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And what do you mean, use a Mini-ITX box? A car PC could never have the same funtionality as the Empeg!


Don't want to sound to blasphemous here, but if the car manufacturer's iPod
control user interface is really good, you won't need the Empeg's display and
its user interface. And if you don't need that, it will be a lot easier to come with
a replacement, since it can be headless.

Automotive computer hardware is becoming practical and affordable. I really
like the VoomPC enclosure, the M1-ATX power supply and Pentium M/Celeron M
Mini-ITX motherboards like the DFI G5M100-N.

For software, I'm looking at MPD. This is a audio player that is designed as a
daemon, allowing to be controlled by many different clients. Once running,
it keeps running even without clients connected. It even remembers states
across reboots. It's very easy to write your own client using whatever platform.
There's even this nice PDA client. It wouldn;t be too hard to write an MPD
client that emulates the iPod serial interface.

MPD doesn't do everything the Empeg can, but it is approaching its
capabilities. It supports WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC and AAC (even with
DRM), has crossfade, hierarchical playlists (not nested, though),
search functions and automatic gain. What is missing is cache and disk
spin control, but this could be done by a client, without changing MPD itself.

Pim