Had my Gateway fitted last week with the Ipod in the space where the cd holders were. Unfortunately we needed an extension lead which we are still waiting for. In the meantime I downloaded some mp3s onto a 1gb memory stick and am playing it with no problems through the usb port.
I am thinking, why don't I just buy a slim 80gb usb connected hard drive of ebay for about £25 and put all my music on there.
Has anyone done this and if so is it possible to organise file directories to work like play-lists or do I just have 7,500 random music tracks and no real way to sort?
Any pros or cons you have come across?
If you want to use a hard drive, you should get the power booster from Eric and BumperPlugs. It is pretty cheap, and is needed for most hard drives. You don't want to strain the power through the Dension.
I don't use usb personally, but I think the navigation is more limiting than with the iPod. You also have the trouble of copying files to it and keeping it organized, which iTunes/the iPod takes care of. Good luck!
IIRC, its done all through the ID3 tags. It will scan each and every file to read the tag contents then build a library. It may pause slightly while this happens, but only the first time you plug in.
I have now done what I threatened in my original post.
All works well and have velcro'd the hard drive on top of the Dension.
Having copied over 1,000 tracks onto the drive (created a playlist in Itunes and just then copied all to disk) the PCM reads it in 50 track folders meaning you cannot random every track, only the folder you are in.
Anyone got a way to beat this please?
So you have 50 songs per page, and after you turn page, the Random mode is set to off by itself?
Do you have the latest SW on the Gateway?
looking to put a HDD into my car with the dension GW500 also. Can you arrange the folders and create sub folders to get round this problem ? For instance create top level folders by music genre , then by artist as a sub folder then an album folder under that ? Not really interested in having an i pod and leaving it in the car, so i prefer to put all I've got onto a HDD and for the occasional update or new album play it on the Cd.
I am still playing with this
Currently I file the tracks in Genre folders but following upgrade to the latest software version it can now sort by artist and album. Quite pleased with it actually.
With tons of spare space on the disk there seems to be no reason why you equally couldnt file by playlist or anything you want.
As a matter of interest since I have done this the Dension doesnt seem to want to recognise my Ipod but I'm not sure I care any more. You need to be a bit more careful about updating the disk but other than that it works fine.
