This weekend I added an Ipod to my Mercury. It was like this, I was at Best Buy and they had a 4GB Ipod for $25 off. I guess it was returned because it was one of those open box sales. So I bought it I added it to the car. Now this thing will hold some music So far 47 CD's. Its almost full, but I sould be able to get 2 or 3 more CD's on there. I am at 643 songs, so I am figuring about 40 to 45 more songs depending on size. But I was also wondering. While I was at Best Buy I saw a Western Digital USB Portable Hard Drive on the clearence table. Its an 80 GB HD, so it will hold all the music I own, my son owns and my wife owns and all my friends have. So I bought it. Can a Kenwood or Pioneer that has USB capability access and play music from this HD? I am booked up this week and well into next week so it will be a while before I can check this out. But I am curious
you maybe should have got the 30gig.lol. or make a favorite's list and remove the songs you dont listen to
What I wanted to do in the Mercury is put on the Ipod, CD's that are listened to all the time. Because the Pioneer DEH-P7600MP plays MP3 CD's we only need to keep 3 or 4 CDs in the car at any time. NO More Clutter under the seats. I still wanna get a 30GB for my truck but to replace the DVD player. The 30GB will do video. But I still keep thinking, how do I get an insane amout of music in my car? We use it for trips. That why it has XM. The Ipod will only help put what we wanna hear when we wanna hear it at our finger tips.
it might be able to use the usb hard drive. but the player might be limited to how much it can see. like my computer right now cant see my new 320gig hd and my cell phone can only handle 2gb. im not sure youd have to look it up on google or something. maybe kenwood "model #" hd capacity" or something like that
Just me knowing computers, I don't think you would be able to get it off of a harddrive, they co operate with the computer, opens the certain way, everything that happens when you use the external drive won't be able to happen because the deck don't have the same properties as a computer. But I'm not sure if you could make everything .mp3 because there will still be the first file in there.
Now thats thinking logically, and you may be right. The USB drives may only recognize Thumb drives. So I'll format the HD first, load a bunch of songs and see what happens. I stay MP3, mainly because I am familiar with it. I typically get 6 CDs on one MP3 CD. This will range from 90 to 120 songs on a CD. I could get more but I keep my VBR quality set to 2 or 1. And its AAC (I always get it mixed up too), my Pioneer will only play WMA and MP3 files, its an older unit
before my ipod i had a master cd with 470+songs on it,but i set my quality low to max out my memory. 909 songs-3.35 gigs. i converted them to aac files from wma still sounds good to me.although i keep some cd's to show off the SQ at the shows i go too. i met a dude with a SQ system and he said it sounds really good.i'm just happy with that! listening to the ipod.
Its always slow the week before school, so I had a chance to check it out and IT WORKS. In our demoboard we have a Pioneer DEH P6900UB. I hooked up my Western Digital Passport USB Harddrive. AND IT WORKED. The pioneer was able to access and play all the tracks. I was able to navigate to folders and navagate within folders. Now this HD is an 80GB. I wonder if it can access a 120 or 160 version. I wish I had a Kenwood USB Radio in my display
Lol, sweet..One thing though that drive is not really meant to be in a moving car and bouncing around all the time. I don't think it would last long unless you can like mount it in a way where it won't be jolted. Jello !! LOL
I'm not sure that vibration would be a problem. These little HD's seem to be pretty tough. I think the problem might be extreme heat or extreme cold. I'd still like to try something with this thing. I could have every song I own, my wife owns and what my son has and I would still have a little room left over. Hmmmmmm
Ya, that's definitely cool, i didn't think it would work, it must just see the audio files and ignore everything else. Did you put XP on the drive then put the music?
Actually The only thing on the HD are Music and Video files, and the Pioneer radio ignored the video files. The HD came with some Western Digital Sync software but I deleted all of that. The only thing I left on it, that it came with is the autorun.inf file. Everything else was deleted. The HD has no operating system on it, to install the music files, I just dragged and dropped from my computer. If I get a chance I'm gonna play with it some more later.
Cool, maybe if you had a deck with a dvd screen it would play the videos haha, ya i figured that after i thought about it that you wouldn't need xp, it's just like a huge usb flash drive now.
You've got it. I'd really like to check this thing out with a Kenwood. But we don't stock a USB Kenwood. I wanna stay with Kenwood becuase I've never had one give me problems, I currently own 3. A KDC-X617, a KDC MP8017 and a KDC 516S. They all look alike, just different features. Remember the thread "Where Is CarAudio Going?". Well, thats where its headed. All the music I have at my finger tips. Now I just need to be able to create playlists in the car.
