Well, here is another "hard drive" based head unit for use in the car. Not very impressive. 20GB, who are they kidding!?!?! Why can't someone do it right? I can only dream about what the Empeg group could do given the resources and direction to build a OEM unit today!

oh, almost forgot the linky...

http://technoride.com/article/Chrysler+MyGiG+Hard+Drive+for+Navigation+Music/183407_1.aspx

call me crazy but other than the 20gig thing I really like the look of this thing. the usb and cd option seem handy and the nav would be nice. and an upfront aux in, i really don't know why that is not standard these days, my 1998 panasonic cd head unit even had that feature and that was way before fancy portable mp3 devices.

its no empeg though

I agree, it doesn't look bad at all, hardware-wise. But the software is where most of these hard drive units fall down. I'll reserve judgement until I see a more detailed review of how this thing really works as a music player. But, I think it's safe to say the state of factory and aftermarket car music players is a flat out joke these days.

I agree, the Chrysler radios with the large screen displays have always caught my eye. They do have a bunch of "almosts" with this radio. If the software and hard drive could be improved upon you might have something here. I'm also looking forward to a more complete review.

According to the article only half of the 20GB is dedicated to music.

I'll bet they're using these new automotive-spec hard drives, which are presumably built tougher than the laptop-spec drives in the empeg, and may not be available yet in larger sizes.

Can you connect a 60GB iPod via USB (playing its non-protected music)? And charge it.... Or a 1TB USB drive encloure running from an inverter....


EDIT:

Quote:
A USB jack. You use it for transferring music from memory keys. ... Unlike Fiat's Blue&Me LINK and several replacement radios, this is for flash-based keys only, not music players.

Oh well. LAME.

Bruno

Thankfully it has USB for transfering music, since ripping CDs in car is lame. Reminds me of a neat (yet lame) idea I saw on a Sony deck (before I quickly turned away): 1gig flash memory and USB mini-a jack on the detachable face plate for bringing into the house and loading music. I think that's all the storage it had, though.

I just plug my Ipod into the aux port and play it on the MyGig system-the sounds is terrific. Why would a bigger hard drive be needed? I have a five gig travel USB storage device I plug in and transfer to the hard drive. Lots of folks think many gigs of memory is a good thing but 20 gig is way more than enough for this application.

Wow this is an old thread. I now have about 170GB of music. Over 20000 tracks.

The empeg community has taken this application to a whole new level. That is what the rest of the workd still hasn't caught on to. Many of us keep our entire music collection on the empeg and transferring musc only happens when we've aquired new music. At least for me, removing stuff from my empeg s something that has never happenned. I have all my CD's in a box in storage - never see one any more except if I buy one - then after rippage, it is gone to storage.

For this kind of thing, 20 GB doesn't cut it - at least for more invested music lovers.

And I didn't even touch on the customization potential. There is nothing like the empeg - even nearly a decade later!