Rpmayne 0 Posted August 17, 2006 Does anyone own a USB enabled headunit, or have any pointers? Think this would suit me as all my music (30gb ish) is on an external HDD so hoping that I can just plug it in and scroll through the ID3 tags / folder & file names. I was ideally going to get a Kenwood MASK head unit but they don't seem to do as many as they used to, and none of this years MASK models have the USB. Do any other manufacturers have a similar system to mask so I don't need to take the front off all the time? Ta. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
TIMMYVR 0 Posted August 21, 2006 We sell a real nice jvc unit for £159 mate. Good spec, ill get the model number for you tommorrow. Timmy Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Rpmayne 0 Posted August 23, 2006 Thanks TimmyVR but I just bought the highest Kenwood they do with USB. Thing is I have tried attaching the HDD and its not working too well. First it wouldn't recognise any of the files, now it seems to have scrambled a small amount of them. I spent all day yesterday using tag&rename to sort all the id's out making sure there wasn't any huge filenames or that the limits were exceeded (max 500 folders etc.). Still no joy. I change the format to Fat32 from NTFS though because it will only work with FAT16/32. It did warn me about loosing some data streams during the conversion? Maybe that's the problem..? Plays off the supplied USB stick fine, although its only displaying folder numbers rather than names at the moment so if I do get the HDD working it will take ages to find anything. Displays the artist/track name ok. Probably not set up correctly yet though. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
dinkus 10 Posted August 23, 2006 Hmm, I was looking at getting one of these, but JVC and Kenwood seem to be the only people that make and all-in-one HU to do it. Alpine do a USB interface that can be hooked up to any of their modern HUs, but the interface box is £160ish I think! I'm just gonna go the whole-hog and have an in-car PC instead :lol: Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Kevin Bacon 5 Posted August 23, 2006 Why not get a DVD player H/U? Loads of gigs of music and it *does* display the ID filenames properly. Doesn't take long to buzz your tracks over onto a DVD-R. Or you've got that Dension thing Henny had which has a removable hard disk. Car PCs can be troublesome! Panch's was awful, constantly crashing and overheating, it was next to useless tbh....and it was a car specific PC aswell, LOL! :-) Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
dinkus 10 Posted August 23, 2006 Yeah, I'm not convinced about this car-specific PC lark - PCs generally just aren't cracked up to be run in cacky conditions in a car. I'm going to use a laptop as a base because it's so much more robust, it's less power-hungry and thus creates less heat, it's compact and has built in UPS. Plus I happen to have one kicking about spare :D Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Rpmayne 0 Posted August 23, 2006 Do like the look of the Alpine headunits but as you say they are expensive compared to the others. Clarion do one but not so keen on the looks. Didn't fancy the DVD way, just thought that if the headunit could play the HDD then I could keep all the tunes in one place.. plug into the indoor PC for playing / downloading then the car would always be up to date. Apparently most of the next generation Kenwoods will have USB's (hopefully more advanced search wise) so this is just a stop gap. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
