Thumb Drives & MP3′s
I know I am on a technology kick here the last few post and I have a couple of more that I may mention here in the near future as well. A few months ago, I was contemplating buying a second Zune (or some other kind of MP3 playing device) because at 4GB capacity my current one only holds about one eighth of my total music collection and of course. The expense of the item and hearing rumblings of a new model coming out deterred me at the time, but I had another idea at the time that I thought was even better.
My thought ran something like this. The reason I wanted a new one, with perhaps more memory, was to hold more of my music without have to swap it out from my computer. It would never fail I was in the mood for one time of music when when driving down the interstate and I had another type loaded. I have personally wanted to avoid the larger capacity models that were drive based – moving parts are more suspect to being dropped, wear and tear, and of course are harder on batteries.
So my thought was why doesn’t someone come up with a sing MP3 player with a USB port to swap music into and out of by just using a a USB based memory stick? Seemed like a very simple idea and I had to wonder why someone had not done it before. (To my knowledge and please correct me if I wrong) no one has done this yet. But just imagine it, a USB stick with your country music, another with folk, Celtic, and new age stuff, and yet another for 80′s classic rock (yeah, that makes me feel old). Not to mention with the easy download access of audio books these days, wouldn’t something like this be sweet?
Enter my new truck, which came equipped with a fairly nice and very modern radio/CD player deck. It had an aux port for 3.5mm connections and a USB port. I had seen such before and mistakenly had assumed the USB was only for charging your device that was playing the 3.5mm port. First, the aux connection is great and does work with my Zune and even my computer, but if either are being charged by the truck I get a lot of feedback from line noise – generated by the electro-magnetic fields of the engine doing its thing I am sure.
Then a thought occurred to me to try the USB device, as it seemed like when I charged things the receiver deck always tried to look to see what was available. I put in a memory stick with music files, organized in a directory structure and sure enough it reads them. It displays song names, albums, and artist from the file information as well. At 4GB capacity it takes a bit to keep in organized in ones head, but skipping ten is an option which just about gets an album.
So, next thoughts for me in this matter. It would be nice if the USB port could read from things like my MP3 player or even my cell phone while they are being charged. I am also thinking the digital nature of that transmission would avoid the interference of the analog aux input jack. But at current this is not to be. Perhaps instead a blue tooth receiver should start to show up in the car units, keeping it digital but avoiding that extra wire and probably adding very little expense to the overall cost of the unit.
All good things of course have a down side. Right after this discovery and my driving around jamming to the one USB memory stick while making plans for what organization I would use for the rest of them, said radio in my truck stopped working. I checked fuses in the truck panel and all were fine. Turns out the installation was less then professional with wires behind barely stripped and a lot of electrical tape. By redoing the power supply wire I was able to get it working again, but I need to redo the whole of it sometime soon to avoid other problems in the future.
September 28th, 2009 at 2:35 am
I believe I have seen somewhere mp3 players with usb port. Guess one of my friends has something like that. Don’t know the model though.
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