Summer Of Upgrades, Two
Posted on | September 3, 2007 at 3:14 pm | 3 Comments
In this entry, I talked about my problem playing MP3s on the stereo of my Prius, since the CD player in the 2005 version will not play MP3 CD-Rs. And since I download a lot of MP3s from eMusic, and also have a vast MP3 collection ripped from my CD library, I needed a way to play them in the car. Keep in mind that normal aftermarket iPod integration solutions, such as a head unit that you can hook up to an iPod and display/control the contents of it, don’t work on a Prius, since it’s impossible (?) to replace the factory stereo unit.
So the (fairly cheap) solution I went with is the DICE Electronics iPod Integration Kit. This is a small black box unit that hooks into the CD Changer port of the Prius’ stereo on one end, and an iPod on the other end. The unit itself and the iPod can be stored out of the way in the glove compartment (or elsewhere), so that neither unit is showing when you look into the car. And since you can control the iPod and display the artist / album / track information using the car’s stereo, including the up/down controls on the steering wheel, there’s really no need to even touch the iPod unless you want to put some new music on it. The car and DICE unit continuously charges the iPod. Installation was fairly easy, though it involved removing a bit of trim and having some nimble fingers to plug the cable into the back of the stereo without seeing it. These instructions were really useful, even though they’re for a different but similar unit.
(Note that DICE makes this unit for many different makes and models of cars, not just the Prius.)
It’s not a perfect solution. Basically, you are using the CD Changer controls to navigate the iPod, and that’s pretty clumsy. (For example, hitting “Disc 1″ means that the next/previous buttons will change tracks, “Disc 2″ means they change playlists, “Disc 3″ means they change albums.) There is no way to navigate by artist, and your iPod has to be set up with playlists in order to work. And I’m not a very playlist-centric person. Basically I’ve got two playlists on the car iPod – one that contains my favorite albums, and one that contains the eMusic downloads I haven’t listened to yet. It can take awhile navigating through the first playlist to find a particular album, especially if it’s near the end of the playlist. What makes this even clumsier is that if you are navigating by album, the “disc” field on the MFD displays the word “ALBUM” instead of the album names. You have to guess which one you’re on by the first song on the album. (Same with playlists, which display “PLAYLIST”.) You have to switch back to navigating by track to see the full album/artist name along with the song. Clumsy, but workable. It’s also kind of a pain switching back and forth between the “title” screen (where you can see the track text info) and the regular CD Changer screen, which has the “Disc” buttons used to change iPod navigation.
An additional problem I had was that my only iPod was a 3rd Generation touchwheel 30GB model, and that one just barely works with the DICE. Older ones don’t work at all. The main problems were that I couldn’t navigate by album, and any time I turned the car or the stereo off and back on again, the iPod would come back up in “PAUSE” mode. To get it out of that, I had to change tracks, which would cause me to lose my position in the current song. Luckily, with newer iPods, it just starts playing from where you left off.
So I bit a bullet and bought a more recent iPod for the car. I actually won an eBay auction, for I think the first time ever, and got myself a reconditioned 4th Generation 40GB clickwheel unit for a decent price. (Thanks to fellow Prius owner/LoudFan dgstan for the suggestion, and for much help with help with DICE questions.) It works great! I don’t even care if the battery isn’t long-lived, since it’s always charged in the car.
Crisis averted. Now that I can listen to MP3 goodness in my car, I’m totally happy with the Prius and the switch from the Acura. Ain’t technology wonderful?
Pet Peeve Of The Day: I’m an album-centric guy in a post-album playlist / song / download era. It’s no fun being a dinosaur.
Latre.
Comments
3 Responses to “Summer Of Upgrades, Two”
September 4th, 2007 @ 9:34 pm
I think the whole “post-album” thing is way overhyped. (BTW: I’m also an album-centric guy. Unlike Rog, I’m young and extremely sexy. I’m also the most humble and honest person in the universe.) If we were really in a post-album age, it wouldn’t be the case that everyone’s still releasing by far the majority of their music on…albums. Digital-only releases are still “special” and usually aren’t entire album-length collections…and when they are, they have a hard time integrating themselves into a band’s “official” discography. (Go to AMG and look up Mission of Burma. Do you see their live album Snapshot listed? No? Maybe because it was an iTunes-exclusive release…).
The fact is, it makes much more sense in almost every way (artistic, logistical, and economical) to release songs in bunches rather than exclusively one at a time. I’d be very interested in reading a book that explored the changeover in the music industry, during the ’60s, first in the US and then in Britain, from singles as primary retail item to albums. There were, I’m almost certain, an absolutely lower number of releases then, and companies could handle promoting the singles they released. But there’s simply no way companies could promote as much material as is released these days exclusively as “singles” (i.e., as individual digital downloads). They can’t even properly promote all the albums they release, of course!
My own belief is that albums will gradually shift over to digitally exclusive versions, including downloadable artwork, including videos, and interactive material, concert discounts, etc. – to make them more attractive than illicit (i.e., free) downloads.
People misunderstand the nature of the individual download vis a vis albums as such. It’s not that songs are just random individuals bouncing around in Brownian motion; it’s that people enjoy making their own sequences (thus the popularity of mixes, posting playlists, etc.). But – rather in the way that purveyors of interactive fiction and media discovered that their product never appealed the way they expected – I think they’ll discover that people also enjoy experiencing the artist’s own notion of sequencing and selection. The album, in other words, will always be around, in some mode or other.
September 4th, 2007 @ 10:00 pm
Yes, I’m really surprised that the album model of music distribution is still used as much as it is. It seems to me that the people I know who aren’t as much into music as We The Obsessive could care less about albums (”I always skip those tracks”) and just listen to the songs that initially roped them in. I can’t figure out if it’s economics or tradition that keeps that model going, even in the digital download age.
September 5th, 2007 @ 4:10 am
Now that I have a commute once again, I’ve taken to listening to books on tape using the MP3 player feature on my shiny new Nokia 6131. But the player leaves something to be desired, and that’s even by comparison with an elderly Mpio FL100 MP3 player I used to carry from time to time. It’s almost as if they’re trying not to compete with some other Nokia music player, except I don’t know of any. It’s VERY feature-limited – playlists? I can barely back up if I lose focus and miss a few sentences… Dinosaur, meet your forerunner – 20th Century Guy.