lap top or extrenal hard drive for car audio music

[IH8RICE 10+ year member]

any one know how to use a lap top or an external hard drive to store music for in car entertainment? it woudd be nice to use a lap top for in car use but i dont know how to do it yet. it'd be nice to use a lap top to play dvd too. i think the easiest way would be use an extrenal hard drive and hook it up to a in dash dvd player. anyways any one know how to do this? or any one know who i should talk to?

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[MastaFlex 10+ year member]

do you want to put ur laptop in your car?

Because if so, just plug and play with dvds your computer should already play them, if not just download a program for it - like windows media player.

 

[IH8RICE 10+ year member]

basically i just want to know how to use a external hard drive with a in dash dvd player so i dont need cd's and no i dont want a little crappy i pod! i just want to store the music in the external hard drive and play it on the in dash dvd

 

[MastaFlex 10+ year member]

**** you would have to do some re-wiring with your system, i dont know exactly how to do that, seems a little harder then what people may think, but never the less good luck, i would like pics if you get it figured out, cuz i would like to do that too

 

[IH8RICE 10+ year member]

well for one thing ill get it to work! im an electronics mechanic in the military i deal with wiring schematics every day im sure i can figure it out. soorner or later but i appreciate the help if any one knows how to do it. some one had to have done this before.

 

[kuijo 10+ year member]

If you're talking a computer external hard drive to a car head unit, thats not going to happen. Your best bet would be to get an ipod or ipod-like mp3 player. Unless you want put a car-puter in your car, which is going to be expensive.

 

[IH8RICE 10+ year member]

it cant be that hard to hook up an external hard drive to an in dash dvd player but i dont know how to yet. car puter is that a brand name or some thing ? cost doesnt mean much im deploying in the military ill have the money to do it when i get back.

 

[kuijo 10+ year member]

A Car-puter is a computer in your car. You could get a nice touchscreen monitor mount it to your dash. And just use it like a computer, and stash the actual computer somewhere in your car in these tiny cases designed for cars. Open up winamp or WMP or whatever and play the songs.

The reason you couldn't hook up an external hard drive to a DVD player is because headunits don't use an IDE connection which is what your hard drive would need. and even if you got them connected, the headunit wouldn't know how to read what it was looking at.

 

[Cris 10+ year member]

You have a dvd player. You have a hard drive.

Getting those two to work together isn't as simple as figuring out which blue wire goes to which red wire.

You need some sort of electronic liason.. most likely software based.. that will take information from your hard drive and turn it into an audio signal for your in-dash dvd player. This is where the aformentioned carputer would come in. Since you refuse to go the simple route (ipod via any choice of adapters) then you'd need to either hook up a laptop (simple as audio-out from the laptop's soundcard) or buy and hookup a carputer.

Being good at wiring schematics will only help you in hooking it up. You can't get an indash dvd unit to communicate with an external hard drive because you know how to splice wires.

 

[whtxblazer02 10+ year member]

I bought the OmniFi 20 Gig hard drive for my blazer. I love it.

It comes with a din-sized controller that you can mount anywhere in the vehicle. I molded mine into the rearview mirror. You simply splice into a power, ground, and turn-on lead. Then plug the rca's into your auxillery input of your headunit.

Here are a couple of pics of the actual hard-drive and the controller before I put it in my mirror.

 

[Dj-torn 10+ year member]

Visit http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=25 for more help w/ your project

 

[Jamaica2G 10+ year member]

I know where IH8RICE is coming from as I have two 20GB hard drives just sitting here doing nothing.

I just got an Eclipse AVN 5500 and as soon as I looked at the AUDIO IN rca's I thought , hmm wish I could hook up my spare hard drive without burning the power to supply an entire carputer.

How do CD changers work?

Are the HD's in OmniFI's exchangable for larger ones?

I would hook up my laptop but it has the Chittiest audio-out on the face on the planet. You can even hear the distortion through POS headphones. :-(

Adrian

 

[reneeb7363 10+ year member]

if you really wanna do this cheap you are going to need an ol laptop or p/c that you can tear apart... install a basic, no frills, operating system, like Linux, and update to usb 2.o drivers... it will probably need a driver for the plug and play compatiblity with your external HD. Run the audio card output to your head unit, do you have an aux input?, RF adaptor? Power p/c with an inverter.

There are sooo many variables....

Are you any good with software mods? You can just about buy a carputer for what your gonna have invested in all of this anyways (time and money) and get what you want.

 

[phyphoestilic 5,000+ posts]

U can always go the way of the ipod. and get a ipod adapter or use the aux input on the HU. If using the aux any MP3 player would do.

 

[Rattlebrain 10+ year member]

If your HU has an aux input, just connect it to your laptop through the headphones out.