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Ho hum. So I just walked into Cambridge Car Audio carrying my recalcitrant Dension and persuaded them to let me plug it into their indoor car-stereo connector, in order to find out whether my loose connection was in the stereo or in the car. I fully expected this experiment to tell me that the stereo was perfectly all right and the car's wiring was at fault, since that seemed only reasonable given that the car was the bit that had changed recently. Then I was going to go back to Wests and demand that they made a better job of fixing their loose connections, this time armed with clear proof that the stereo wasn't the faulty component.
Except that, as it turns out, the results of the experiment went the other way, and it is the Dension that's broken. Bah. I was really hoping not to have to send it away for repairs, since that's always a staggeringly annoying pain in the wossname.
Worse still, I asked CCA whether there were any other hard-disk based MP3 car stereos on the market, and they said yes, there were about three of them, with disk sizes ranging from 10Gb to 16Gb and prices starting at 600 quid. The Dension has a still-fairly-small 20Gb disk and cost me 400, and I thought that was bad! So it looks as if I'm stuck with trying to get the Dension fixed, on all counts. Sigh.
I've been considering the possibility of writing one for a while. From the MP3 players I've seen, there's a huge variety of bad interfaces floating around, and none do exactly what *I* want:
1) Track searching, queuing and playing needs to be easier, and do the right thing. (Leon's allows you to find a track during playback, but if you select it it starts immediately - no queue option. If you wait for the current track to finish you find it times out of the track selector and returns to the main menu, losing the selected next track.)
2) Support for MP3, of course, but OGG, WAV and whatever other open codecs I can get my hands on.
3) For DJing with, I want dual high-quality line level stereo outputs. The UI also needs to maintain two separate playlists, one for each channel, have pause-at-end-of-track on each channel, fade, cross-fade, pitch-bend, stored cue-points (and good frame-by-frame and fast scanning for finding the cue-point), possibly remembered cue-points and volume levels for stored music.
4) USB (mass storage emulation) or Ethernet interface for transferring files. Internal hard drive for storage (probably 2.5" would do, though 3.5" gives higher capacity.)
The main question is is there hardware out there currently which can support this. It needs the connections above to be useful at all, and to handle the software side it needs to basically be capable of running Linux, with hardware supported as is or at least open enough for me to write my own simple drivers. (Well, I wouldn't mind doing the display/input drivers myself, but want the USB/Ethernet already supported.)
Two form factors in particular I'd be interested in finding: smallish touch-screen panel (400-600ish square ought to be enough), like a PDA but bigger; and car stereo. It seems likely that someone somewhere has produced something suitable, but Google throws an inordinate amount of useless chaff up on any vaguely related keyword I can think of.
(Things like PC104 and MiniITX could be used here, and might be more flexible, but then there's hassle with power supplies, cases, extra internal cabling. I'm after something self-contained that can be bent to my purposes. I'm really only interested in the software hackery side of the project.)
You could always hook up a laptop...