| I installed the Insignia IN-MP101 car stereo this weekend (background info). Why is that a big deal? The stereo plays both MP3CDs and has a USB port to play MP3s from a flash drive. Being the geek that I am, that's a big deal. I won't go into the details of the install - if you have ever installed a car stereo before, this was nothing special, though my 1997 Suzuki Sidekick does have some weird grounding issues. This is the third stereo I have easily fit into a car with no dash modification when everything I read online said it would not fit. The IN-MP101 fits fine in my Sidekick - I just had to swap the positions of the tray and the stereo in my dash. | |||||||||
| So, let's get right to it - how does it work? Does it do everything it says it does? Am I happy with it? Read on.... | |||||||||
| Once installed, I threw in a bunch of my MP3 CDs (and I do have a bunch), and it played every one with no problems at all. I have MP3 CDs of MANY different brands though the ones I most like to use are the Verbatim Digital Vinyl CDRs that I just think are cool. It just cracks me up to be putting in CDs that look like a 45 record...oops...digression......where was I? Oh yeah...most of my MP3 CDs have about 150 songs on them and when I put an MP3 CD into the IN-MP101 it takes on average about 7 seconds to scan the CD and begin playing the first track. My old Jensen MP3310 took about 10 seconds so this seems very acceptable to me. | |||||||||
Navigation is a
major issue when you are trying to navigate a CD with 150+ songs. My
old Jensen had UP/DOWN dir buttons and it also had keys 0-9 to enter in
a track directly. The Insignia IN-MP101 has UP/DOWN dir buttons also
but only *appears* to have buttons 1-6. Turns out some other buttons
serve as the missing numbers.  (Click on image for an
interactive description of the buttons)
The 8 and 9 buttons are just to the right of 1-6, so my first thought was "where is 7?"....it turns out it is all the way on the bottom left side, and the 0 is on the upper left side. Could they not come up with a better number layout than that? I think I will end up just using 1-6 and 8 and 9 and just not worry about 7 or 0. If I want to go to track 67 I'll just key in 66 and hit NEXT. The IN-MP101 also has a way to search for songs by typing in some info about the song, but the procedure is so complicated, there is no way I will ever use it. |
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| The other option for navigation should be the included credit card remote it came with, but it is a horrible remote. Since I understood how the head unit worked, it should be trivial to use the remote, right? Wrong. For some reason, the designers decided to keep the same screwed up method of selecting tracks. The remote doesn't have a 0-9 keypad as you would expect but again has 1-6 and the other numbers are on other buttons as secondary functions. On top of that, you can't just type in numbers, you have to hit a key (the AMS key) on the remote to begin entering the track number. How asinine. Even if it did work well, it uses a button watch battery which would get expensive to keep replacing....not to mention the chances that I would break the remote or lose it is probably pretty high. I wonder if I can get a cheap universal remote (which can take rechargeable batteries) to work with it? Hmmm....maybe I'll try that at a later date. | |||||||||
| One of the things I like about the IN-MP101 is that it displays the number of the track on the CD ("MP3 Track 043") when it first starts playing a track. My old player would display the number of the directory the file was in and the number within the dir ("04-07" - which could actually be, say...track 43 on the CD) - this would make it very difficult to figure out what track number to key in directly. | |||||||||
| When playing MP3s, you can choose for it to display the Filename, Track Name, Artist, Album, Year, or Comments from the id3 tags. I don't think I will ever use the album, year, or comment display - I never make sure those tags are filled out anyway. How many times have I listened to a song and said "I wonder when this song came out"? Never. The default display is the filename which is pretty good if you have your files named with Artist-Trackname. I tag all of my MP3s with both v1 and v2 tags (using The Godfather) and it reads and displays them correctly. I did a test to see which version of tags it reads and it looks like it will read and use whichever one is present. I made an MP3 with just id3v1, another with just id3v2, and another with both and it displayed correctly in all cases. The scrolling of the display is FAST - much faster than the Jensen - but not too fast. It pauses after it scrolls through the entire display, so you end up seeing the beginning of the display more often than the rest of it. | |||||||||
| On a side note, one thing that is a MUST for me is to use MACCC to make nice CD covers for all of my MP3 CDs. The best feature of MACCC is the ability to number the tracks so you know what track number to type in to go directly to a song. DISCLAIMER: I wrote MACCC, so I'm biased. | |||||||||
| The manual indicates it is very liberal with the MP3 CDs it will play by saying it will play CDRs recorded in ISO9660 level 1 or level 2 format, or Joliet or Romeo formats. All my MP3 CDs are ISO9660 so I can't vouch for the player's ability to play the other types. | |||||||||
| Besides the MP3 CDs, the other feature I was most interested in is the USB port for playing off of flash drives. This makes listening to podcasts so much easier since I just throw them on my USB drive and play them in the car stereo then I delete them off the drive (from a PC) when I am done listening to them. I have a 1GB Lexar Jumpdrive and it seems to work very well with it. When you insert a USB drive, it immediately switches to USB mode and starts scanning for MP3s. This seems to take a little longer than I like - I keep getting worried it's "stuck" or something. I tested it with my USB drive with 90 MP3s and it took almost 30 seconds to scan them all and start playing the first track. That seems a bit much, but I'm impatient. Navigation is done the same way as with the MP3 CDs. One negative about the USB port is that the port has one of those crappy rubber USB "caps" on it that is barely attached (it "hinges"). I can tell will come off quickly and get lost. In fact, when I tried the stereo out in the store, the cap was missing from the demo unit already. | |||||||||
The manual says the IN-MP101 will only play off
of 1GB or smaller Windows-compatible USB drives:
I can confirm that it won't play mono MP3s. It wouldn't play the latest episode of Earthcore. It doesn't handle it very gracefully though. The first time it just skipped it, which was fine, but the second time I put the file 3 times on the drive - one of them so it came up first. The stereo just never stopped scanning - I waited for about two minutes and gave up. |
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| Another minor quibble is the manual...it is some horribly translated English. It gets the point across, but it's rough (and funny sometimes). For example: | |||||||||
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| Am I to believe it could accidentally erase
my CDRs? I don't think so. One feature I really like and didn't even realized I missed is the volume knob. My old stereo had arrows you had to keep pressing to raise and lower the volume. This one has a knob - I can turn it way up or way down with a flick of the fingers. I forgot how nice that is. |
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| The IN-MP101 also has RCA AUX inputs on the back and I've hooked up a headphone jack to that so I can easily hookup ANY other MP3 player or audio device (iPod) to the IN-MP101 and have it play through the car stereo. If you buy ANY car stereo, this one or some other, you have GOT to make sure it has AUX inputs. As a side project, I need to wire up a nice looking input jack in my dash somewhere. | |||||||||
| Another feature it has that is interesting but will never be used by me is the ability to record off of the radio, a CD, or the AUX input to a USB drive in WMA format. Interesting idea, but not something I can see myself ever using. | |||||||||
| As for sound quality, I am probably not the best person in the world to comment on the sound quality. I am not an audiophile. I'm just an average geek that likes music. I have never owned an expensive stereo in the car or in the home (cause I'm a cheapass) and if I did I'm not so sure I could tell the difference. Also, my Sidekick is notorious for being an *extremely* loud car. Really loud...to the point of people installing padding in the floorboards to keep out the road noise. Having said that, I think the stereo sounds great. It is plenty loud to hear over the car noise and I can hear it just fine when I drive with my top down (not MY top - the convertible top, you perv) and it sounds good to my untrained ears. It does have some EQ modes to adjust the sound (pop, rock, classic and flat modes) but I just turned on the LOUD feature and left it at that. | |||||||||
| So, am I happy with it? Would I recommend it? Yes and yes. You can't beat it for $100 (though I paid $20 extra for the Best Buy insurance - just in case). It plays MP3 CDs, has a USB port to play off of flash drives, and has an AUX inputs, so it should take care of all of my car audio needs for quite a while. The hardcore open-source geek would probably say "But it doesn't play Ogg Vorbis!", but for me, I don't care. I don't use OGG, I use MP3. | |||||||||
| If there are any items I missed that you want me to
cover, or if you want to give me any feedback, you can email me at feedback@myvogonpoetry.com
or just leave a comment on the blog post. UPDATE: Lots more good discussion/info on the blog post - be sure and check that out too! UPDATE2: The stereo does have a few quirks. If you have an MP3 on your USB drive that it doesn't like (I haven't completely figured out what makes it do this), it will sometimes just skip those files, but sometimes it hangs and won't play ANY files off the drive. The solution is to get rid of the offending MP3s (by taking the drive to a computer and deleting them), then it will work as advertised. This doesn't happen much since most of my MP3s are in the right bitrate range, but when it does happen it's quite aggravating. |
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| Brian http://myvogonpoetry.com |