41–50 of 53 posts
I'm the only one still listening mp3s? I have a sandisk mp3 player (size similar to the classic ipod shuffle) and I use yandex to get the mp3s. And I transferred all my old CDs to mp3 format as well. I don't use my smartphone to listen to music because it's too big/heavy (running with it is so uncomfortable).
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…
Good times.
Apparently, everything is done through one's phone now. And then it seems so difficult to get files on and off of an iPhone without using the system-wrecking iTunes that most people resort to some kind of service, so rather than your music, you're getting whatever is available that "they" feel like popularizing now.
I burned my MP3s to discs in a format Artist / Album / Song so I could use my rudimentary speech UI to navigate up and down the directory hierarchy and play the selected item (be it a single MP3 file, or a directory, which would get played recursively).
I'd leave the unit open on the passenger seat and reach over to run the UI without looking at it. I can still remember how Festival's "accent" colored the reading of the names and titles.
I put the unit out to pasture when I got a flash-based player w/ reasonable capacity.
5 years later I bought a car that, from the dealer, could play MP3s burned on CDs. The shuffle mode was terrible though; if you had enough songs, it would loop the order and not play every individual track.
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…
Around the same time I got a portable CD player that could play CDs, MP3s, and VCDs. Video CDs were pretty rare in North America but it wasn't much of a feat to author them yourself. You'd typically need two discs to hold a full length movie (MPEG1), but it was kind of a perfect size for television episodes (especially when utilizing RW discs). And playing them on a CRT tv (still the norm) was a huge improvement over…
It connects to an area I'm growing increasingly interested in, the early history of the Chinese Internet and tech industry. (VCD players sold in enormous numbers there.) See for instance this fascinating piece on the Chinese Flash gaming scene: https://www.chaoyangtrap.house/flashing-for-fun-and-no-profi...
Turns out some chap in Eastern Europe restores old BMW head units and outfits them with Bluetooth. $400 and a few weeks later, it arrived spic and span with some of the most user friendly install instructions I’ve ever seen. He even gave me the option to do things like have a custom display message or show current song info.
These kinds of experiences make it fun to be a techie car nut.
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…
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…
Heck, I remember that article from the time it was circulated on Slashdot back in the day.
Looking at the title, I was, like, OMG, was it about that crazy setup where someone wired a desktop PC to play mp3s in a car back when CD players were far, far from being standard?
And lo and behold, yes, it was. I mean, he used an "embedded" system, that's to say - a mini-ITX sized PC with Pentium 166MhZ running Linux.
It's insane that within 5 years, CD players playing MP3-CDs became ubiquitous (way before Flash memory became cheap enough for accessibly priced mp3 players with 1GB memory).