Why do most Car Stereo mp3 players suck?

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Car Stereo mp3 Players Suck

mp3 players are now ubiquitous. They are available as personal devices the size of cigarette lighters. They are basic freeware on any computer operating system. They are integrated in cell phones. And for several years, they have been available for car stereos.

So why do car stereo mp3 players suck so bad?

I'm not asking *how* they suck. I will give some great examples of how car stereo mp3 players really, really suck. I'm just wondering: how could car stereo mp3 player manufacturers have messed up so badly? How could they be selling such crappy units for so long?

How Car Stereo mp3 Players Suck

I rarely have complaints about the sound quality of car stereos. There are hordes of magazines devoted to rating and promoting car stereos. Careful attention to audio fidelity is something car stereo manufacturers know they are supposed to get right.

No, most of my complaints are about the usability and usefulness of car stereo mp3 players. There are some glaring mistakes in their User Interface. Because of that, car stereo mp3 players really suck. I've had two of them so far, and both of them had the exact same flaws. [By the way, if you find car stereo mp3 players that don't have these flaws, let me know. I've tried both Sony and Pioneer units and have been really disappointed with both.]

One big problem is how bad they look. I understand that part of the market is really interested in bright blue lighting that illuminates the entire car. I understand that flashy animations are important to a few people out there. But it seems like car stereo manufacturers think there are only two types of people: people who are satisfied with the factory-installed stereo, and people who want a flashing neon sign embedded in their dashboard. They do not believe there is anyone out there who might be interested in a subtle-looking yet powerful-sounding mp3 player.

I had a hard time finding a unit that didn't completely clash with my car's interior. I finally settled for an mp3 player that had a sliding cover, so that most of the time the gaudy flashing blue LED panels would be hidden.

But really, would it be so hard to create a unit or two that didn't look like a parked UFO?

Forget for a minute how bad the units look. Let's talk about how they play music.

Like most people out there, I have hundreds of mp3 tracks that I listen to. Typically I throw some mp3 tracks on a CD in a haphazard way. I don't care about the order in which the tracks are played. In fact, I *prefer* the tracks to be played in a random order.

Unfortunately, a car stereo mp3 player gets this horribly, horribly wrong. It really does play the tracks in a completely random order. That is, it plays one random track at a time, without caring what tracks it has already played, or what tracks it is going to play in the future. So if you have 50 tracks to be played, you might hear track number 2 five times in a row, but not hear track 14 for five days. If I press the "previous track" button on my mp3 player while in random mode, it does not back through the previously played tracks. The player has forgotten what it played five minutes ago and instead, it picks other random tracks. The "previous track" and "next track" buttons pretty much do the same thing.

The proper way to handle random play is to shuffle the tracks. Assemble a random ordering of the 50 tracks in a list, and then walk through the list. The "previous track" and "next track" buttons then function as the user would expect, jumping to the previous and next tracks in the shuffled playlist.

At first I thought: "maybe the manufacturers tried to do this, but didn't have the memory in the unit to handle shuffled playlists." But a few minutes of back-of-the-envelope calculations can quickly show that this should take no more than a few kilobytes of memory in the absolute worst case. So that's not an excuse. Manufacturers just get this plain wrong.

The most annoying flaw in car stereo mp3 players is their terrible track title display. If you're like me, you give your mp3 tracks good names, with the name of the artist and album, as well as the song's name. So the track title can be very long, easily 30 characters or more. This won't fit on a standard display. You have to scroll the title slowly, like a Wall Street ticker board. This is 1970's technology.

However, again, car stereo manufacturers seems to not understand how to do this. Sometimes I will see the title scroll, for instance right when the song starts. But other than that, the mp3 player just shows the first 10 or 15 characters it can fit, and truncates the rest. So if you have a bunch of tracks by the same artist (which is very common), you won't actually be able to see the song name in the display.

This really cripples the display. I think the manufacturer thought: "well, the driver will spend all of their time looking at the mp3 player anyway. So long as we scroll the title when the track starts, they'll know what's going on."

But if your mp3 player isn't the center of your life, and you actually look at the road when you're driving, you probably won't be paying attention when the tracks change, and the title does its one and only scroll. So if you look at the display 30 seconds into the track, you'll have no idea what the track title is (at least, not if the track title is longer than 10 characters).

My current car stereo mp3 player has a big blue LED panel (that I hide most of the time). When not hidden, this panel can show animations of dolphins swimming. It can show animations of cars in a race. It can show animations of pistons pumping up and down, representing bass and treble values.

But the big flashy blue LED panel can't scroll track titles. How messed up is that?

Why Car Stereo mp3 Manufacturers Should Be Ashamed

Okay, so car stereo mp3 players suck. Perhaps it's because mp3 players have only been included in cars for a few years, and they are still learning what features to support?

No, that's not an excuse. You know why? Because excellent mp3 players have been available *for free* on home PC's for a long, long time.

Fire up Winamp . You'll see that there is complete support for shuffled playlists, and the track title always scrolls. Winamp is skinnable, so you can control what the player looks like. Winamp and its many clones have been able to design mp3 players that don't induce epileptic seizures.

So that's one reason to be ashamed. People have been building usable mp3 players for years. The flaws I'm describing are basic features that every other mp3 platform has figured out.

The other reason to be ashamed is that the flaws are so apparent. If you get one of these units installed in your car, you become frustrated with the low-quality experience after a week or less. Even if the people making these units were unaware of iPods or Winamp or XMMS or any other mp3 player, they still could have noticed these problems if they'd actually tried using their own product for a while.

Why Car Stereo mp3 Players Suck

I think that is the real reason why car stereo mp3 players suck so bad. The people making them don't actually use them.

Do you trust products produced by people that don't use them themselves? I don't.

The List

Anyway, the next time I buy a car stereo mp3 player, this is what I'll look for:

1) It can't look like a flashing blue-red-and-purple Gameboy. It has to look like an audio component that understands it is only an mp3 player, not the center of attention in my vehicle.

2) It has to support a functional shuffled playlist. "Previous track" and "next track" buttons should behave sensibly in shuffle mode.

3) Track titles have to scroll all the time, not just when the song starts.

In short, a car stereo mp3 player should look and behave similar to practically all the other kinds of mp3 players out there.