I was just reading one of the columns in the back of the 4/00 Roundel, which is the BMW Car Club of America magazine. The column was a rant about how BMW stereos are uniformly horrible, despite all sorts of "premium" options. In particular, the guy was complaining about UI issues and BMWs penchant for cassette players in the dash and 6-disc changers in the trunk, ranting in particular about the inconvenience of trunk mounted changers. One of the suggestions to BMW was interesting:

"Buy up a controlling interest in empeg.com, a U.K. outfit doing hard-disk-based MP3 players that can hold several hunderd CDs in a unit the size of a single-DIN in-dash receiver (www.empeg.com). That could be mounted in the trunk. To make such a device work well, you'd need some expertise with PCs and with MP3 files. But if any automaker's owners fit the profile, it's BMW's. For non-technical owners, BMW dealers could subcontract the work out to a good stereo store, or to the service manager's PC-savvy sixteen-year-old son. The owner would bring in the 250 CDs he wants ripped, providing both the source and the proof he or she owns the music. (Rip is techno-speak for converting from one format to another. It stands for raster image process, a term used by the graphics industry to describe creation of a printing plate or laser printer image. Despite what one might think, it's unrelated to rip off.) Empeg.com is one British company that knows what it's doing, has an energetic workforce, has no decaying factories, and is unlikely to break BMW's bank."

Hmmm. So he's thinking outside the box, anyway. Aside from the dig at Rover, and the really creative derivation of rip, he makes an interesting point.

It seems like a commercially viable built-in MP3 player would have some interesting issues; the empeg car's target market is a little more technologically savvy than the average BMW owner.

One thought that could be interesting (and probably covered a million times here already) would be a CD changer that simply "remembered" (ripped and spooled to disk) every CD it saw. You could load up 6 CDs, listen to them in realtime, and the system could be ripping and compressing in background.

-Zandr