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Doof doof doof
I got a new car stereo at the weekend, to replace my Dension DH102 which packed up in April. I was unable to get another DH102 or anything like it: players with their own hard disks seem to have gone totally out of fashion, and even Dension don't sell them any more. Instead, the new fashion is stereos which have an iPod connection; so I now have an Alpine CDE-
Points in favour of the Alpine so far:
Works better in the cold. It's admittedly early days yet so I won't know how much better until the chills of February have come and gone; but the iPod/Alpine combination works fine now, which already makes it an improvement on the Dension, whose hard disk I'd have been taking indoors overnight to keep it warm at this time of year.
Hard disk is replaceable. The bit of the Dension which eventually packed up was its hard disk cartridge; I took the cartridge apart and found an ordinary laptop hard disk inside it, but it wasn't at all happy when I replaced it with a different disk. The Alpine's hard disk unit is an iPod, which should make it nice and easy to get a new one if and when I need to.
Plays other people's music. The Dension only played MP3s from its own hard disk, and radio. The Alpine also plays CDs, so if I have a passenger who doesn't like my music collection then they can bring some of their own. Or even their own iPod, if they have one.
Plenty of space. The Dension's disk was only 20Gb and was starting to feel rather cramped. I now have a 60Gb iPod plugged into the Alpine, and even if I do manage to fill it up (which is unlikely) I don't doubt that Apple will bring out even bigger ones as disk becomes cheaper.
On the other hand, points against the Alpine:
Not much display. The Dension had a huge pixelated display which contained lots of useful information and was significantly user-
Menu navigation is rather slow. Apparently this model of stereo is set up to talk to the iPod natively at the full speed permitted by the interface, while many other ‘iPod-
No queue function. One of the most obviously useful things about any music player with random access to a large music collection is that you can queue things up to be played in the future. In a car player this is particularly useful: instead of pressing lots of buttons to choose a new album when you're in the middle of driving (or alternatively going without music), you can queue up your next album when you're safely stopped. But the iPod doesn't support this, and therefore the Alpine doesn't either.
(Well, the iPod supports an ‘on-
No latitude in menu setup. The iPod, and therefore the Alpine, does not permit me to organise my music into a hierarchy of subdirectories the way I want; it insists on doing it the way it wants. On the Dension I cunningly set up a two-
Particularly bad about the last two points (in fact, quite possibly the last three) is that as far as I can tell they're fundamental limitations imposed by the iPod-
On the plus side, I suppose, that means I don't have to worry about whether I should have bought some other model instead. But it is rather annoying me that I can visualise exactly what my ideal car stereo would do, and none of its features seem obviously specialist to me, and yet nobody is prepared to sell me anything remotely like it. If I were more of a hardware person I might have given serious thought to building my own.
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Then you can do exactly what you want :)
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Then you could install a fold-away 7" touchscreen into the space where the stereo currently lives...
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The iAudio I have doesn't use the ipod-style database model for finding tracks, which would be hell if your music was organised any old way, but does mean you can do exactly what you describe in your last point. I think its dynamic playlist is a little more streamlined too. But I suspect there aren't any car stereos which can control it remotely!
The positive points are pretty good though!
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There wasn't any other choice that I could find. Dension have stopped building hard-disk players and instead are selling an adapter that connects an iPod into a normal head unit's CD changer port. Alpine sell things that connect to an iPod. Everybody who's in this market at all, as far as I can tell, is selling things that connect to an iPod. It's iPod or nothing :-/
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NB> "The positive points are pretty good though!" was referring to your setup, rather than my mp3 player.
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The iPod, to be fair to it, is significantly less unhelpful when used as an iPod rather than as a back end for a car stereo. I don't think it was really designed for the latter, so I can't blame it for not being well adapted to that environment. Instead I have to blame all the stereo manufacturers who decided it was the Right Thing.
(That's another positive point I didn't list above, of course: the Dension hard disk was just a hard disk cartridge, but the Alpine's iPod can be taken out and used as an iPod. But I don't generally seem to have much use for a walking-around music player, so it didn't strike me as enough of a plus point to bother listing.)
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The risk-free approach, I suppose, would be to borrow an iPod that already runs Rockbox, and test that against the Alpine. So. Are you mentioning it because you use it, or alternatively do you know somebody who does?
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It does stike me that a far faster way would be to pull the iTunes DB off via the USB treating it as a mass-storage device and parse that yourself (assuming we're living in a fantasy world where speed of navigation trumps cost of memory, processing,etc). After all that is what iTunes itself does and hence navigating your iPod when plugged into your computer if speedy.
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(As a disclaimer, I'll declare an interest: I work with three former employees of empeg and the person who runs the owners' club.)