///MDex

1st post here in electronics; don't kill me for posting this book of a question.

I've tried doing some reasearch in the archives, but found very little, and what I did find, is probably outdated by now.

Here's what I'm wanting to do:

Instead of me telling you what components I want (like a typical client / end-user), I'll tell you what I want to achieve, and you all can make the recommendations.

SOUND CHARACTERISTICS:
better quality sound, its loud enough right now
more bass, mids, and highs
probably not interested in a sub

MP3 AUDIO CHARACTERISTICS:
very similar to this type of setup where you have a medium where your music resides, and you transport it between desktop and car

http://www.phatnoise.com/products/

From Cnet:

Behind the PhatNoiseThe PhatNoise player sits in your trunk like a CD changer. It works with a variety of head units, getting around the lack of standards by writing separate software for each different head unit (an elegant solution if ever we've seen one). The small, removable hard drive connects to your computer via a USB cradle. Music on the drive syncs up automatically with a database on your PC every time that you connect it, similar to the address book feature on a PDA. Once you hook up the PhatNoise player to your computer, the software adds any music that you've ripped or downloaded since the last time you connected the device. It even allows for dynamic playlists, letting you listen to the 20 most recent jazz songs that you've downloaded, for example. The smallest-capacity PhatNoise (somewhere between 6GB and 10GB) will sell for around $700, putting it into the middle range of car MP3 players.

I'm dying to get my music into my ride.

*I DONT want a CD based system* I'm tired of putting my music on CDs; I want all my music, all the time.

If you have any wesites I can research, post those links and I'll start crunching on those too.

Thanks guys.

mumbles

Dexter,
Not sure if this is the direction you want to approach this from, but this link deals mainly with mp3's from the mobile computing perspective...
http://www.mp3car.com/

GSAristo

Dexter,

I've got a NEO35 MP3 Player with a Maxtor 20GB hard drive in it. So far I've got over 2000 songs and only half the hard drive is taken up (I'm still ripping the rest of my CD collection). The trade off is lower sound quality, but for daily driving it is acceptable IMO. It came with a car bay and a PC bay. You can get details and get other questions answered about it from where I got mine at - www.neomp3players.com.

Here's a pic of the NEO35 installed in the stock changer location (glovebox) in my GS.

///MDex

Thanks Allan. This is the kind of info I was looking for. I've looked at this setup, and am interested, but answer me this:

How do you navigate among the 2K songs you have?

I am in a similar boat, and my songs are mostly grouped by folders.

Are your MP3s all lumped into the root of the harddrive and sorted by name?

TIA

///MDex

Thanks Allan. This is the kind of info I was looking for. I've looked at this setup, and am interested, but answer me this:

How do you navigate among the 2K songs you have?

I am in a similar boat, and my songs are mostly grouped by folders.

Are your MP3s all lumped into the root of the harddrive and sorted by name?

TIA

GSAristo

Hi Dexter,

My songs are organized in a directory tree structure as follows:

\music type\singer\album\song.mp3

The NEO35 has a wired remote that has an LCD screen and navigation buttons much like the up down arrow keys on a keyboard. There are also buttons for Play, Pause, Stop, FF, RW, menu (for EQ/Bass/Treble), and program (for Repeat, Repeat All, Random, Random All).

Using the buttons, I can list the directories in the root directory, as well as all the directories leading to the actual MP3 files. Once I'm in the right directory, I can list all the MP3 files it contains, select the song that I want and simply press Play to start playing it.

Here's a pic of the NEO35 remote.

///MDex

Again, thanks, excellent info.

I've had my eye on this setup, and the phatmusic one also for a while.

Thanks for the pic - this alleviates a great much of my concerns on the navigation issue.

LeXusBoy

You could always have some one build a PC for your car to play them...and hey it can do DVD and other stuff....

///MDex

I have helped a buddy build one (slim line everything) and install it, but it's just a little too involved for what I'm trying to do - beteen the video, audio, windows shell, etc.....

Thanks