Another option that I recently found that I have completely fallen in
love with:

http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/neo35/

Anyone in here use one of these? How well does the Pioneer CDC
Adaptor function? WillI be able to get all of th ID3 tags from the
MP3s to display on my Pioneer DEH-P74DH head?

So far this thing looks great. Rip my CDs to MP3 and simply copy to
the drive in this unit, then pop the unit into my Truck and away we
go....... On paper it looks like just what I want...... on paper....

I dont know how this product is, but I had another one of their products. I
saw it at Comdex several years ago and fell in love with it as well.
However once I bought it, it had a few problems with drivers and firmware,
though those eventually were sorted out. Then there were two hardware
failures. SSI replaced the units at least. But the one thing I could not
get over was the UI. It had to be the worst UI ever, and was very very
difficult to use the unit while driving. I frequently had to pull over just
to find the music I was looking for. My passengers didn't have much luck
using the unit at all because it wasn't intuitive. Perhaps they've worked
all this out, I have no idea, but that's my experience anyway.

It doesn't look like they make the product anymore, just jukeboxes now. The
unit I had was a walkman type device that took a laptop harddrive (ok, a
very LARGE unweildy walkman).


"Taps" wrote in message
...
Another option that I recently found that I have completely fallen in
love with:

http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/neo35/

Anyone in here use one of these? How well does the Pioneer CDC
Adaptor function? WillI be able to get all of th ID3 tags from the
MP3s to display on my Pioneer DEH-P74DH head?

So far this thing looks great. Rip my CDs to MP3 and simply copy to
the drive in this unit, then pop the unit into my Truck and away we
go....... On paper it looks like just what I want...... on paper....

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 01:11:55 GMT, "Rob" wrote:

I dont know how this product is, but I had another one of their products. I
saw it at Comdex several years ago and fell in love with it as well.
However once I bought it, it had a few problems with drivers and firmware,
though those eventually were sorted out. Then there were two hardware
failures. SSI replaced the units at least. But the one thing I could not
get over was the UI. It had to be the worst UI ever, and was very very
difficult to use the unit while driving. I frequently had to pull over just
to find the music I was looking for. My passengers didn't have much luck
using the unit at all because it wasn't intuitive. Perhaps they've worked
all this out, I have no idea, but that's my experience anyway.

It doesn't look like they make the product anymore, just jukeboxes now. The
unit I had was a walkman type device that took a laptop harddrive (ok, a
very LARGE unweildy walkman).

Thanks for the info. The main thing that I was interested in with the
Jukebox is that it can be controlled through my Pioneer Unit as if it
were a Normal CD Changer. So the GUI itself shoudlnt be an issue.

As far as hardware issues go, I have a feeling that the part that
would probably go bad the soonest would be the hard drive itself. If
thats the case, upgrading the hard drive shouldnt be a problem. So
far, from what I have read, its simply a FAT32 formatted hard drive.
The rest of the unit appears to be pretty much non-movable parts. So
except for a power surge, or something like that, I dont see much else
going on.

I havent made the purchase yet, I am still waiting to hear from others
who actually own the systems before I take the plunge.

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 22:17:23 -0400, Taps
wrote:

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 01:11:55 GMT, "Rob" wrote:

I dont know how this product is, but I had another one of their products. I
saw it at Comdex several years ago and fell in love with it as well.
However once I bought it, it had a few problems with drivers and firmware,
though those eventually were sorted out. Then there were two hardware
failures. SSI replaced the units at least. But the one thing I could not
get over was the UI. It had to be the worst UI ever, and was very very
difficult to use the unit while driving. I frequently had to pull over just
to find the music I was looking for. My passengers didn't have much luck
using the unit at all because it wasn't intuitive. Perhaps they've worked
all this out, I have no idea, but that's my experience anyway.

It doesn't look like they make the product anymore, just jukeboxes now. The
unit I had was a walkman type device that took a laptop harddrive (ok, a
very LARGE unweildy walkman).

Thanks for the info. The main thing that I was interested in with the
Jukebox is that it can be controlled through my Pioneer Unit as if it
were a Normal CD Changer. So the GUI itself shoudlnt be an issue.

As far as hardware issues go, I have a feeling that the part that
would probably go bad the soonest would be the hard drive itself. If
thats the case, upgrading the hard drive shouldnt be a problem. So
far, from what I have read, its simply a FAT32 formatted hard drive.
The rest of the unit appears to be pretty much non-movable parts. So
except for a power surge, or something like that, I dont see much else
going on.

I havent made the purchase yet, I am still waiting to hear from others
who actually own the systems before I take the plunge.


It would be a good idea to remove the hard drive when you first get
the jukebox (or as soon as the warranty expires), and use Norton Ghost
or another similar program to copy the entire drive partition as an
image file onto your computer's hard drive. That way, if the drive in
your jukebox crashes, you just have to get a new drive and copy the
image onto it. Even though it's a FAT32 drive, they're probably using
some proprietary operating system, so just buying a new hard drive and
formatting in on your home computer probably wouldn't get you back up
and running

I did this with my wife's Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox MP3 player. It
originally came with a 6 Gb laptop hard drive, and I had a 20 Gb drive
lying around from when I upgraded her laptop. I hooked both the 6 Gb
and the 20 Gb drives to my desktop computer, and used Ghost to copy
the partition from the 6 Gb drive onto the 20 Gb drive. Since Ghost
does a bit-for-bit blind copy, it doesn't matter what the operating
system is. I've used it on my Windows machine to copy Linux
partitions, Windows partitions, TiVo drives and Macintosh drives, with
no problems.

Scott Gardner

The hard drive should be fine, the parts that went on me were the LCD
display and the power connector input.
You're right on the hard drive format though, it's a standard laptop drive
with the FAT32 file system (for the SSI product I owned).

"Taps" wrote in message
...

Thanks for the info. The main thing that I was interested in with the
Jukebox is that it can be controlled through my Pioneer Unit as if it
were a Normal CD Changer. So the GUI itself shoudlnt be an issue.

As far as hardware issues go, I have a feeling that the part that
would probably go bad the soonest would be the hard drive itself. If
thats the case, upgrading the hard drive shouldnt be a problem. So
far, from what I have read, its simply a FAT32 formatted hard drive.
The rest of the unit appears to be pretty much non-movable parts. So
except for a power surge, or something like that, I dont see much else
going on.

I havent made the purchase yet, I am still waiting to hear from others
who actually own the systems before I take the plunge.