff all - and i might convert it for use as a in-car mp3 - although im going to have to work out how to power the craptop - but i was definatly thinking of using an fm modulator to connect it too my head unit....

finding a decent one might be an issue.... :|

I was also thinking of ripping the LCD panel out and mounting it somewhere - but dunno yet as its not exactly small....

Snowcrash - maplins sell a 240v inverter that'll give enough juice to power a laptop for about 40 quid.

Re: screen. The cable between the mobo and LCD cannot feasibly be extended. Some people have tried it, and found the noise interferance to be terrible...

I have a P133 laptop too which is what I am thinking about using..
Cheaper than the CD changer route, although more baulky...
like where do you mount it..

Would need a power inverter and a fm modulator then I guess.

JGM :)

in the boot :D - it might squeeze under the drivers seat - but I reckon boot will be best as then i can rip it out and plug it into my lan to swap songs......

How would you control it though?

I suppose you could run Linux on it and a control panel..

I was thinking if I disconnected the micro switch that switches the thing off when the lid is shut I could open it select a playlist and then close the lid and stick it where ever, like you say under the seat etc..
Either that or some homemade dash mount... could even keep windows on it and have some data logging going on too ?

I shall have to look into it once I get back from my holiday.

Cheers for the ideas guys

JGM :)

windows is an easy option - with winamp as the shell and winamp plugins running keyboard and maybe lcd display - i used to have loadsa links on this - will dig it out and post it on here at some point.

Okay cheers Snowcrash...

JGM :)

PS: Is there a story behind your username?

lol - not wot your thinking - i aint crashed any car yet (touch wood) - if you like IT stuff then my name is based on the book Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson, its a really cool book (e.g. think of "The Matrix" but written before that came out) I recommend it.

anyway links for mp3car stuff (i've been researching this subject since 1999 so I have read loadsa stuff on it):

http://scott.kincaid.net/
http://www.skylab.org/~chugga/mpegbox/

these sites have links to other pages about car mp3 - but doing a search on google/yahoo will return a load of results.....

FYI: even the rio in-car mp3 was made by a geezer for his mazda mx-5 he posted all the info on his website years ago, then decided to do a production model, then diamond bought it :D

Snowcrash - tip top book!

Hugo's original MP3 player pages are still up too - http://utter.chaos.org.uk/~altman/mp3mobile

Control-wise, you can buy a numeric keypad from Cherry and others which has a PS2 connector on it and will work with most if not all laptops. You can sling this in the ashtray area and Robert is your father's brother. Displaywise, Matrix Orbital do good displays - see my pages for more info on how they work.

If you go the PS2 keyboard route on Win95 (probably easiest), you'll need to map keypresses to control Winamp which is quite simple. It's very easy to do with Linux.

Be aware if you decide to upgrade an old laptop (or PC) you may run across BIOS issues with large hard discs. There's a limit at around 8.4GB that you'll hit with anything around 97-98, and you can solve it with a program called EZDrive. For 2.5" hard drives, dabs seem to be around the cheapest for Fujitsu drives.

So, power's sorted, control's sorted... What are you waiting for :) ?

PS - your wife/significant other will be convinced you're a muppet of the highest order.