Backstory: Once upon a time 5 years ago, I ordered an audio player called the Neuros. What a great audio player it was! It was big like a brick, but I didn’t mind that since I only used it in my car. It supported MP3, ogg, WMA, & a couple other file formats and it could transmit on FM radio frequencies, so I could listen to it on my car stereo. However one sad day in about December of 2005, it died and I was (GASP!) forced to go back to using CDs.
Fast forward to about now, I’m looking to get that awesome capability of being able to play my music in 3 main file formats (MP3, ogg, and FLAC) back and listen to it on my car stereo, while having many GigaBytes of storage space. The Ipod won’t work because it doesn’t support ogg or FLAC formats and is rather expensive. I can’t get another Neuros because they discontinued it! And besides, I want to be able to listen directly through a plug-in line rather than over a transmitted signal, because the sound quality on the Neuros, while being pretty good compared to other wireless audio solutions, was still rather poor.
Well, I have a Nintendo DS and a slot-1 cartridge for it called the EZ-Flash 5+, or EZV+ for short. It allows me to use my DS to run homebrew software of all kinds, including one called DSOrganize which can play MP3, ogg, FLAC, and many more formats! The cartridge has a small slot in it that reads microSDHC or microSD cards, so that is where all of the data is stored. The SDHC spec supports cards up to 32 GB, although at the time of this writing there are only 8 GB cards for sale. BTW, the cards are the size of my fingernail.
I downloaded DSOrganize today and tested it out. It works great, supports playlist files, and played every file I threw at it flawlessly. Now I just need a car stereo head unit with an aux-in jack in the front, which are surprisingly easier to find now than they were the last time I looked for them just 2 years ago. Even most of the low-end car stereo units have them now. Basically, I get one of those and install it, then run an audio cable from my DS-headphone jack to the car stereo and I have musical bliss.
So let’s compare prices and capabilites of the setup I want to an Ipod 8 GB. I’m not going to include the price of the car stereo, since that would be required for both.
DS solution:
Nintendo DS lite: $100-$130
EZ-Flash V+: $25.50
8 GB microSDHC card: $38.50
Total: $164-$194
Pros: Plays all the music formats I want it to, supports playlists, swappable memory cards so you can load different/more music onto it without going back to your computer, can be upgraded to have more capacity when bigger microSDHC cards come out, and can play games.
Cons: NOTHING EVER (completely objective viewpoint)
Ipod solution:
Ipod 8GB: $194
Pros: Can play more video formats (actually a con, I don’t want to crash my car because I was watching Romper Room while driving)
Cons: Can’t play all the audio formats I want, can’t swap memory cards out on the go, can’t be upgraded, can’t play games on it.
Conclusion: With the Ipod, you spend more to do less. With the DS, I get the novelty of playing music off of a gaming system, yay! Really, I already had the DS and the EZV+, so for $38.50 extra I get to have enough storage space to rival modern audio players. Plus when the bigger microSDHC cards come out I can swap one of those in for more capacity. Try doing THAT with an Ipod! I just ordered a new car stereo and will have it installed next weekend, and also just ordered the memory card which should arrive this week. The setup should be complete by next Sunday!
Tags: car audio, Geek, Nintendo DS
July 27, 2008 at 4:24 pm |
Yay, sounds awesome. I got a Cowon Iaudio for my mp3 needs, and I love it.
July 28, 2008 at 2:33 pm |
[...] HARDWARE: Why you should not buy an iPod if you own a Nintendo DS. Mastery over personal hardware is… If you’ve already bought a DS, you’ve already paid for a device capable of doing MORE with audio files than an iPod. Why pay Apple extra $ for proprietary, closed hardware that wont even play common formats, when you ALREADY HAVE something capable? (tags: hardware software music players iPod NintendoDS Apple homebrew mp3 FLAC OGG fromGregZ) [...]
July 29, 2008 at 4:58 am |
Very cool! I did not know the DS was capable of being a useful media player. Thanks for the tips!
August 2, 2008 at 12:35 am |
This idea sounds great! I have a very nice sounding, punchy, dynamic custom car audio system. The best sounding lossy format that I have tried is 320 bit rate WMA, but the punch or liveliness of the songs is noticeably diminished, when compared to the CD. 320 MP3s are much worse, and as the bit rate drops, so does dynamics and frequency response.
My Pioneer car audio head unit will only decode lossy formats through its USB and Ipod inputs. I have not found a head unit made that can decode any lossless format such as flac, apple or wma lossless, or I would immediately buy it.
That is why I have been looking for a portable solution that will play back my lossless format FLAC home music collection. That way I can get CD audio quality without cluttering my car up with hundreds of disks! The one concern that I have with your solution is the quality of the DS digital to analog conversion chipset. The rinky dink soundtracks on my kids DS games suggest that it may be pretty low quality.
– DrFunn -
August 4, 2008 at 12:16 pm |
@DrFunn: Well the car stereo was installed on Saturday and I drove home from Circuit City listening to music played on the DS and amplified by the car stereo. Soooo, it worked!
Now that I’ve had it and used it for a couple days, I’ll address some of your concerns and list a few things I’ve noticed. First, the sound quality. The sound quality seems very good to me when songs are played off of the DS, and it is definitely better quality than the music from most of the DS games that I have played. They use low bitrate music and sound effects for the games so they can cut down on the amount of space those take up in the game cartridges. The biggest DS game is about 128 MB, so with space constraints like that, you can’t blame them for lowering the sound quality so they still have room for other stuff like the graphics and game code.
Second, some issues I’ve noticed. One of my songs had noticeable skips in it when played back on the DS, but I found out this was because it was an .ogg file that had been encoded at a very high quality setting and the bitrate was averaging in the 400-500 kbps range. Apparently, this is a bit too much for the processors in the DS to handle, thus the skips.
Third, “random” playback doesn’t work at all if I use a playlist file. If I am playing music back in a folder, it will randomize the playback order of the tracks in that folder but it will not randomize playback of tracks in a playlist. This is a bug in DSOrganize that I’m hoping will be fixed in a later version.
Overall, I am happy with the DS audio solution and will be using it almost every time I drive from now on. At this point, I don’t think it would be worth it to buy another audio player to get around the few shortcomings that this one has. If you already have a DS, go ahead and buy a slot-1 cart and a microSDHC card and go for it! If not, there should be a portable audio player out there that supports all of the file formats you want and has good sound quality. And of course, both of these options require that you have a way of plugging it into your car stereo, like an Aux-in jack.
November 29, 2008 at 1:27 pm |
DrFunn, if mp3 at 320 kbps doesn’t sound transparant to you it will be caused by:
1.- using an old mp3 encoder (use Lame)
2.- using modern encoder with erroneous settings
3.- you’re a victim of placebo effect (do an ABX test)
So don’t spread nonsense.