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The MP3mobile (1998)

utter.chaos.org.uk

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Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#4

Post by eddieroger »

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 mini tower encased in translucent green, bungee corded to my trunk's side panels, and a 10-key with a PS2 extender running to my console. I booted straight in to WinAmp and ran plugins to let me pick songs by entering +$NUM+ or variations of that. A few months in, I got a 4x40 LCD so I could see what was playing and so some menu-type things. The most clever move, I thought, was getting a hot swap HDD tray so I could periodically reload the files, and maybe the true crowning achievement was the printout I had up front of what was available. Simpler but much more fun times, because the challenge was the fun part.

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#5

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

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] It was pretty sweet, all things considered. Tape decks started to vanish from cars at about that time, and those FM transmitter adapters that would plug into the cigarette lighter and broadcast on a radio frequency were really crap compared to the direct jack. I would argue I didn't get that same level of ease+fidelity of pushing MP3s to my car stereo until I directly installed a Bluetooth stereo into my car 15-ish years later.

[0] example: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#6

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#9

Post by hypercube33 »

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…

I remember reading boot magazine having a tutorial about how to build a carputer around this time and my mind raced about how awesome that'd be.

Re: The MP3mobile (1998)

#10

Post by dfxm12 »

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 music, not knowing how to find something, general decision paralysis, etc. I think some of these problems exist with satellite radio and terrible console UIs today.

I get it from a curiosity stand point, can I do this? And it is fun just to see if you can. As it turns out, it's not very practical compared to alternatives though.

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