Although the hard drive idea is great, there are other input mechs that might actually prove to be more flexible for a car stereo. For example, having a CD drive would make it easy to bring data CDs from the house into the car (and could theoretically play music CDs as well). 4mm DAT would be cool too. Any plans for alternative inputs down the road?

Hmmm, I don't think Dat would be a good idea. It's not really random access, and my experience with home decks is that tapes chew up quite easily...

Cd could be good, but it takes alot of space, and is very prone to skipping (Although the buffering would sort most of that..)

I'd go for either slot loaded Hard Discs, or some high capacity minidisk variant (Smaller discs have less vibration problems..) At least until solid state becomes a sensible price.. =)
Jazz

CDR's arn't a good media for MP3 playing. Why? Not changable (what happens when you burn that song with a skip in it and you don't want it anymore). Expensive (Add the cost of a CDR unit to a PC if you don't have one already - excluding the cost of the media.) Slow (It takes too long to burn CDR's and I myself screw them up 1 out of 10 times anyway). Low capicity (650mb compared to 4 or 10gb!) Trouble (CD's are too much trouble. My cd collection is always screwed up becuase I carry them in the truck. Not a problem with HDD).

If you want a CDR unit there are already some out there at www.mp3.com/hardware or you can get an MP3 player on the upcoming AutoPC unit at www.clubautopc.com or www.autopc.com

David

Actually, I was thinking along the lines of a CD-RW disc. I have a CD-RW burner already. It would make it really easy to put a few albums onto the disc and play as needed.

As for your issues of cost and access, etc., if you don't want the CD model don't buy it. I want it and would buy it.

I will check the other refs. Thanks for the link.

How about a voice control system that would allow you to
change mp3's and a CF slot that's accessable from the front of
the unit, to allow transfer of mp3's to/from empeg??

Someone's already done it...

www.autopc.com

check this link out for what I am talking about: http://www.accpc.com/tcapstore.htm

Having a empeg using that could accept those, like pcmcia slot versions of it would be really nice. I would be like having 90gig floppy disks. Only real problems seems to be the battery it needs, but from the looks of it, it should only need like a watch battery that could be inside the pcmcia card. Now if they get this made and into production soon would be really nice. 'Delays' are always a pain that shoots down most plans and dreams.

You realize that is tottally fake right?

Keith Kemp

fake or not, it will be a reality soon, probably not at that cost though

You might have seen this before, but it's our "standard" reply to this (very common) subject and would seem to be relevent:

We have no plans to integrate a CD player into our empeg Car product.

We did consider this option, but decided against it for a number of reasons: some practical, some commercial, and some because of our own opinions.

Starting with the practical ones:

1. There just isn't enough room.
When things like power supplies and a decent display on the unit are taken into account, there is very little space left for a huge CD-ROM drive. Even laptop drives would fill all of the space currently filled with the hard drives.

2. Durability.
Most CD-ROMs nowadays are made to be cheap, not durable, due to the ever shortening cycles of PC development and higher CD speeds. When you throw in the things like wear on bearings from spinning a CD in a moving, vibrating vehicle it becomes apparent that you really need a custom in-car CD-ROM mechanism, which aren't thick on the ground.

Both these problems could be solved if we were a huge audio company, who has mechanisms and designs for these things which could be adapted for CD-ROM (as opposed to CD-audio) playback. But we're not - yet! Adding MP3 playback to a normal CD-audio player isn't as easy as putting a MP3 decoder into the output stream: CD-audio data (a) runs at the wrong data rate and (b) uses an error-spreading technique on the audio stream, as opposed to an error-correction, sector-based technique for CD-ROMs.

Next, the commercial reasons:

1. Limits the market to those with CD-recorders.
You need a CD-recorder to use such a device. CD-recorders are expensive items, have a habit of being a pain for novices to get working reliably, and so on.

2. Appeals to music pirates.
Although it appears that Diamond have emerged victorious over the RIAA, we're not being complacent, and we do not want to be seen as encouraging piracy. Whatever people say, the RIAA and other music industry organisations are rightly worried about CD-R owners, and associate them with piracy, which being honest is what most of the CD-R drives are used for, in one way or another.

Finally, our personal reasons:

1. Not big enough!
The idea with the empeg is to have *all* your favourite music with you at all times. As the idea was go get rid of swapping tapes or CDs, it seems a backward step to end up swapping CDs, even if they hold 12x as much as they did before. With the release of the new IBM 14.1Gb laptop drive, the empeg can now have up to 476 hours of CD-quality audio all inside the unit!

2. Breaks the database.
On the empeg, the music is organised in a database. This allows you to specify tracks to be played by various categories and to bring together different moods of music with ease. With a handful of CD-Rs, you lose this 'anything, anytime' freedom that you get with a hard disk. It also doesn't lend itself well to maintenance of the database: for example, modifying the criteria on a tune stored on a CD-R (say, recategorising Ash from Britpop to Indie) is a major pain.

I hope you can see our reasoning, even if you don't agree!

Rob.