Hard Drive for the Car
 

Have not been on here for a long time. Just finished downloading all of my CDs to my computer (using an external hard drive) and purchases Squeezebox's for every room in the house where I listen to music (including my two decks). This thing is amaizing...the iPod like interface has changed the way I listen to music.

So, how can I do something similar in the car WITHOUT going to the iPod. I want a digital ouput and I will using lossless files (I didn't spend 10k on a system to use inferior source media). Is there any hard drive for the car that can be controlled from the driver's seat?

Thanks to all.

Lawrence

the only one I know of is the omnifi from RF. It only plays mp3 and WMA however.

Username Quality Control has one for sale on this site.

The set is a hard drive with wired remote control to browse through songs and has a wireless card so you can upload all your music to it from your home network. Pretty neet.

Give it time, the CD, the DVD and even compressed MP3 files are going the way of the dinosaur

We currently have 4 and 8 GB flash drives (thumb drives) where we can transfer CD OR BETTER level sound. There are music downloads available now with better than CD sound so there is no longer going to be a need for compressed files. We can use the thumb drives now, we just need better software.

One of the gentleman I deal with at a local shop was telling me he hooked a external hard drive up to his deck (originally built for the computer). Now a days, most of the new external's run right off of the bus power from the USB. He was making it sound complicated, but just double check to see, or google it, but I tihnk any thumb drive, or external hard drive that runs off of bus power will work. For my next setup, I'll be using a thumb drive and about 320kbps (cd quality is around 128kbps) sound files for SQ.

I am going to try using an external computer hard drive plugged into the usb port on the deck, powered by the power adapter that comes with it, plugged into a small power inverter. The usb port see's a flash drive as just a drive, so why not a drive as a drive? 250gig of storage in the truck would kind of neat.:dunno:

Ya thats what I was thinking of doing. We have a 120 gig hard drive here at work (the source), and it runs right off the bus power. One day when I get the new setup, I'll be doing that so I can hold some of my high quality mixes.

why not just integrate an entire pc into your car. Then you can adapt to any new format that comes out, and have infinite space for music, and wireless network abilities? They even make solid state hardrives now with no moving parts that are not susceptable to vibration.

Solid state drives like the poster above, was my suggestion. However, they are VERY pricey at the moment. Give it time.

A carputer would be your best bet in terms of options, adaptability which will give the choice longevity. I agree with nickm50, the only current solution that will withstand the sands of time, is a full PC in the car. This is a project i'm looking heavily into at the moment as well.

Disk based storage is susceptible (especially HD) to temperature, vibration and other such variables that were not designed for mobile use. Laptop drives are a huge leap from standard desktop drives, but are still not immune from the elements. This is where solid state drives come to play, but as stated above, are a little to "new" to the market for pricing to drop drastically.

www.mp3car.com/vbulletin is a site just dedicated to the niche. All sorts of info, including answers to your question are most likely on that site.

Hope this helps!

how about a dvd monitor and a modded xbox? i am thinking about doing it within the next week. with the XBMediaCenter you can have loads of music and videos of pretty much any file type. but the problem lies with the hard drive. ive seen people have xbox's installed in their vehicles before. how was that done?

In the past I've tried dual layer dvd's in the deck, took like a minute for it too start playing. Then used the usb connection with a thumb drive, that was pretty good.

I've got a new car with a stock cd player so have to find a new way to access my entire music collection. Think I have done it with a fm transmitter that can take a SD memory card or usb device, I'm gonna give that a try next
I have a SD memory card with 16GB of space, plenty big enough for my collection.