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-Auxill...
That meant you had to first rip the CD containing all those 3-5 second tracks to your computer, sync the iPod, and then you’d be ready to use it.
And even after all that, the quality was still worse than the cassette adapters.
My online radio webpage (button links for different genres aligned left to right to easily click when driving with the microsoft player above the links) worked great through my Microsoft Treo phone which I too connected my Treo phone to stereo via a cassette tape adapter. Used a cassette tape adapter from 2005 to 2016 in different cars until that 2016 car stereo had built in bluetooth.
And playing them on a CRT tv (still the norm) was a huge improvement over broadcast quality. I think that led to a further interest in DVD-authoring and then Web/Media development.
It connects to an area I'm growing increasingly interested in, the early history of the Chinese Internet and tech industry. (VCD players sold in enormous numbers there.) See for instance this fascinating piece on the Chinese Flash gaming scene: https://www.chaoyangtrap.house/flashing-for-fun-and-no-profi...
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.
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.)
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).
https://www.engineering.com/story/meet-the-man-who-designed-...
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/magazine/article1.pdf
Pretty sure he lent me an Acorn CDROM once too
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.
I do wonder about the power draw though. Even though I'm driving a car with a huge battery, leaving things like sentry mode on while parked does hit my range in a noticeable way, roughly 3-5% in a typical day. I considered a battery for just the PC, essentially a mini UPS made of 18650s or some such, but haven't gotten much further than just letting the idea percolate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Does _your_ car stereo run Linux?
actually nowadays probably yes haha
Thanks for posting, living in that nostalgia for a moment has made my day.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
I could shuffle my entire music library, then if I heard a song I liked, i could hit a single button to "unshuffle" around that artist (playing their songs in order) or around that album, or whatever, for example.
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.
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.
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
I don't use my smartphone to listen to music because it's too big/heavy (running with it is so uncomfortable).
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.
Good times.
