[dfxm12]

The UI for these things isn't good to use while driving. Music players with big storage have pretty poor ways to find what you're looking for even with a decent sized screen + keyboard (like youtube music on your phone or an ipod touch), let alone just a few buttons (like I had on my MP3 CD player or what this seems to have).

Even if you have a passenger running the device, you fall victim to them not knowing your music, not knowing how to find something, general decision paralysis, etc. I think some of these problems exist with satellite radio and terrible console UIs today.

I get it from a curiosity stand point, can I do this? And it is fun just to see if you can. As it turns out, it's not very practical compared to alternatives though.

[V99]

The product that came from this project (Empeg/Rio Car) was/is actually quite nice and well thought out for navigating while driving and minimal looking at the screen. Physical buttons and a rotary encoder with detents so you know exactly how far you moved when scrolling slowly.

You quickly learned the button sequence for the operations you used a lot to be able to do them without looking at all. For picking actual music everything was a set of nested playlists/folders. The structure of them was up to you to define in the desktop app, which could make things that are the result of a search of ID3 data or pull off the first letter of the artist or whatever you want depending on how much music you have and how you like to play it.

You load something into the active play queue and then can modify that by prepend/appending more without losing the rest. "Wendy" filters to dynamically disable content that a certain passenger doesn't like when you say they're in the car (Wendy was the girlfriend of one of the developers, I think). A LOT more flexible than most players today. So... also probably way too complicated for normal people today, but super powerful and customizable.

There were only a few thousand built, and a lot of them are still in use today. Few modern cars have a DIN slot anymore, but the community has built some elaborate ways to keep using these by separating out the display/controls and mount just them in the cabin, integrating with car bluetooth controls invented long after Rio went bankrupt, etc.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

> not very practical compared to alternatives

Compared to alternatives today but in 1998 there wasn't much experience in this space. So it was very much worth experimenting at the time.

[dfxm12]

No, compared to the alternatives back then as well, like a cd, a tape, the radio, etc. These things have simple controls that you don't need to take your eyes off the road to operate, if you needed to.

[rconti]

Actually, the empeg had features that still don't exist on other players to this day.

I could shuffle my entire music library, then if I heard a song I liked, i could hit a single button to "unshuffle" around that artist (playing their songs in order) or around that album, or whatever, for example.