8 ms·

The MP3mobile (1998)

73 points by anschwa 3y ago

hackerbosspz9 3y ago
[flagged]
hackerbosspz9 3y ago
[flagged]
eddieroger 3y ago
This was a nostalgia bomb for me, particularly because I did a project like this in my first car around the same time. In retrospect, it's a miracle my car never exploded, with questionable wiring running from my console to the trunk, and a power inverter / extension cord combo that was also fairly dubious. But the idea of having all my music was too much to pass up for a nascent driver and techie. My setup was a mini tower encased in translucent green, bungee corded to my trunk's side panels, and a 10-key with a PS2 extender running to my console. I booted straight in to WinAmp and ran plugins to let me pick songs by entering +$NUM+ or variations of that. A few months in, I got a 4x40 LCD so I could see what was playing and so some menu-type things. The most clever move, I thought, was getting a hot swap HDD tray so I could periodically reload the files, and maybe the true crowning achievement was the printout I had up front of what was available. Simpler but much more fun times, because the challenge was the fun part.
- hypercube33 3y ago
  I remember reading boot magazine having a tutorial about how to build a carputer around this time and my mind raced about how awesome that'd be.
- jimt1234 3y ago
  I had an aux input on the back of my car stereo wired to a Toshiba laptop shoved into the glovebox of my Chevy Lumina. The laptop ran WinAmp with all my bootleg mp3s. There was no power connection, and laptop batteries were terrible back then, so yeah, I could listen to music for about 20 minutes. Oh, and there was no interaction with the music unless I was at a long stoplight. Anyway, I thought I was Hackerman. LOL
- bobchadwick 3y ago
  Nostalgia bomb here, too! I think this page had to have served as the inspiration for my car MP3 player, even though I don't actually recognize anymore. Mine was basically a motherboard crammed under the driver's seat of my Ford Festiva, which loaded an MP3 player on boot (can't remember which one unfortunately). I had it set to shuffle my collection, and I'd use the arrow keys on a full sized keyboard to skip tracks. It was powered by an inverter plugged into the cigarette lighter, and to solve some noise issues, I had broken guitar string grounding the motherboard to the seat's mounting hardware. I have great memories of driving around and listening to bands like Pavement and Smog, which served as my intro to the wonderful world of '90s indie rock. (I'm sure I pirated my entire collection at the time, but over the years I think I've made up for it by buying their albums and seeing them live.)
- romwell 3y ago
  >This was a nostalgia bomb for me Heck, I remember that article from the time it was circulated on Slashdot back in the day. Looking at the title, I was, like, OMG, was it about that crazy setup where someone wired a desktop PC to play mp3s in a car back when CD players were far, far from being standard? And lo and behold, yes, it was. I mean, he used an "embedded" system, that's to say - a mini-ITX sized PC with Pentium 166MhZ running Linux. It's insane that within 5 years, CD players playing MP3-CDs became ubiquitous (way before Flash memory became cheap enough for accessibly priced mp3 players with 1GB memory).
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
Circa 2001 or so, I got a portable CD player for Christmas that could also play MP3s, which was just about the coolest thing ever at the time. Now instead of the normal 12-13 songs a CD could hold when converted to WAV, I could hold 100-200 songs in mp3 form on a 700mb CD burned as a data disc rather than an audio disc. This was then supplemented in the car with a cassette tape adapter that included an audio jack. [0] It was pretty sweet, all things considered. Tape decks started to vanish from cars at about that time, and those FM transmitter adapters that would plug into the cigarette lighter and broadcast on a radio frequency were really crap compared to the direct jack. I would argue I didn't get that same level of ease+fidelity of pushing MP3s to my car stereo until I directly installed a Bluetooth stereo into my car 15-ish years later. [0] example: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxillary/dp/B07N2KPTGW/ https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...
- dfxm12 3y ago
  My first car was too new to have a tape player, but too old to have aux/usb/bluetooth input. I had to resort plugging in my creative nomad mp3 player to an FM radio transmitter plugged into my cigarette lighter port. :)
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    I remember the Nokia N900 being able to broadcast FM to achieve the same!
  - stuart78 3y ago
    I used a series of those for iPod for the first few years, but lived in Los Angeles, so there was a ton of interference, both from radio stations and other devices broadcasting on the same frequency. It created some pretty chaotic drives from time to time...
    - dfxm12 3y ago
      Yeah the old school ones (or maybe just the cheap ones me and my friends had) had a only few stations they could transmit. Everyone once in a while we'd be able to tune the radio to one of those stations if we were next to a young person at a red to see what they were listening to, if we thought they had the same device. Maybe we'd kill ours to hear theirs if we heard the static...
aidenn0 3y ago
5 years later I bought a car that, from the dealer, could play MP3s burned on CDs. The shuffle mode was terrible though; if you had enough songs, it would loop the order and not play every individual track.
- gxqoz 3y ago
  My car still has an amusing WMA logo above the CD player to advertise its support for playing CDs with WMAs burned to them. Never actually used that functionality though.
CommieBobDole 3y ago
Looks like this is by Hugo Fiennes, who among other things designed the Nest thermostat and (at least partially) the iPhone. https://www.engineering.com/story/meet-the-man-who-designed-your-iphone-it-wasnt-all-steve-jobs https://www.engineering.com/story/meet-the-man-who-designed-...
- mavhc 3y ago
  Yep, turns out he went on to work on the best selling mp3 player of all time https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/magazine/article1.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/magazine/article1.pdf Pretty sure he lent me an Acorn CDROM once too
dkdbejwi383 3y ago
https://archive.ph/aB5Q5 https://archive.ph/aB5Q5
dfxm12 3y ago
The UI for these things isn't good to use while driving. Music players with big storage have pretty poor ways to find what you're looking for even with a decent sized screen + keyboard (like youtube music on your phone or an ipod touch), let alone just a few buttons (like I had on my MP3 CD player or what this seems to have). Even if you have a passenger running the device, you fall victim to them not knowing your music, not knowing how to find something, general decision paralysis, etc. I think some of these problems exist with satellite radio and terrible console UIs today. I get it from a curiosity stand point, can I do this? And it is fun just to see if you can. As it turns out, it's not very practical compared to alternatives though.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  > not very practical compared to alternatives Compared to alternatives today but in 1998 there wasn't much experience in this space. So it was very much worth experimenting at the time.
  - dfxm12 3y ago
    No, compared to the alternatives back then as well, like a cd, a tape, the radio, etc. These things have simple controls that you don't need to take your eyes off the road to operate, if you needed to.
- V99 3y ago
  The product that came from this project (Empeg/Rio Car) was/is actually quite nice and well thought out for navigating while driving and minimal looking at the screen. Physical buttons and a rotary encoder with detents so you know exactly how far you moved when scrolling slowly. You quickly learned the button sequence for the operations you used a lot to be able to do them without looking at all. For picking actual music everything was a set of nested playlists/folders. The structure of them was up to you to define in the desktop app, which could make things that are the result of a search of ID3 data or pull off the first letter of the artist or whatever you want depending on how much music you have and how you like to play it. You load something into the active play queue and then can modify that by prepend/appending more without losing the rest. "Wendy" filters to dynamically disable content that a certain passenger doesn't like when you say they're in the car (Wendy was the girlfriend of one of the developers, I think). A LOT more flexible than most players today. So... also probably way too complicated for normal people today, but super powerful and customizable. There were only a few thousand built, and a lot of them are still in use today. Few modern cars have a DIN slot anymore, but the community has built some elaborate ways to keep using these by separating out the display/controls and mount just them in the cabin, integrating with car bluetooth controls invented long after Rio went bankrupt, etc.
gorkish 3y ago
Love and remember this project -- as someone who has also been jamming customized PC computers into cars since the mid 90's, I really believe that there is still a lot of unrecognized potential in having the ability to carry your own personal data and applications with you. I used to have the top viewed install on the MP3Car forums back in the early 2000's when that site was kind of the central hub for these projects. Unfortunately at some point those archives went offline and and an overwhelming amount of information on hundreds of these projects were lost. At that time you have to realize that some cars were shipping with tape decks and others were shipping with big screen nav systems that sucked. The objective was to replace that junk with a touchscreen PC, make it look like it was built that way, make it integrate with the car as much as possible, then make it do everything you could ever want to do in a car. My install had: automatic backup camera, in-dash dvd, timeshift recording for am/fm, xm satellite, and uhf/vhf tv, gps navigation, 4.1 audio, music/movie playback from hdd or usb, wifi hotspot, cell modem, integration with the car's accessory bus (steering wheel buttons/react to events), basically the works. I even eventually got my system fully working with LinuxBios (Via EPIA-M) which was fun, but not something I ever want to have to repeat. I did eventually come to learn that trying to build and maintain a full telematics suite for a userbase of one was a foolish endeavor. Today I have a small Raspberry Pi running 24/7 as a headless NAS in my car though if I had the time I would probably like to upgrade it to a small proxmox hyperconverged cluster instead. My car goes mostly everywhere I go, and when it doesn't, I can fall back to VPN. If this sounds interesting to anyone else, I'd highly recommend giving it a try, though it's a lot easier to deal with the constant power requirement in an EV.
- mips_r4300i 3y ago
  Another one here for the mp3car forums. Saw a build inside a VW beetle with the LCD bezel bondo'd into the center console and it looked pro. I picked up a 8" Lilliput LCD, a mini-itx board and a picopsu, and jammed it behind the stereo area. Made the LCD bezel out of the plastic sidewall of a floppy organizer case, but spray painted textured black. In VB6 you could use the windows media player ActiveX control to introspect your media library. So I could scroll through all my songs on the touch screen with my custom app. And running XP with NTfs meant you could shut off the power at any time with disk corruption.
dehrmann 3y ago
One time, I used my laptop as an mp3 player for my car. I dubbed it the ThinkPod.
jareklupinski 3y ago
from the website's linked https://www.empeg.com/ https://www.empeg.com/ > Does _your_ car stereo run Linux? actually nowadays probably yes haha
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Mine runs QNX! I got curious and had to crack open the firmware update file to check...
rwl4 3y ago
This reminds me of megaCar from the same era: https://web.archive.org/web/20001019032036/http://www.megacar.com/flash_en.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20001019032036/http://www.megaca... Browsing that site again now in 2023 is hilarious! Make sure to turn your audio on.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  LOL. "M E G A C A R !"
lmarcos 3y ago
I'm the only one still listening mp3s? I have a sandisk mp3 player (size similar to the classic ipod shuffle) and I use yandex to get the mp3s. And I transferred all my old CDs to mp3 format as well. I don't use my smartphone to listen to music because it's too big/heavy (running with it is so uncomfortable).
- pjscott 3y ago
  You're not alone. I have a cheapo mp3 player from a Chinese no-name brand -- I'm pretty sure I've seen the exact same thing sold under multiple brands, for some reason -- and it's tiny, light, and good at playing music. Way better experience than having a smartphone clunking around in my pocket.
- hondo77 3y ago
  As I type this I'm listening to mp3's playing from my iPod classic, line out from the dock, into desktop speakers in my home office. Love it. I started buying CDs in 1985 (and vinyl before that). I guarantee you I have music that isn't on any streaming service so they're mostly of no use to me.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  all of my cds nicely ripped to mp3 and on a usb drive right into my car. use them every day. luckily the infotainment system handles them.
- mavhc 3y ago
  Children in schools where their phones have been banned had to learn about the history of music distribution, eg what mp3s are
mrbuttons454 3y ago
I remember this project! Inspired me to make an MP3 player out of an old VCR case and an old 486, to use with my appropriately 90s stereo component stack. Around the same time I had been given 6x Powermac 7200s that had been retired from a local company. I loaded up Debian, and wrote some crude bash scripts to convert WAV to MP3 on the "cluster". I believe they were G3 233mhz, and as a cluster they could rip a CD to MP3 faster than anything on the market at the time. Getting Linux running on a PowerPC CPU got me into Debian, and now 20+ years later it's still my distro of choice, albeit on AWS and Linode these days. :) Thanks for posting, living in that nostalgia for a moment has made my day.
rconti 3y ago
I had an empeg in my '95 M3 from around 2001-2004 (?) It was a 20GB version, if memory serves, which was the largest available at the time without going to a 2 hard disk version (2.5" HDDs). It retailed for $2000 but I bought it for about $400 new. It was the v2 with the airplane wing looking screen, and it was 2 acquisitions in. I think SonicBlue then Rio? Or Diamond multimedia? I can't remember anymore. Used it for a few years, and sold it on eBay for, I think, more than I paid for it.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  SONICblue bought them and rebranded the product “Rio Car”. I had one of the original empeg units, and it was amazing. Nice cool conversation starter. And it was built strong. It still worked deep in the 2000s when I lost track of it maybe during a move. Sad, they are a cool piece of Linux history.
greggsy 3y ago
> PCM-5862 (retails for $525) > PCB-10586-2000 > Intel Pentium 150Mhz > 16Mb RAM 10x more powerful than an Arduino, and 10x less powerful than a Pi Zerp (40x if you count cores?). Probably uses 1000x more power. RAM proportions are similar too. It’s probably not fair to compare raw numbers like this, but it’s interesting to see how the market sliders move over time. I think the first Arduino only emerged five or so years after this article came out?
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
I did something like this in around 1999 too. It was just a headless motherboard in a plastic box running some DOS MP3 player. I had a numeric keypad with a little integrated LCD that I used to control it. I eventually replaced the whole thing with an iPod. Good times.
at_a_remove 3y ago
Bafflingly, even the high end head units do not play any of the playlist formats. I do not understand this. I realize that .m3u8 is CSV-like in its lack of exacting standard, but come on. Apparently, everything is done through one's phone now. And then it seems so difficult to get files on and off of an iPhone without using the system-wrecking iTunes that most people resort to some kind of service, so rather than your music, you're getting whatever is available that "they" feel like popularizing now.
EvanAnderson 3y ago
I got a used IBM Thinkpad 365XD w/ a broken screen and a DC-to-DC converter to run in my car back in '99. I loaded Slackware on it and set it up to mount the root filesystem readonly (so the unit could be hard powered-down whenever). I wrote a little Perl init script to mount the CD-ROM drive if a media was present and do rudimentary filesystem navigation.I used the Festival speech synthesis package reading filenames from the disk. I burned my MP3s to discs in a format Artist / Album / Song so I could use my rudimentary speech UI to navigate up and down the directory hierarchy and play the selected item (be it a single MP3 file, or a directory, which would get played recursively). I'd leave the unit open on the passenger seat and reach over to run the UI without looking at it. I can still remember how Festival's "accent" colored the reading of the names and titles. I put the unit out to pasture when I got a flash-based player w/ reasonable capacity.
dclowd9901 3y ago
I have an 89 BMW E30 that I bought with a lousy glitzy Panasonic head unit. I wanted to return the car to its original head unit, but I am a person of 2023, so naturally I want Bluetooth to go along with my tape deck. Turns out some chap in Eastern Europe restores old BMW head units and outfits them with Bluetooth. $400 and a few weeks later, it arrived spic and span with some of the most user friendly install instructions I’ve ever seen. He even gave me the option to do things like have a custom display message or show current song info. These kinds of experiences make it fun to be a techie car nut.
thenickdude 3y ago
This unlocked a memory of reading a very similar project from 1999, but they also installed a numeric keypad in front of their shifter: https://www.aaroncake.net/projects/mp3player.htm https://www.aaroncake.net/projects/mp3player.htm I especially found this part funny: >By far the most interesting I get is the hassle when I try to cross borders get stopped by the police. Everyone wants to know what it is, what it does and if it is dangerous

73 points by anschwa 3y ago

hackerbosspz9 3y ago

[flagged]

hackerbosspz9 3y ago

[flagged]

eddieroger 3y ago

This was a nostalgia bomb for me, particularly because I did a project like this in my first car around the same time. In retrospect, it's a miracle my car never exploded, with questionable wiring running from my console to the trunk, and a power inverter / extension cord combo that was also fairly dubious. But the idea of having all my music was too much to pass up for a nascent driver and techie. My setup was a mini tower encased in translucent green, bungee corded to my trunk's side panels, and a 10-key with a PS2 extender running to my console. I booted straight in to WinAmp and ran plugins to let me pick songs by entering +$NUM+ or variations of that. A few months in, I got a 4x40 LCD so I could see what was playing and so some menu-type things. The most clever move, I thought, was getting a hot swap HDD tray so I could periodically reload the files, and maybe the true crowning achievement was the printout I had up front of what was available. Simpler but much more fun times, because the challenge was the fun part.

hypercube33 3y ago
I remember reading boot magazine having a tutorial about how to build a carputer around this time and my mind raced about how awesome that'd be.
jimt1234 3y ago
I had an aux input on the back of my car stereo wired to a Toshiba laptop shoved into the glovebox of my Chevy Lumina. The laptop ran WinAmp with all my bootleg mp3s. There was no power connection, and laptop batteries were terrible back then, so yeah, I could listen to music for about 20 minutes. Oh, and there was no interaction with the music unless I was at a long stoplight. Anyway, I thought I was Hackerman. LOL
bobchadwick 3y ago
Nostalgia bomb here, too! I think this page had to have served as the inspiration for my car MP3 player, even though I don't actually recognize anymore. Mine was basically a motherboard crammed under the driver's seat of my Ford Festiva, which loaded an MP3 player on boot (can't remember which one unfortunately). I had it set to shuffle my collection, and I'd use the arrow keys on a full sized keyboard to skip tracks. It was powered by an inverter plugged into the cigarette lighter, and to solve some noise issues, I had broken guitar string grounding the motherboard to the seat's mounting hardware. I have great memories of driving around and listening to bands like Pavement and Smog, which served as my intro to the wonderful world of '90s indie rock. (I'm sure I pirated my entire collection at the time, but over the years I think I've made up for it by buying their albums and seeing them live.)
romwell 3y ago
>This was a nostalgia bomb for me Heck, I remember that article from the time it was circulated on Slashdot back in the day. Looking at the title, I was, like, OMG, was it about that crazy setup where someone wired a desktop PC to play mp3s in a car back when CD players were far, far from being standard? And lo and behold, yes, it was. I mean, he used an "embedded" system, that's to say - a mini-ITX sized PC with Pentium 166MhZ running Linux. It's insane that within 5 years, CD players playing MP3-CDs became ubiquitous (way before Flash memory became cheap enough for accessibly priced mp3 players with 1GB memory).

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

Circa 2001 or so, I got a portable CD player for Christmas that could also play MP3s, which was just about the coolest thing ever at the time. Now instead of the normal 12-13 songs a CD could hold when converted to WAV, I could hold 100-200 songs in mp3 form on a 700mb CD burned as a data disc rather than an audio disc. This was then supplemented in the car with a cassette tape adapter that included an audio jack. [0] It was pretty sweet, all things considered. Tape decks started to vanish from cars at about that time, and those FM transmitter adapters that would plug into the cigarette lighter and broadcast on a radio frequency were really crap compared to the direct jack. I would argue I didn't get that same level of ease+fidelity of pushing MP3s to my car stereo until I directly installed a Bluetooth stereo into my car 15-ish years later. [0] example: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxillary/dp/B07N2KPTGW/ https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...

dfxm12 3y ago
My first car was too new to have a tape player, but too old to have aux/usb/bluetooth input. I had to resort plugging in my creative nomad mp3 player to an FM radio transmitter plugged into my cigarette lighter port. :)
- Fnoord 3y ago
  I remember the Nokia N900 being able to broadcast FM to achieve the same!
- stuart78 3y ago
  I used a series of those for iPod for the first few years, but lived in Los Angeles, so there was a ton of interference, both from radio stations and other devices broadcasting on the same frequency. It created some pretty chaotic drives from time to time...
  - dfxm12 3y ago
    Yeah the old school ones (or maybe just the cheap ones me and my friends had) had a only few stations they could transmit. Everyone once in a while we'd be able to tune the radio to one of those stations if we were next to a young person at a red to see what they were listening to, if we thought they had the same device. Maybe we'd kill ours to hear theirs if we heard the static...

aidenn0 3y ago

5 years later I bought a car that, from the dealer, could play MP3s burned on CDs. The shuffle mode was terrible though; if you had enough songs, it would loop the order and not play every individual track.

gxqoz 3y ago
My car still has an amusing WMA logo above the CD player to advertise its support for playing CDs with WMAs burned to them. Never actually used that functionality though.

CommieBobDole 3y ago

Looks like this is by Hugo Fiennes, who among other things designed the Nest thermostat and (at least partially) the iPhone. https://www.engineering.com/story/meet-the-man-who-designed-your-iphone-it-wasnt-all-steve-jobs https://www.engineering.com/story/meet-the-man-who-designed-...

mavhc 3y ago
Yep, turns out he went on to work on the best selling mp3 player of all time https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/magazine/article1.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/magazine/article1.pdf Pretty sure he lent me an Acorn CDROM once too

dkdbejwi383 3y ago

https://archive.ph/aB5Q5 https://archive.ph/aB5Q5

dfxm12 3y ago

The UI for these things isn't good to use while driving. Music players with big storage have pretty poor ways to find what you're looking for even with a decent sized screen + keyboard (like youtube music on your phone or an ipod touch), let alone just a few buttons (like I had on my MP3 CD player or what this seems to have). Even if you have a passenger running the device, you fall victim to them not knowing your music, not knowing how to find something, general decision paralysis, etc. I think some of these problems exist with satellite radio and terrible console UIs today. I get it from a curiosity stand point, can I do this? And it is fun just to see if you can. As it turns out, it's not very practical compared to alternatives though.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
> not very practical compared to alternatives Compared to alternatives today but in 1998 there wasn't much experience in this space. So it was very much worth experimenting at the time.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  No, compared to the alternatives back then as well, like a cd, a tape, the radio, etc. These things have simple controls that you don't need to take your eyes off the road to operate, if you needed to.
V99 3y ago
The product that came from this project (Empeg/Rio Car) was/is actually quite nice and well thought out for navigating while driving and minimal looking at the screen. Physical buttons and a rotary encoder with detents so you know exactly how far you moved when scrolling slowly. You quickly learned the button sequence for the operations you used a lot to be able to do them without looking at all. For picking actual music everything was a set of nested playlists/folders. The structure of them was up to you to define in the desktop app, which could make things that are the result of a search of ID3 data or pull off the first letter of the artist or whatever you want depending on how much music you have and how you like to play it. You load something into the active play queue and then can modify that by prepend/appending more without losing the rest. "Wendy" filters to dynamically disable content that a certain passenger doesn't like when you say they're in the car (Wendy was the girlfriend of one of the developers, I think). A LOT more flexible than most players today. So... also probably way too complicated for normal people today, but super powerful and customizable. There were only a few thousand built, and a lot of them are still in use today. Few modern cars have a DIN slot anymore, but the community has built some elaborate ways to keep using these by separating out the display/controls and mount just them in the cabin, integrating with car bluetooth controls invented long after Rio went bankrupt, etc.

gorkish 3y ago

Love and remember this project -- as someone who has also been jamming customized PC computers into cars since the mid 90's, I really believe that there is still a lot of unrecognized potential in having the ability to carry your own personal data and applications with you. I used to have the top viewed install on the MP3Car forums back in the early 2000's when that site was kind of the central hub for these projects. Unfortunately at some point those archives went offline and and an overwhelming amount of information on hundreds of these projects were lost. At that time you have to realize that some cars were shipping with tape decks and others were shipping with big screen nav systems that sucked. The objective was to replace that junk with a touchscreen PC, make it look like it was built that way, make it integrate with the car as much as possible, then make it do everything you could ever want to do in a car. My install had: automatic backup camera, in-dash dvd, timeshift recording for am/fm, xm satellite, and uhf/vhf tv, gps navigation, 4.1 audio, music/movie playback from hdd or usb, wifi hotspot, cell modem, integration with the car's accessory bus (steering wheel buttons/react to events), basically the works. I even eventually got my system fully working with LinuxBios (Via EPIA-M) which was fun, but not something I ever want to have to repeat. I did eventually come to learn that trying to build and maintain a full telematics suite for a userbase of one was a foolish endeavor. Today I have a small Raspberry Pi running 24/7 as a headless NAS in my car though if I had the time I would probably like to upgrade it to a small proxmox hyperconverged cluster instead. My car goes mostly everywhere I go, and when it doesn't, I can fall back to VPN. If this sounds interesting to anyone else, I'd highly recommend giving it a try, though it's a lot easier to deal with the constant power requirement in an EV.

mips_r4300i 3y ago
Another one here for the mp3car forums. Saw a build inside a VW beetle with the LCD bezel bondo'd into the center console and it looked pro. I picked up a 8" Lilliput LCD, a mini-itx board and a picopsu, and jammed it behind the stereo area. Made the LCD bezel out of the plastic sidewall of a floppy organizer case, but spray painted textured black. In VB6 you could use the windows media player ActiveX control to introspect your media library. So I could scroll through all my songs on the touch screen with my custom app. And running XP with NTfs meant you could shut off the power at any time with disk corruption.

dehrmann 3y ago

One time, I used my laptop as an mp3 player for my car. I dubbed it the ThinkPod.

jareklupinski 3y ago

from the website's linked https://www.empeg.com/ https://www.empeg.com/ > Does _your_ car stereo run Linux? actually nowadays probably yes haha

kalleboo 3y ago
Mine runs QNX! I got curious and had to crack open the firmware update file to check...

rwl4 3y ago

This reminds me of megaCar from the same era: https://web.archive.org/web/20001019032036/http://www.megacar.com/flash_en.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20001019032036/http://www.megaca... Browsing that site again now in 2023 is hilarious! Make sure to turn your audio on.

qingcharles 3y ago
LOL. "M E G A C A R !"

lmarcos 3y ago

I'm the only one still listening mp3s? I have a sandisk mp3 player (size similar to the classic ipod shuffle) and I use yandex to get the mp3s. And I transferred all my old CDs to mp3 format as well. I don't use my smartphone to listen to music because it's too big/heavy (running with it is so uncomfortable).

pjscott 3y ago
You're not alone. I have a cheapo mp3 player from a Chinese no-name brand -- I'm pretty sure I've seen the exact same thing sold under multiple brands, for some reason -- and it's tiny, light, and good at playing music. Way better experience than having a smartphone clunking around in my pocket.
hondo77 3y ago
As I type this I'm listening to mp3's playing from my iPod classic, line out from the dock, into desktop speakers in my home office. Love it. I started buying CDs in 1985 (and vinyl before that). I guarantee you I have music that isn't on any streaming service so they're mostly of no use to me.
sumtechguy 3y ago
all of my cds nicely ripped to mp3 and on a usb drive right into my car. use them every day. luckily the infotainment system handles them.
mavhc 3y ago
Children in schools where their phones have been banned had to learn about the history of music distribution, eg what mp3s are

mrbuttons454 3y ago

I remember this project! Inspired me to make an MP3 player out of an old VCR case and an old 486, to use with my appropriately 90s stereo component stack. Around the same time I had been given 6x Powermac 7200s that had been retired from a local company. I loaded up Debian, and wrote some crude bash scripts to convert WAV to MP3 on the "cluster". I believe they were G3 233mhz, and as a cluster they could rip a CD to MP3 faster than anything on the market at the time. Getting Linux running on a PowerPC CPU got me into Debian, and now 20+ years later it's still my distro of choice, albeit on AWS and Linode these days. :) Thanks for posting, living in that nostalgia for a moment has made my day.

rconti 3y ago

I had an empeg in my '95 M3 from around 2001-2004 (?) It was a 20GB version, if memory serves, which was the largest available at the time without going to a 2 hard disk version (2.5" HDDs). It retailed for $2000 but I bought it for about $400 new. It was the v2 with the airplane wing looking screen, and it was 2 acquisitions in. I think SonicBlue then Rio? Or Diamond multimedia? I can't remember anymore. Used it for a few years, and sold it on eBay for, I think, more than I paid for it.

ryandrake 3y ago
SONICblue bought them and rebranded the product “Rio Car”. I had one of the original empeg units, and it was amazing. Nice cool conversation starter. And it was built strong. It still worked deep in the 2000s when I lost track of it maybe during a move. Sad, they are a cool piece of Linux history.

greggsy 3y ago

> PCM-5862 (retails for $525) > PCB-10586-2000 > Intel Pentium 150Mhz > 16Mb RAM 10x more powerful than an Arduino, and 10x less powerful than a Pi Zerp (40x if you count cores?). Probably uses 1000x more power. RAM proportions are similar too. It’s probably not fair to compare raw numbers like this, but it’s interesting to see how the market sliders move over time. I think the first Arduino only emerged five or so years after this article came out?

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

I did something like this in around 1999 too. It was just a headless motherboard in a plastic box running some DOS MP3 player. I had a numeric keypad with a little integrated LCD that I used to control it. I eventually replaced the whole thing with an iPod. Good times.

at_a_remove 3y ago

Bafflingly, even the high end head units do not play any of the playlist formats. I do not understand this. I realize that .m3u8 is CSV-like in its lack of exacting standard, but come on. Apparently, everything is done through one's phone now. And then it seems so difficult to get files on and off of an iPhone without using the system-wrecking iTunes that most people resort to some kind of service, so rather than your music, you're getting whatever is available that "they" feel like popularizing now.

EvanAnderson 3y ago

I got a used IBM Thinkpad 365XD w/ a broken screen and a DC-to-DC converter to run in my car back in '99. I loaded Slackware on it and set it up to mount the root filesystem readonly (so the unit could be hard powered-down whenever). I wrote a little Perl init script to mount the CD-ROM drive if a media was present and do rudimentary filesystem navigation.I used the Festival speech synthesis package reading filenames from the disk. I burned my MP3s to discs in a format Artist / Album / Song so I could use my rudimentary speech UI to navigate up and down the directory hierarchy and play the selected item (be it a single MP3 file, or a directory, which would get played recursively). I'd leave the unit open on the passenger seat and reach over to run the UI without looking at it. I can still remember how Festival's "accent" colored the reading of the names and titles. I put the unit out to pasture when I got a flash-based player w/ reasonable capacity.

dclowd9901 3y ago

I have an 89 BMW E30 that I bought with a lousy glitzy Panasonic head unit. I wanted to return the car to its original head unit, but I am a person of 2023, so naturally I want Bluetooth to go along with my tape deck. Turns out some chap in Eastern Europe restores old BMW head units and outfits them with Bluetooth. $400 and a few weeks later, it arrived spic and span with some of the most user friendly install instructions I’ve ever seen. He even gave me the option to do things like have a custom display message or show current song info. These kinds of experiences make it fun to be a techie car nut.

thenickdude 3y ago

This unlocked a memory of reading a very similar project from 1999, but they also installed a numeric keypad in front of their shifter: https://www.aaroncake.net/projects/mp3player.htm https://www.aaroncake.net/projects/mp3player.htm I especially found this part funny: >By far the most interesting I get is the hassle when I try to cross borders get stopped by the police. Everyone wants to know what it is, what it does and if it is dangerous