MP3 Grows Wheels
If music means MP3 to you, now you can play your digital tunes in the car.
BY REBECCA DAY
You've got hours of MP3 music sitting on your hard drive and a full tank of gas in the car. You used to have to choose between driving one or the other—both at once was too much to hope for. But, thanks to a new generation of CD portables and in-dash CD players that are equipped with MP3 decoders, you can finally take your tunes on the road.
Snazzy portable digital music players have been around for a couple of years, and many come with kits that let you play your MP3 files through a car stereo system. But bigger MP3 CD portables have two advantages over digital music players: versatility and cost. The versatility benefit is a no-brainer: MP3 CD portables and in-dash players let you play CDs recorded with MP3 songs as well as conventional CDs. It doesn't take long to notice the cost savings either. Blank CDs are a steal compared with the more expensive flash media. You can burn 10 hours of MP3 music onto a blank CD-R that sells for a couple of bucks. Squeezing 10 songs onto a 32MB flash memory card, in contrast, will run you about $50.
The new CD players themselves are less expensive too. The Philips line of MP3 CD players starts with the $99 eXpanium EXP201, which comes with a cassette adapter and a DC power cord for playback through a car cassette player. Costing almost twice as much is Philips's flash-memory-based RUSH digital audio player ($180). And, the RUSH stores only 1 hour of music at a 128-kilobit-per-second (Kbps) sampling rate compared with 10 hours for the CD portable. In between, Philips's new EXP401 3-in. eXpanium and EXP503 portable MP3 players (prices unavailable at press time) log 3 hours of compressed digital audio on a $2 half-size CD.
More Music, Less Hassle
MP3 has been a driving force behind Kenwood's in-dash and portable CD players this year. ''In the past you brought along a few CDs or minidiscs in the car,'' says Bob Law, vice president at Kenwood. Today, car stereo buyers (most of whom are 18- to 25-year-olds) record their own compilation discs, the way people used to make compilation tapes from their LPs. ''Now with one CD you have enough music to get there and back, even if you're traveling long distances.''High-volume, compressed-audio discs could threaten the future of the car CD changer, Law says. ''To an extent we're cannibalizing our own sales, but that's the nature of technology.
In a few years the car CD changer is going to be like the turntable—out-of-date and old-fashioned.''Portable CD players without MP3 playback could be an endangered species as well. The Kenwood DPC-MP922 ($180) comes with both AC and car power adapters and a cassette adapter. Kenwood sells one in-dash MP3 CD player in its standard line and two step-up models in its flagship Excelon line, including the KDC-MP8017 ($359), which the company claims has the fastest disc-access time of any MP3-capable in-dash player.
To support all MP3 playback devices, Kenwood sells a neoteric home audio component called Entre that enables you to burn an MP3 CD without using a PC.But even 10 hours of music may seem chintzy compared to what you get with Rio's Rio Car ($999 to $1899), which comes in four versions: 10GB, 20GB, 30GB and 60GB, which store 200, 340, 515 and 1000 hours of music, respectively. Rio Car, a removable hard disk that connects to a PC via a USB connection, lets you access tracks according to a playlist or by typing in the name of an artist or the name of an album.
Good Managers
Having 1000 hours of music at your fingertips is terrific, but creating that technology comes with its own unique challenge. ''Once you've got more than even a few songs, how do you get to each one of them?'' says Steve Sanders, product line manager for Rio. ''That's the big issue for MP3 car players.''Rio Car offers two approaches for music management. ''We've found that everybody has their own way of doing organizing tracks,'' Sanders says. ''Some people have artists under a particular genre or they have other ways to organize music that is very personal to them. Maybe it's 'music for driving home after work on Friday night.'''
Rio Car gives you the flexibility to create your own playlists and to change them.The second approach is to utilize the ID3 tags that are encoded on an MP3 file. They log the title, artist, album, year, genre and track info. With Rio Car, you can create your own playlist of songs from 1982, for example, just by punching in that year on the remote control. You also can search by typing in a name, say ''Beatles,'' using the alphanumeric keys on the remote control. After a few button presses, the band name will appear by way of predictive logic, which narrows the choices based on possible letter combinations. ''The idea is that you hit as few buttons as possible to get to the track you want,'' Sanders says, ''and that typically happens within two or three button presses.''
Makers have devised a variety of methods of making file management easy for users. But there are some limitations. Sony's CDX-MP450X in-dash CD receiver ($400) plays back MP3 files that are arranged in folders on a CD-R or CD-RW. The Sony receiver allows for up to 255 folders and up to 999 MP3 files to be squeezed onto a CD, but the highest compression rate—required to fit this amount of music on a disc—comes at the expense of a satisfying listening experience.
Generally, 128Kbps is considered the optimum balance between quantity and quality in the car environment where ambient noise compromises the listening experience. At 128Kbps, a 3-minute song consumes about 3MB to 4MB of disc space, which translates to 162 4MB songs on a CD.
Manufacturers have had to figure out not only how to manage music files and folders, but also how to display disc information. MP3-based CD players have the challenge of displaying more text than a typical CD player in order to accommodate ID3 tag data. On the Sony CDX-MP450X, for instance, the folder names cannot be longer than eight characters, and they have to be written in capital letters. However, MP3 file names can be up to 31 characters long either in capital or lowercase letters.
Blaupunkt's San Jose ($399) in-dash MP3 CD player uses a scrolling display method for ID3 tag information. Kenwood does the same.
The Aiwa CDC-MP32 ($400) limits the number of tracks it can read from an MP3 disc to 512, and, before initiating play, the display shows nothing more than the number of albums and tracks available. The Aiwa user manual warns that it may take 2 minutes for the player to scan a disc for artist and title information. By pressing the Display button repeatedly on the front panel you can scroll through track data, but you can't access tracks by genre or custom titles.
JVC's KD-SH99 ($429) employs Direct Directory Access, which lets you access up to 12 directories on an MP3 disc using the six function keys on the CD receiver. The KD-SH99 also has a front-panel input into which you can plug a portable digital music player.
Visteon, which makes factory and replacement radios designed for plug-and-play installation in Ford vehicles, has incorporated several features into its MACH MP3 to make it easy to find what you're looking for on an MP3 disc. When you're in MACH Track mode, the volume knob becomes a selector wheel that lets you fly through tracks without taking your eyes off the road. ''If you want to get to a song in the middle of the CD, you hit Track, and the display will show each track,'' explains Dave Cheney, Visteon's product team manager for MP3. Within a couple of twists you can jump from the beginning to the end of the disc, and you can access songs either numerically or by name.
Alpine's CDA-7878 ($799) lets consumers play back music according to how they've organized it into folders and files on a recordable CD. The 64-character Alpine display comes in handy when renaming files, a practice spawned by copyright issues associated with music-sharing services such as Napster.
''Right or wrong,'' says Stephen Witt, vice president of brand marketing for Alpine, ''users are renaming files to get around some of the issues in file transfer. The nomenclature they come up with includes some pretty lengthy names.''Alpine took the high road with its CDA-7878 MP3 CD receiver, utilizing the company's top-end sound control features in the MP3 deck. Bass Engine Pro, for instance, gives users control over output, equalization and tone, so they can adjust the sound to their own listening preference or to overcome acoustic anomalies in their vehicle.
Quantity Over Quality?
Positioning the MP3 CD receiver as a high-end audio piece presents strategic questions for hardware makers. ''Whatever you have recorded onto the medium is what you're going to get back,'' Witt says. Alpine's spin is that the high-end audio circuitry built into the CDA-7878 can give users the impression of an improvement in sound quality. ''The BBE [Barcus-Berry Electronics] circuit we've built into our head units psychoacoustically improves the low frequency output and phase of the signals,'' he says. ''That results in more clarity and a perception of improved sound playback.''MP3 has become the de facto term for compressed audio, but other formats, such as Windows Media, are emerging.
Within a few months, Rio Car customers will be able to upgrade the unit by downloading a Windows Media decoder from the Rio Web site.Fortunately for consumers, the days of having to commit to one format are numbered. Kenwood's Bob Law envisions car owners one day downloading new compressed music decoders to their car stereos.
Upgrading to a new platform through a USB connector or via CD-ROM could be here as soon as 2003, he says.With the recent announcement of the new and improved mp3PRO (available at www.rca.com) and quite a few other formats, the likelihood that MP3 will be the long-term format of choice is unlikely given the simple upgrades made possible by software, Witt says. ''A better mousetrap will be built.'' And, as processing power increases, so will the quality of the music formats.
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