"The final component, the ultimate piece, the last thingie!"

[vakkotaur]

jmaynard and I had reason to go to Mankato for a few things today, and I now have a 128 MB USB flash drive (the PNY Attache from Best Buy). That along with the gadget I picked up last night makes up my auto mp3 player. Earlier in the day we got mp3 encoding working on belgian so I can encode to the format the thing can play. The gadget even plays some mp3 files that seem to give xmms (version 1.2.7 so it's not the latest and greatest) some trouble.

After loading the flash drive with mp3 files, I had to test it. First in the office to be sure it would play a troublesome file, then in the car to be sure it worked for what I really wanted. Two issues came up, both of which are treatable. It seems there's enough hash in the air even in little Fairmont that every FM channel from 87.7 to 88.9 MHz has enough noise to make things sound scratchy. Fortunately the Corolla's broadcast receiver antenna is mounted on the A-pillar where the driver can reach out and adjust it. I had it fully retracted and things sounded clean. Or at least they did most files. That's the other issue. The mp3 player seems to clip a bit on a few files I'd made with Audacity and had adjust the levels to *just* not clip, or so it had seemed. Evidently that's a bit more than the player-transmitter combination can take. The files made from CD all sounded fine.

I like this thing. I could use a few more flash drives, but that's not a big deal. I have until a bit before RCFM for that. On that trip (16 hours one way if I were nutty enough to do it in one shot), I'd like to have a few hours worth of music, spread across a few flash drives.