Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The MP3mobile (1998)

utter.chaos.org.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#31

Post by V99 »

dfxm12 wrote: post #10

The UI for these things isn't good to use while driving. Music players with big storage have pretty poor ways to find what you're looking for even with a decent sized screen + keyboard (like youtube music on your phone or an ipod touch), let alone just a few buttons (like I had on my MP3 CD player or what this seems to have). Even if you have a passenger running the device, you fall victim to them not knowing your mu…

The product that came from this project (Empeg/Rio Car) was/is actually quite nice and well thought out for navigating while driving and minimal looking at the screen. Physical buttons and a rotary encoder with detents so you know exactly how far you moved when scrolling slowly.

You quickly learned the button sequence for the operations you used a lot to be able to do them without looking at all. For picking actual music everything was a set of nested playlists/folders. The structure of them was up to you to define in the desktop app, which could make things that are the result of a search of ID3 data or pull off the first letter of the artist or whatever you want depending on how much music you have and how you like to play it.

You load something into the active play queue and then can modify that by prepend/appending more without losing the rest. "Wendy" filters to dynamically disable content that a certain passenger doesn't like when you say they're in the car (Wendy was the girlfriend of one of the developers, I think). A LOT more flexible than most players today. So... also probably way too complicated for normal people today, but super powerful and customizable.

There were only a few thousand built, and a lot of them are still in use today. Few modern cars have a DIN slot anymore, but the community has built some elaborate ways to keep using these by separating out the display/controls and mount just them in the cabin, integrating with car bluetooth controls invented long after Rio went bankrupt, etc.

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#32

Post by rconti »

dfxm12 wrote: post #10

The UI for these things isn't good to use while driving. Music players with big storage have pretty poor ways to find what you're looking for even with a decent sized screen + keyboard (like youtube music on your phone or an ipod touch), let alone just a few buttons (like I had on my MP3 CD player or what this seems to have). Even if you have a passenger running the device, you fall victim to them not knowing your mu…

Actually, the empeg had features that still don't exist on other players to this day.

I could shuffle my entire music library, then if I heard a song I liked, i could hit a single button to "unshuffle" around that artist (playing their songs in order) or around that album, or whatever, for example.

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#33

Post by rconti »

I had an empeg in my '95 M3 from around 2001-2004 (?)

It was a 20GB version, if memory serves, which was the largest available at the time without going to a 2 hard disk version (2.5" HDDs).

It retailed for $2000 but I bought it for about $400 new. It was the v2 with the airplane wing looking screen, and it was 2 acquisitions in. I think SonicBlue then Rio? Or Diamond multimedia? I can't remember anymore.

Used it for a few years, and sold it on eBay for, I think, more than I paid for it.

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#34

Post by bobchadwick »

eddieroger wrote: post #4

This was a nostalgia bomb for me, particularly because I did a project like this in my first car around the same time. In retrospect, it's a miracle my car never exploded, with questionable wiring running from my console to the trunk, and a power inverter / extension cord combo that was also fairly dubious. But the idea of having all my music was too much to pass up for a nascent driver and techie. My setup was a min…

Nostalgia bomb here, too! I think this page had to have served as the inspiration for my car MP3 player, even though I don't actually recognize anymore.

Mine was basically a motherboard crammed under the driver's seat of my Ford Festiva, which loaded an MP3 player on boot (can't remember which one unfortunately). I had it set to shuffle my collection, and I'd use the arrow keys on a full sized keyboard to skip tracks. It was powered by an inverter plugged into the cigarette lighter, and to solve some noise issues, I had broken guitar string grounding the motherboard to the seat's mounting hardware.

I have great memories of driving around and listening to bands like Pavement and Smog, which served as my intro to the wonderful world of '90s indie rock. (I'm sure I pirated my entire collection at the time, but over the years I think I've made up for it by buying their albums and seeing them live.)

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#35

Post by Scoundreller »

kedean wrote: post #29
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Circa 2001 or so, I got a portable CD player for Christmas that could also play MP3s, which was just about the coolest thing ever at the time. Now instead of the normal 12-13 songs a CD could hold when converted to WAV, I could hold 100-200 songs in mp3 form on a 700mb CD burned as a data disc rather than an audio disc. This was then supplemented in the car with a cassette tape adapter that included an audio jack. [0…

Semi-related, it's wild how much FM transmitters have improved since the early aughts. I drive a vehicle from 2005 without a tape deck or aux jack, so I picked up a cheap one that receives a bluetooth signal (from my phone), then bridges that to the radio over an FM frequency. The audio quality is truly impressive compared to the iTrip's and such of 20 years ago.

Also helps if your FM spectrum isn’t close to “full”.

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#36

Post by dfxm12 »

stuart78 wrote: post #23
dfxm12 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first car was too new to have a tape player, but too old to have aux/usb/bluetooth input. I had to resort plugging in my creative nomad mp3 player to an FM radio transmitter plugged into my cigarette lighter port. :)

I used a series of those for iPod for the first few years, but lived in Los Angeles, so there was a ton of interference, both from radio stations and other devices broadcasting on the same frequency. It created some pretty chaotic drives from time to time...

Yeah the old school ones (or maybe just the cheap ones me and my friends had) had a only few stations they could transmit. Everyone once in a while we'd be able to tune the radio to one of those stations if we were next to a young person at a red to see what they were listening to, if we thought they had the same device. Maybe we'd kill ours to hear theirs if we heard the static...

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#37

Post by greggsy »

> PCM-5862 (retails for $525)

> PCB-10586-2000

> Intel Pentium 150Mhz

> 16Mb RAM

10x more powerful than an Arduino, and 10x less powerful than a Pi Zerp (40x if you count cores?). Probably uses 1000x more power. RAM proportions are similar too.

It’s probably not fair to compare raw numbers like this, but it’s interesting to see how the market sliders move over time. I think the first Arduino only emerged five or so years after this article came out?

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#38

Post by tylerrobinson »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Circa 2001 or so, I got a portable CD player for Christmas that could also play MP3s, which was just about the coolest thing ever at the time. Now instead of the normal 12-13 songs a CD could hold when converted to WAV, I could hold 100-200 songs in mp3 form on a 700mb CD burned as a data disc rather than an audio disc. This was then supplemented in the car with a cassette tape adapter that included an audio jack. [0…

One of the funniest (in hindsight) aspects of those FM broadcasters was how you selected a frequency. The Griffin iTrip didn’t have any buttons, so the way you selected a frequency was by playing a specific track from your iPod corresponding to the frequency you wanted.

That meant you had to first rip the CD containing all those 3-5 second tracks to your computer, sync the iPod, and then you’d be ready to use it.

And even after all that, the quality was still worse than the cassette adapters.

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#39

Post by mavhc »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #7

Looks like this is by Hugo Fiennes, who among other things designed the Nest thermostat and (at least partially) the iPhone. https://www.engineering.com/story/meet-the-man-who-designed-...

Yep, turns out he went on to work on the best selling mp3 player of all time

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/magazine/article1.pdf

Pretty sure he lent me an Acorn CDROM once too

Post reply on HN