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Music Media Technology

OGG Capable Car Stereos? 82

Posted by Cliff from the dashboard-alphabet-soup dept.
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?"
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OGG Capable Car Stereos? More

OGG Capable Car Stereos?

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  • Simple? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 )
    Have any of you been able to find a simple car stereo that will play your OGGs?

    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.

    • 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.

    • I find it retarded that such FM hacks are necessary anyways. Seriously, I've seen cars made in the past 4 years that come with a built-in casette player! Casettes for shit's sake! Meanwhile, I have never ever seen a car stereo with a freaking auxilliary line-in jack. I just don't get it - you put all this money into speakers, displays, buttons, etc. and can't be bothered to put in a freaking hole??
      • My JVC player supports MP3, cd changer, and has auxiliary line in on the front (and I believe one in the back should I choose to hook it up).

        You just aren't looking enough. :)
        • Oh, I know I can buy one - but I mean I've never seen anyone who _owns_ one. By that, I mean that it's really rare for no good reason.
          • My 2004 Nissan Sentra SE came with a stereo with line-in, stock.

            -Ster
          • I have a 100 dollar clarion deck that has RCA ins on the back, if you get a minijack to rca cable and plug it in it'll work just fine (I used this years ago to hook up my computer to my stereo system, pretty simple assuming you can find a premade cable... usually at a musical equipment store.)
      • I have never ever seen a car stereo with a freaking auxilliary line-in jack I had one until 4 years ago, it was about 12 years old when I trashed it.

      • Re:Simple? (Score:3, Informative)

        by bobbozzo ( 622815 )
        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.
      • Just about every head unit radioshack sold(when they sold head units) had line in. The $30 tape player I got from there also had better reception than my $200 Alpine.

  • EPIA minitx project time (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Friday October 21, 2005 @12:30PM (#13845342) Journal
    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 !

    • That's awesome, but the awesomeness was totally cancelled out by your URL. Sorry ;)
    • 30 seconds is a pretty long time to boot. I have an Mp3 deck with the annoying 'feature' that when playing an Mp3 file, it will start from the song beginning after the power has been turned off. That's annoying enough (if you take a trip with lots of short stops you hear the same song over several times).

      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
      • > 30 seconds is a pretty long time to boot.

        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
      • Linux Bios [linuxbios.org] will boot the EPIA in about 5s but it doesn't support FreeBSD. Plan9 doesn't do the EPIA's graphics or sound, I don't fancy getting Windows 2000 to boot from read only media. As for Linux, I'd rather wait 30s for FreeBSD :)

        • "As for Linux, I'd rather wait 30s for FreeBSD"

          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
  • Yes, your only option is to transcode or re-encode to MP3. Or buy a portable player with an audio input that you can connect to your stereo.
    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)

    by venomkid ( 624425 ) on Friday October 21, 2005 @12:38PM (#13845399)
    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.
    • ...encoding them as high bandwidth mp3s shouldn't hurt the sound too much.

      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.

      • Pretty much what I did do when the fuckwit broke into my car and stole the stereo. One of these days, I'm going to have to get a Ford car hardware hacker to show me how to remove the central dash panel so that I can wire it all in correctly and not use batteries and inverters anymore.
        • Just get a Haynes manual from a parts store, it'll show you how to take apart the dash and have wiring schematics. You might need to buy a set of offset and small screwdrivers or other little tools depending on the model but any hardware store will have them.
          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.
        • What model car? Many Ford vehicles have clips holding the radio in that let you pop it out in seconds, literally, with the right $8 tool. If there are two holes on either side of your radio, then find the Ford factory radio removal tool (available almost anywhere that deals with car stereos) and have at it.
          • The radio coming out was no problem at all- the theives took care of that for me. But getting access to the wiring behind the radio to find out why none of the power wires actually have power anymore- that's the question. I'll have to remove the whole panel for that- it's a 1999 Ford Escort with the funny round panel that contained the radio and the air conditioning controls.

  • 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)

    by tab0wling ( 688803 )
    I just check the status of the ipodlinux project http://ipodlinux.org/Project_Status [ipodlinux.org]

    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)

    by tleehane ( 320951 )
    The empeg/Rio Car player [empeg.com] 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 [riocar.org]. According to the FAQ on riocar.org [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.
    • Yes, it's here [empeg.com]. It's still in alpha. Last update was July of 2005
      • Another open source project stuck for infinifty in the pre 1.0 or alpha stage? Who would have guessed!?
        • Not at all. That os version 3.00 aplha.
          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.
          • I was just joking about it. I know it's a legitimate product. I just think it's funny to browse freshmeat or sourceforge and see the gigantic # of what amounts to a number of lofty dreams that never really went anywhere. Or the huge number of software products that never made it out of .01.

  • Iriver? (Score:3, Informative)

    by mengel ( 13619 ) <mengel@users.sou ... rge.net minus pi> on Friday October 21, 2005 @01:03PM (#13845678) Homepage Journal
    It looks like the latest firmware [misticriver.net] for the iRiver imp550 [google.com] cd players does ogg vorbis audio; but I'm not sure how "car-stereo" it is...
  • Either use a portable music player (I use a Rio Karma), or transcode your files. If your car's anything but off, it's going to make some background noise. The more background noise it makes, the less important the audio quality of your files.

  • PhatNoise PhatBox (Score:4, Informative)

    by avi33 ( 116048 ) on Friday October 21, 2005 @01:27PM (#13845892) Homepage
    ...or maybe the 'Kenwood Music Keg' which seems to run the same firmware.

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

    • Re:PhatNoise PhatBox (Score:3, Informative)

      by dr_dank ( 472072 )
      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 pls2
    • I refuse to support the phat noise (aka music keg) people. They either stole my idea, or independently invented it at the same time I was discussing it on Usenet. Either way, they won't share details of their system which was built on top of community-provided software which itself requires little to no modification, or the communication protocol between the receiver and a CD changer (which isn't exactly secret, but is a pain to extract). So screw them. :)

  • Flexible Music Collection (Score:3, Insightful)

    by amcnabb ( 682951 ) on Friday October 21, 2005 @02:20PM (#13846349) Homepage
    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.
  • I've started to rip my 2.000 CD collection in ogg. This was a mistake. MP3 has won. I know it isn't free, it has patents and licensing, but it is better than any closed format. All the big corp hate MP3. They can't lock you with it. They must support it. They (and you) will have to live with mp3.

    I'm now re-encoding everything in high quality MP3 VBR. Portability wins.

  • ...that with so many corps trying to push flash-based phones and other cramped audio players, that they would take the tiny step to support Vorbis.

    I guess ideology isn't dead after all.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • The Open Source evangelists tediously blather on about how Open Source gives users so many choices, but, had you gone with MP3 or WMA, you would have had far more choices for an in-dash MP3 player.

      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

    • 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

  • Get a stereo with audio in and plug in the portable ogg player of your choice.

    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.

    • Get a stereo with audio in and plug in the portable ogg player of your choice.

      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

  • Get a car tape player, and a 2.5mm to tape adapter. Done. Plug in a CD player, and no need to worry about the built in one dying. If you want power, get a cigarrette lighter power adaptor, or a 120 V car inverter... or just charge a lot of batteries.

    Hey, this is slashdot, not pimp my ride.
  • I know this is not simple but it plays ogg and you can take it with you but the real down side is space and its ugly. lol :( but you have to give it to me i found something different than everyone else. :) http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000953056118/ [engadget.com]

  • Amazon do one (Score:3, Informative)

    by seanellis ( 302682 ) on Saturday October 22, 2005 @01:05PM (#13852878) Homepage Journal

    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)

      by ZephyrXero ( 750822 )
      Thank you so much for the first decent piece of information anyone has given me here :)

      • Re:Amazon do one (Score:3, Informative)

        by seanellis ( 302682 )
        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 mu
  • It's funny...ya know, when I wrote this article, I specifically ended it by stating how I was already aware of my options to re-encode/transcode, get an external player and attach it to a jack, or install some sort of file server in my car, yet if you look up at the majority of these posts they go on to suggest these things to me like I've never heard of them. Thanks guys...this has been alot of help ;)

    It's always funny to me as well how so many people are so quick to write off vorbis. About 7 years or s

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