OGG Capable Car Stereos? 82
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?"
Re:What's next (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's next (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe this'll help... (Score:3, Interesting)
They used to make a single-DIN [xenarc.com] 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'.
Re:What's next (Score:1)
Re:What's next (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's next (Score:2)
Simple? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
UK counterpart to FCC? (Score:1)
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.
Re:UK counterpart to FCC? (Score:1)
Specifically (Score:2, Informative)
Use of an FM transmitter without a licence is an offence throughout the European Union [ofcom.org.uk].
Re:Simple? (Score:2)
Re:Simple? (Score:2)
You just aren't looking enough.
Re:Simple? (Score:2)
Re:Simple? (Score:2)
-Ster
Re:Simple? (Score:1)
Re:Simple? (Score:1)
Re:Simple? (Score:1)
Re:Simple? (Score:3, Informative)
Crutchfield has some, as do most stereo shops.
Re:Simple? (Score:1)
EPIA minitx project time (Score:3, Interesting)
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 !
Re:EPIA minitx project time (Score:2, Funny)
Boot time (Score:2)
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 ca
Re:Boot time (Score:2)
I'll second that. I'm no Linux guru, but just bought a 'Medion' Laptop from Aldi. It has a second 'non-booting' media-centre which is really a second Linux boot partition with a build of Busybox.
This Linux media center boots up in 10 seconds. That is counting from after the BIOS check completes, till the media centre interface is ready. With BIOS check included, it's under 15 seconds.
The Linux media centre includes 'PowerCinema Linux' to play DVDs.
The Aldi box
Re:Boot time (Score:2)
Re:Boot time (Score:2)
Use the best tool for the job. I haven't used an Epia with BSD yet, but if you're worried about compatability glitches I'd have to say that the support given by VIA for my M-10000/M2-10000 in linux has been pretty decent. Hard to figure out at times, but it works quite well: sound, DVD accelerate, 3d acceleration (basic, but good enough for neverball), and TV-out etc all work nicely.
What I haven't tried yet is the Cardreader or PCMCIA slot on the M2. I'd im
Re:Boot time (Score:1)
Suck it up, and re-encode your stuff (Score:1)
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 1,000,0
This is why my collection is in mp3. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is why my collection is in mp3. (Score:1)
Indeed - this is what I do, but if I had been thinking more clearly when I bought my car stereo, I would have simply bought a set of speakers and an amplifier with a line-in socket to which I could hook up my iPod.
Maybe if I had done that, I wouldn't have had to pay twice for the dashboard unit when that fuckwit saw fit to bust into my car to rip off my stereo.
Re:This is why my collection is in mp3. (Score:2)
Re:This is why my collection is in mp3. (Score:1)
Also, depending on the kind of power you need you may want to run the power independantly of other things in the fuse box. Theres usually an empty spot on the fuse box, or you could just use an inline fuse and run it straight to the battery.
Re:This is why my collection is in mp3. (Score:1)
Re:This is why my collection is in mp3. (Score:2)
Re:Portable Ogg Player (Score:4, Informative)
Cowon makes a fantastic audio player that supports Ogg Vorbis. It's called the iAUDIO x5 [cowonamerica.com]. 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.
Not going to find one (with a reasonable price) (Score:2)
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.
ipodlinux status (Score:1, Informative)
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...
empeg/Rio Car Player (Score:2, Informative)
Re:empeg/Rio Car Player (Score:2)
Re:empeg/Rio Car Player (Score:1, Funny)
Re:empeg/Rio Car Player (Score:2)
The 1.00 and 2.00 lines were quite stable.
The playser suffered from a high price tag ($800 us) and amall market (2 years in tech land means a lot) The division was bought by rio/sonic blue and then sold to the same company that owns denon and marantz. They don't know what the hell to do with it.
Still, the core code lives on in every rio/sonic blue player today. The staff backports things to the car player on the side.
And yeah, it runs linux.
Re:empeg/Rio Car Player (Score:1)
Iriver? (Score:3, Informative)
Simple, really (Score:2)
PhatNoise PhatBox (Score:4, Informative)
The ogg question is addressed here [phatnoise.com].
I bought a PhatBox [phatnoise.com] that works well for me, on account of the fact that it can handle flac [sourceforge.net] - 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 [vwvortex.com] 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.
Re:PhatNoise PhatBox (Score:3, Informative)
1)Rip a cd, use XMMS to make a playlist and keep it in the temp directory.
2)Use the pls2
Re:PhatNoise PhatBox (Score:2)
Re:PhatNoise PhatBox (Score:1)
Re:PhatNoise PhatBox (Score:2)
Flexible Music Collection (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
That's why I changed from ogg to mp3 vbr (Score:2)
I'm now re-encoding everything in high quality MP3 VBR. Portability wins.
You would think (Score:2)
I guess ideology isn't dead after all.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:But ogg is patent-free, open-source! (Score:2)
Agreed. Maybe someday OGG will be widely supported for autos, but MP3 is the way to go at present. You're not distributing the music anyways so whether or not you're breaking patents, nobody is gonna know or care.
At home I like to use OGG files mainly because it seems easier to get a good sounding encoding by us
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Re:But ogg is patent-free, open-source! (Score:2)
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Re:But ogg is patent-free, open-source! (Score:1)
Re:But ogg is patent-free, open-source! (Score:1)
Monkey's Audio is junk. I used it for a while but Matt was always introducing new bugs and people were always having problems with it. I had a few verify/reliability issues myself. FLAC is much more solid and is a 'proper' unix app (it appears you are a Windows user so don't worry about that - but last time I checked there was a half-arsed Linux version of MAC which didn't inspire confidence).
What's
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Re:But ogg is patent-free, open-source! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:But ogg is patent-free, open-source! (Score:1)
Ogg/vorbis does not require a powerful system to decode. My iRiver iFP-799 (1GB flash) plays VBR ogg/vorbis from 64Kbps to 230Kbps and is usable as a USB mass storage device. (It plays the oggs/mp3s/wavs from the filesystem, too, unlike an iPod.) iRiver also used to make the H340, a 40GB HD player, that plays the same range of ogg/vorbis. They don't seem to be shipping these anymore, but you may be able to find one 2nd hand. Hell, I haven't check their website in a while, so they might have an even bet
Audio In. :) (Score:2)
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.
Re:Audio In. :) (Score:2)
Yep. Thats definately a good plan.
Last summer my Volvo's cassette player died, so I decided to upgrade to one of the auto MP3 players. After some shopping around I picked a high-end Jensen unit which was still cheaper than the lowest Sony. I've been lucky with it so far, and being able to store eleven odd hours of music on one cd is definately pretty cool.
Most of these things will have aux input RCA jacks in the back. All you h
A cheap way, if you have an ogg player already (Score:1)
Hey, this is slashdot, not pimp my ride.
The Pontus PAC-7002(B) (Score:1)
Amazon do one (Score:3, Informative)
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 [amazon.co.uk]
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Amazon do one (Score:3, Informative)
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 mu
RTFQ? (A whole lot of replies wrapped in one!) (Score:2)
It's always funny to me as well how so many people are so quick to write off vorbis. About 7 years or s