MP3 in Ford trucks
 

I just saw a Ford Trucks ad that boasted of the availability of MP3 in their top models.

The revolution is over. MP3 has completely won.

Never mind that bouncy trucks are the IDEAL place for MP3. The visuals in the ad were all about the usual macho signatures for trucks: loading heavy stuff into the back and driving over rugged terrain. These are not your typical MP3 users. "Hey Jim, ya wanna go haul those logs out?" "Sure buddy, just as soon as I finish burning this Pet Shop Boys disk. I downloaded their entire back catalog."

If MP3 is now an important feature to Joe Average, for use in his TRUCK, it has won... before any legitimate music industry offered any CD [sic] in the MP3 format.

i can not stop laughing at that.

~james

Hilary Rosen says...
 

The truck industry's killer app is piracy. RIAA must be paid for each and every MP3 player that those thieving bastards at Ford put into a truck, or Britney Spears will starve to death.

This is really exciting. If <i>all</i> stereo equipment eventually starts supporting mp3s, then maybe the record industry will start releasing cds that can hold more than a pitiful 74 minutes of music.

yeah but then theyll start charging 150 bucks for a cd.

~james

I doubt the industry will ever add more music to there CD's. At least not until they realize that file sharing is here to stay. If the industry starts releasing CD's with MP3s on them then no one would ever buy a CD again, especially with the push towards Broadband. The only reason I ever buy a cd is becuase they sound better. Not much but a little, but if you compress them to MP3 to put more music on them then your going to loose quality.

Well fuck you then.

I don't think they sound better, unless you're talking about live stuff.

The real reason MP3s are popular (out of proportion to the price point) is that you don't have to bother with the pointless "filler tracks" that get stuck on many albums to pad them out to an acceptable length.

This happened back when you got 40 minutes on a vinyl recording too. It's the reason the RIAA syndicate has been foot-dragging on downloadable music; they *know* that too much of their catalog is crap nobody would buy if it wasn't glued onto something else people actually wanted.

We've got 100 "non-premium" channels on cable now. Most of them are garbage and infomercials. And promos for all the wonderful shows on *digital* cable...*all* of which would fit into the existing analog bandwidth. Oh, and let's not forget the FUD about VSAT dishes.

Re: Hilary Rosen says...
 

This is a serious problem. I mean, you can already tell she doesn't have any money, cause she can only afford shirts that are too small. :angel:

Yeah that's the OTHER "problem" with the Tivo and its ilk (from the TV industry perspective).. besides the commercial skpping stuff... if I've got 120GB of disk space attached to my TV that is filled exclusively with stuff I decided I wanted to watch (and I do, well, OK, there's stuff for other people in the family too), I will never again sit down and just watch whatever's on.

(Two posts in a row... if we were back in the old Waffle BBS I'd be accused of trying to up my post-to-call ratio!!)

Re: Re: Hilary Rosen says...
 

And thank God for that.

I don't agree. I think the "real reason" they're popular is the incredible compression mp3s have. For example, the cds I make for my Sony Walkman hold 20 hours of music! Hell, the batteries would run out before the cd would run out of new songs to play. This is the kind of technology i'm talking about. Done right, it's a straight up technological advancement that's trivially easy to implement. It may take some time because of politics, but it's just a matter of time, I think.

Well, how many times have you called this year? :-)

Not many since I got DSL hooked up! :3eye:

You know, another thing about the whole MP3 situation occurs to me... and maybe this is what gives the RIAA the willies more than anything else. Complete hardware platform independence! You give me an MP3, I can play it on my computer. I can put it on flash memory and play it on a handheld player. I can put it on an external hard disk and, gee, maybe that hard disk has software to play the MP3 and a headphone jack (like the ipod and its ilk). The record companies have always had strict control over the physical packaging of the music.

The company I'm really interested in is Sony, because they make electronic gadgets and they have lots of music and movies, which means they may have an internal conflict about which side of this debate to come down on.

i have had a MP3 player in my Ford F-150 for about a year. The company that manufactures the Ford stereos has made a mp3 player that looks like the factory original.

http://www.evisteon.com/

looks and works great.

I actually have a cd mp3 player in my car. It's great, I can drive my 6 hours home and never change cd's or listen to the same song.

If it's a Ford product you can guess that there are lots of big pressy buttons on it. Ford likes big ol' buttons with rounded curvy tops, so older folks can find and press them easily, and so you don't poke out your eye if you crash into a button head first. But it does make the whole look and feel of the vehicle like a big padded room.

Heh heh heh thats exactly it.

MP3 in cars
 

Speaking of which, I'm going to get an Mp3 deck for my car so I can play music in it. Right now I'm using a Sonicblue Rio Volt CD/Mp3 player in the tape deck to play CD's and Tapes.

I was considering mounting one of those 800Mhz ultra-small PC's in there with a 30 GB laptop hard drive and 512 MB RAM running one of the many Linux toolkits out there, but I realized I'd spend more money for a solution that's not ideal. I'd rather buy something that's under $500. I was even considering just plugging an iPod into the tape deck, and just getting a PDA holder to mount it on.

However, any recommendations for a good tape deck would be acceptable!

Mitch

Heh....maybe the new ones. My 1995 Escort Wagon has a radio that's completely flat. Oh, some of the buttons have a little ridge on them, but basically it's impossible to tell what you're doing without looking down. It's even got a rocker-style button for the volume instead of a nice knob. A guy I know at work has the identical radio in his Taurus from the same period.

I have one of those, the SP90. It has good features for the price (though I hate the "single circular button performs 4 functions depending on which quadrant of the circle you hit" interface in any context). I recently got an FM modulator so I could play it in my new minivan, which doesn't have a tape deck.