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It's a cheap and easy way for a manufacturer to increase desire-ability for pennies, if designed in from the outset. If it increases sales by 0.1% that might be a much better payback than more expensive seat coverings, for example.
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Ok, my car is not ipod compatible. But it plays standard CDs and has a Radio.
I have a flash drive MP3 player [2 GB size where I store my MP3s]
I bought an FM transmitter from Ebay for £5.
I put it into cig lighter socket. Attach my MP3 flash drive with it. It transmits the MP3s as FM signal which I capture in radio.
Very good quality sound. I don't need to carry loads of CDs either :)
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youve all missed the real reason
people are stuck in trakffic jams for years darn sarth so they need lots of music to see them through these times and as said you can have hours on just one machine
quick question,some latest car players that a usb at the front ,will these accept my 2gb dongle with windows media player recordings on like my computer at work does?
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>quick question some latest car players that a usb at the front will these accept my 2gb dongle with windows media player recordings on like my computer at work does?
Not sure about the cheapo ones, this Kenwood appears to cover most formats including WMA:-
www.justkenwood.co.uk/stock01/kdc_w7534u.asp
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thanks SpamCan61 {P}
There's never any guarantees that individual files will work with any kind of portable device.
The chipsets they use cost literally pennies to produce (many devices use the same Action 2085 chipset that is put into millions of cheap MP3 portable players, Kenwoods and Sonys included).
These chipsets are nominally WMA compliant (in fact the latest versions support DRM10) but you have to bear in mind that they are very cheap, and there isn't much power there (the core of the 2085 is a modified Z80, the same chip that powered the Sinclair Spectrum!). Therefore some files will glitch, and others won't play. Luck of the draw really, regardless of whether it's WMA or MP3.
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I have a flash drive MP3 player [2 GB size where I store my MP3s] I bought an FM transmitter from Ebay for £5. I put it into cig lighter socket. Attach my MP3 flash drive with it. It transmits the MP3s as FM signal which I capture in radio.
What you have just described is like buying a house and finding that actually what you've bought is a pile of bricks that you have to fit together to build a house. Having iPod compatibility means that you control the iPod, which is in the glovebox or wherever, using the remote controls on the steering wheel. The track information etc. appears where you can see it on the car's display, not on the tiny, slightly misaligned and impossible to read lcd of your £15 bargain mp3 player "It's all hype this iPod craze" from Aldi. Really it's a huge thing, like a CD changer was in 1995, but with 500 CDs in it and it fits in your pocket when you're on foot.
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Some of those cheap little FM transmitters are actually quite sophisticated now.
There are models available, still under a tenner, where you connect the MP3 player up via the USB rather than the headphone jack. The controls, and a display are on the transmitter itself, and the whole thing can be controlled via an IR remote. They can also control a HDD full of MP3s. Clever.
Agreed, still nowhere near as good as a dedicated head unit, if for no other reason than the controls are too fiddly, but still.
And the iPod *is* a craze! It's just one of a large number of other MP3 players, many a damn sight cheaper, better quality and more feature-packed than Apple's offering. Creative, Toshiba and Samsung all offer superior iPod alternatives -- and systems like the Archos video players, although more bulky, wipe the floor with the equivalently-priced iPods. It has to be said as well that £15, 2GB "Chipods" from ebay (with that same Action 2075/2085 chipset as the car radios, and the FM transmitters) sound just as good as an iPod, have video playback and radio recording functionality, and cost a tiny fraction the price.
Like everything else, it's all an image thing. What you really want is a USB connection -- the proprietary iPod connectivity is obsolescent.
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It may be a craze, but it's a craze that has lasted for five years now. That's longer than most people keep their cars. Car manufacturers are just responding to the market and the fact is that the iPod dominates the market. No doubt there are similar connectors for competing players by Sony etc but sadly traditional market economics tends to make firms conservative on this kind of issue. It's the same reason devices are "built for Windows Whatever"; there are better OSs out there, but Windows is the market leader so if you want to go a different way you need to put in a little effort (which is very little these days and well worth it in my opinion).
Having used various flavours of mp3 player I happen to think the iPod is the best dedicated player out there. Yes, others have more features, but the iPod/iTunes/ITMS integration is simple and reliable, which gives it very broad appeal. I am pleased that Apple does not (yet) have a monopoly on mp3 players as Microsoft does in operating systems (just about still) because lazy "good enough" mediocrity would overtake them just the same.
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What bugs me about the iPod is its lack of compliance with accepted standards.
Where other devices either apply the brute-force approach of giving you a standard USB flash-drive connectivity, or hook into industry-standard protocols so that WMP and Linux equivalents can control them, or both, iPod sticks resolutely to iTunes. I've found that, while the iPod itself is reliable, the iTunes software can be anything but.
There's also the question of mechanical reliability -- and some iPod models have been less than stellar in this regard. If some no-name Chinese company can produce a bulletproof MP3 player, so can Apple.
iPod has its advantages, but it (IMO anyway) does not excel in any one area, except maybe ease of use, and even there what's so bloomin' hard about dragging-and-dropping files directly onto the device?
Unless you are -- horrors -- BUYING MP3 files. Something I've never been able to get my head around -- surely the buying a CD and ripping the files to the portable approach gives you better sound quality on the devices that matter (ie your home hifi system), and don't have any nasty DRM getting in the way either. Also if you lose the files you have a hard copy.
If iPod would just embrace the standards, as well as going its own way, I might like it more. I don't like restrictive systems, and I resent having to be locked into certain ways of doing things, having to install huge driver packages onto PCs etc.
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iPod has its advantages but it (IMO anyway) does not excel in any one area except maybe ease of use and even there what's so bloomin' hard about dragging-and-dropping files directly onto the device?
I agree about standards but I find that my iPod works very well with the AmaroK music player/manager on Linux and I know it works with others on that platform and Windows too. I don't find it restrictive in that sense outside of the musuc store. There is also the issue of podcasts, which are my favoured listening material for the car. Adding them to the iPod with iTunes is as simple as clicking on a link on a website and then forgetting about it.
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