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#21
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:15:30 -0700, Chuck Gould penned the following
well considered thoughts to the readers of rec.boats: Each time I resolved to replace the stereo system on my boat this year, it would start working properly again and the task would drop several notches on the priority list. Saturday, it gave up the ghost- wouldn't turn on until about 50 attempts had been mae pressing the switch, and even then the digital display was kaput. Only about 14 years' service from that unit- I guess they just don't make them like they used to. :-) Speaking of not making them like they used to......... Holy Smackaroons Used to think I knew a few things about car stereo (my stereo mounts in the cabin where it's pretty protected- and I don't need/won't buy "marine" version). Looking at the specs for potential replacements, I can see where the industry has evolved substantially in the last 14 years while my technical awareness has not. It's like learning a new language. Questions for the more techinally hip: 1. Anybody got "HD" FM radio? Would you rate the difference in sound quality as indistinguishable, marginal, or substantial? 2. Anybody using "memory cards" for music storage? Actually sounds like a better approach than hooking up an external iPod, at least at first blush. (We've got an entire galley drawer filled with CD's, etc....would be nice to free up that space and store the music data on something much smaller). So: 3. What are the pros and cons of memory cards, mp3 CD's, CD changers, separate iPod's etc? There's a real smorgasbord og choices now available. 4. Any general advice on this subject? I just bought a JBL in anticipation of installation. This will be a new install..... Although it is iPod ready.... aux in.... I was really more interested in it's ability to handle satellite radio (Sirius). I rarely listen to AM/FM anymore. -- Grady-White Gulfstream, out of Oak Island, NC. Homepage http://pamandgene.idleplay.net/ Rec.boats at Lee Yeaton's Bayguide http://www.thebayguide.com/rec.boats ----------------- www.Newsgroup-Binaries.com - *Completion*Retention*Speed* Access your favorite newsgroups from home or on the road ----------------- |
#22
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
Chuck Gould wrote in
ups.com: 3. What are the pros and cons of memory cards, mp3 CD's, CD changers, separate iPod's etc? There's a real smorgasbord og choices now available. Ask it ONE important question...... Can I use Windows Explorer to simply copy a whole directory of MP3 music files to the player, or its external memory card, and play it WITHOUT using some hobbled up, record company approved, filtering software that makes you do them one-at-a-time. God some of 'em suck moving music to the player. The computer should treat the player as just an external hard drive copying files to....not filtering the files looking for illegal file sharing which sucks even if you're not downloading like mad from alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.(your favorite genre here) newsgroups..... Copy the files onto a massive portable hard drive you can plug into your laptop on the boat in MP3 format. I just bought a Western Digital MyBook USB hard drive, a whopping 750GB, for $179 on sale at Best Buy. This book-sized hard drive will store movies and music for a whole year in one, small package.....not 250 fragile CDs all scratched up and unplayable in a car stereo player that's gonna crap, soon, on a boat. Plug the hard drive into the laptop and the memory card or memory MP3 player in, too. Copy what you want to listen to on this watch to the player and tuck it in your pocket. Mine is a 2GB Sansa the size of a woman's lipstick case with color LCD screen, FM Radio, voice recorder... $80 on sale: http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Cata...sa_Express_MP3 _Players.aspx 500 songs fit on its INTERNAL memory (2GB) and you can ADD another 2GB with the external MicroSD very tiny memory module for $20 more from Newegg.com. (I'm using Kingston memory now, lifetime warranty and they replaced a bad one with no problem for free!) You won't have to reload 1000 songs often. That's 64 hours without hearing the same song twice. It also has random mode to shuffle the deck. The Sansa Express IS a USB plug...which runs 15 hours of continuous play before you simply plug it into the computer for an hour to rapidly recharge its lithium-polymer advanced battery pack.....all for $79! (c; A condom would make a great waterproof carrying case in bad weather...(c; Just put the open end with the headphone wire coming out of it DOWN in your pocket. To play through the boat's stereo is easy....use an FM stereo transmitter like: http://tinyurl.com/3axoru I particularly like this model, though have never owned one, because the whole transmitter is built right into a common 12V plug already in the boats. If you want to play to the whole boat, not just yourself, plug this cheap transmitter into the headphone jack on the tiny Sansa player for days of unrepeated music you can also carry ashore, in your car, listen privately in bed without disturbing HER...a real feature...(c; (NOTE - The $150 FM transmitters sound EXACTLY like the $15 ones on any radio.) Larry -- Paying for XM is just stupid..... |
#23
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
Paying for XM is just stupid.....
To each his own I guess. With XM, I don't have to worry about "using some hobbled up, record company approved, filtering software that makes you do them one-at-a-time," or copying "the files onto a massive portable hard drive you can plug into your laptop on the boat in MP3 format." I especially don't need to worry about carrying a condom and making sure the open end is down in my pocket, to keep things dry. g I just turn it on and listen. Plus, I don't care how fancy an mp3 player you can buy, it just cannot get live "out of market" baseball broadcasts. This last point is the real reason I got XM in the first place... for the Red Sox. All the music is just an extra as far as I'm concerned.;-) Just my point of view. Like I said, to each his own. --Mike "Larry" wrote in message ... Chuck Gould wrote in ups.com: 3. What are the pros and cons of memory cards, mp3 CD's, CD changers, separate iPod's etc? There's a real smorgasbord og choices now available. Ask it ONE important question...... Can I use Windows Explorer to simply copy a whole directory of MP3 music files to the player, or its external memory card, and play it WITHOUT using some hobbled up, record company approved, filtering software that makes you do them one-at-a-time. God some of 'em suck moving music to the player. The computer should treat the player as just an external hard drive copying files to....not filtering the files looking for illegal file sharing which sucks even if you're not downloading like mad from alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.(your favorite genre here) newsgroups..... Copy the files onto a massive portable hard drive you can plug into your laptop on the boat in MP3 format. I just bought a Western Digital MyBook USB hard drive, a whopping 750GB, for $179 on sale at Best Buy. This book-sized hard drive will store movies and music for a whole year in one, small package.....not 250 fragile CDs all scratched up and unplayable in a car stereo player that's gonna crap, soon, on a boat. Plug the hard drive into the laptop and the memory card or memory MP3 player in, too. Copy what you want to listen to on this watch to the player and tuck it in your pocket. Mine is a 2GB Sansa the size of a woman's lipstick case with color LCD screen, FM Radio, voice recorder... $80 on sale: http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Cata...sa_Express_MP3 _Players.aspx 500 songs fit on its INTERNAL memory (2GB) and you can ADD another 2GB with the external MicroSD very tiny memory module for $20 more from Newegg.com. (I'm using Kingston memory now, lifetime warranty and they replaced a bad one with no problem for free!) You won't have to reload 1000 songs often. That's 64 hours without hearing the same song twice. It also has random mode to shuffle the deck. The Sansa Express IS a USB plug...which runs 15 hours of continuous play before you simply plug it into the computer for an hour to rapidly recharge its lithium-polymer advanced battery pack.....all for $79! (c; A condom would make a great waterproof carrying case in bad weather...(c; Just put the open end with the headphone wire coming out of it DOWN in your pocket. To play through the boat's stereo is easy....use an FM stereo transmitter like: http://tinyurl.com/3axoru I particularly like this model, though have never owned one, because the whole transmitter is built right into a common 12V plug already in the boats. If you want to play to the whole boat, not just yourself, plug this cheap transmitter into the headphone jack on the tiny Sansa player for days of unrepeated music you can also carry ashore, in your car, listen privately in bed without disturbing HER...a real feature...(c; (NOTE - The $150 FM transmitters sound EXACTLY like the $15 ones on any radio.) Larry -- Paying for XM is just stupid..... |
#24
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
XM is a great place to get ammo for your MP3 player.
Just record the data stream from the web cast, chop it up with a sound editor and rip it to MP3. It is where I get some of the old stuff they play on "Bluesville" that you really can't find at Wal-Mart Hehe, that's exactly what I do. I don't even bother to chop it up. I'll just grab the stream from DirecTV and record a huge mp3 to a cd-rw, and play it in my truck. When I get to the ends, I do it again (on the same CD). I only have XM in my boat. --Mike wrote in message ... On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:12:29 -0700, "Mike" wrote: Paying for XM is just stupid..... To each his own I guess. With XM, I don't have to worry about "using some hobbled up, record company approved, filtering software that makes you do them one-at-a-time," or copying "the files onto a massive portable hard drive you can plug into your laptop on the boat in MP3 format." I especially don't need to worry about carrying a condom and making sure the open end is down in my pocket, to keep things dry. g I just turn it on and listen. Plus, I don't care how fancy an mp3 player you can buy, it just cannot get live "out of market" baseball broadcasts. This last point is the real reason I got XM in the first place... for the Red Sox. All the music is just an extra as far as I'm concerned.;-) Just my point of view. Like I said, to each his own. --Mike XM is a great place to get ammo for your MP3 player. Just record the data stream from the web cast, chop it up with a sound editor and rip it to MP3. It is where I get some of the old stuff they play on "Bluesville" that you really can't find at Wal-Mart. |
#25
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
LOL! I did the same thing with 8-tracks. Thinking back to those days is what
made me start recording XM. --Mike wrote in message ... On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:15:09 -0700, "Mike" wrote: Hehe, that's exactly what I do. I don't even bother to chop it up. I'll just grab the stream from DirecTV and record a huge mp3 to a cd-rw, and play it in my truck. When I get to the ends, I do it again (on the same CD). I only have XM in my boat. I did that on 8 tracks before some of these folks were born. Back in the olden days they would run FM shows in the middle of the night without many commercials. I could set up my recorder to make a tape from 2 to 3:30 and have a good tape to play in the daytime when it was all commercials all the time. What I like about digital music is it is very easy to go in and chop out any particular song you want. I have an old copy of Sound Forge that will let you do tricks with sound that would dazzle a recording studio engineer 20 years ago. |
#26
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
wrote in news:qbqje3dq2kfigfl5kc9lgvhuledtd3p2iv@
4ax.com: It is where I get some of the old stuff they play on "Bluesville" that you really can't find at Wal-Mart. alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.blues How big are your hard drives??....(c; You don't have to download them in SLOWtime...one at a time. Download Grabit from www.shemes.com and don't buy their service. Grabit is free and completely automates downloading usenet binaries....at full cap speed, 24/7. Man, they got great old Blues on usenet...or about anything else you'd like to listen to but can't find and XM DOESN'T PLAY. Larry -- alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.(your favorite genre) |
#27
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
wrote in news:2itje3pvc3g57h6dis94jrhlmj2dn1ocb0@
4ax.com: What I like about digital music is it is very easy to go in and chop out any particular song you want. I have an old copy of Sound Forge that will let you do tricks with sound that would dazzle a recording studio engineer 20 years ago. You guys might want to look at "Total Recorder" from www.totalrecorder.com Total Recorder sits between whatever is playing and your soundcard, like a proxy server. I can also simulate a soundcard to record in silence as fast as the server will send it, much faster than X1 speed play. Total Recorder will rip ANY audio from ANY source on the net, webpages, Realaudio, WMP, any secure player, any sound input (digital or audio). It's later versions have a neat intellegent recording function for those late night recordings! Total Recorder now turns individual songs DIRECTLY into MP3 separate files, complete with functions to strip off the 2 second deadtime, etc. It will automatically rip like this from any source, including very high speed conversions of your CD collection direct to whatever speed MP3 compression you select. All you do is change CDs. Works great with its own normalization, DC offset, a full compander to level some awful recordings or streams. It also has a clock so it can start recording that XM or internet stream and stop it as you select. The scheduler has lots of modes and options. TR is not free, but you get lifetime upgrades for a pittance.... To catalog/search/play/log your extensive MP3 collection, I recommend a Russian program "MP3 Catalog Pro" from www.wizetech.com, the blazingly fastest MP3 catalogger on the planet. It's not free either but is cheap. It automatically creates a catalog of any and all MP3s on your system, reading the IDx tags off all MP3s it finds for instant searching through thousands of songs as fast as you can click. Drag the desired search results to another folder to burn or Winamp's playlist to play works great. Dragging to Nero burner also works flawlessly...in digital or CD mode. Just thought you'd like this information.....Sorry it won't switch XM channels from its scheduler...(c; Maybe in the future if there's a demand. Larry -- |
#28
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
I will check it out. Thanks!
--Mike "Larry" wrote in message ... wrote in news:2itje3pvc3g57h6dis94jrhlmj2dn1ocb0@ 4ax.com: What I like about digital music is it is very easy to go in and chop out any particular song you want. I have an old copy of Sound Forge that will let you do tricks with sound that would dazzle a recording studio engineer 20 years ago. You guys might want to look at "Total Recorder" from www.totalrecorder.com Total Recorder sits between whatever is playing and your soundcard, like a proxy server. I can also simulate a soundcard to record in silence as fast as the server will send it, much faster than X1 speed play. Total Recorder will rip ANY audio from ANY source on the net, webpages, Realaudio, WMP, any secure player, any sound input (digital or audio). It's later versions have a neat intellegent recording function for those late night recordings! Total Recorder now turns individual songs DIRECTLY into MP3 separate files, complete with functions to strip off the 2 second deadtime, etc. It will automatically rip like this from any source, including very high speed conversions of your CD collection direct to whatever speed MP3 compression you select. All you do is change CDs. Works great with its own normalization, DC offset, a full compander to level some awful recordings or streams. It also has a clock so it can start recording that XM or internet stream and stop it as you select. The scheduler has lots of modes and options. TR is not free, but you get lifetime upgrades for a pittance.... To catalog/search/play/log your extensive MP3 collection, I recommend a Russian program "MP3 Catalog Pro" from www.wizetech.com, the blazingly fastest MP3 catalogger on the planet. It's not free either but is cheap. It automatically creates a catalog of any and all MP3s on your system, reading the IDx tags off all MP3s it finds for instant searching through thousands of songs as fast as you can click. Drag the desired search results to another folder to burn or Winamp's playlist to play works great. Dragging to Nero burner also works flawlessly...in digital or CD mode. Just thought you'd like this information.....Sorry it won't switch XM channels from its scheduler...(c; Maybe in the future if there's a demand. Larry -- |
#29
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
wrote in news:r0qje3l6bgesnvtqtmioa5li0av0d97b7f@
4ax.com: My Sansa works like that. I am running straight W/98 and this shows up as a USP portable drive when I plug it in. Anything I load out there plays. Sansa used to be a no-nonsense ramplug drive, but has knuckled under of late. My Sansa Express 2GB will PLAY any file WinExplorer loads to it, directly, but the 2GB memory no longer operates in memory mode, only music mode so you can't offload it...which I don't like but it's not my favorite player. I only use it riding motorcycle. They don't make my player any mo http://tinyurl.com/24dhse Mine came with 100GB drive, but, because it's a STANDARD laptop hard drive, I've swapped it out to a 120GB I got for free from a trashed laptop whos battery exploded. The Digital Mind Xclef HD-500 is huge by Ipod standards. It uses a STANDARD Li-Ion battery you can buy from any place that supplies cellphone batteries and the STANDARD laptop hard drive, which is VERY rugged, indeed. The included nice leather case protects it from the scratches and bumps. Mine is old, now, but still playing great! It came from an obscure Korean military contractor: http://www.mclsys.com/index.html where I can still get firmware upgrades, easily installed over its STANDARD USB connector....just copy the firmware file to the hard drive where the bootloader looks for it...just like any computer. No rom burning necessary to crash. The Xclef IS a portable 120GB hard drive and will store, use, transport, copy, delete any kind of file...even from DOS it works....no funny business. Larry -- Did I mention it's HUGE?!...(C; |
#30
posted to rec.boats
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Boat Stereo Questions
"Mike" wrote in news:juHGi.9460$924.3035
@newssvr23.news.prodigy.net: I will check it out. Thanks! --Mike Quite welcome. I've been using TR for many years. Larry -- Search youtube for "Depleted Uranium" The ultimate dirty bomb...... |
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