· Can it control a CD changer, or be controlled as if it were a CD changer? (Entry last updated on February 28th, 2002)No. There's no interface of that kind on the Rio Car player. It is designed to be a complete self-contained stereo, it is not meant to emulate a CD changer, nor is it meant to control a CD changer.
First of all, CD changers all have proprietary interfaces. There's no way it could universally control all CD changers, at least not in a cost-effective way.
And why would you want it to control a CD changer anyway? It's meant to free you of the hassle of ever having to carry CDs around. Its capacity is orders of magnitude greater than any car CD changer.
If all you want is to listen to the occasional CD, then just get a cheap portable CD player that you can plug into its aux-in. Get the cheapest one you can, because it'll just gather dust in the glove compartment, trust me.
As far as controlling the player as if it were a CD changer, that's something that just isn't implemented. The empeg team has created this kind of product in the past for OEM customers, but the Rio Car player isn't one of those products.
The problem with making your MP3 collection behave like a CD changer is that the controller limits you to 99 tracks in a playlist. What if your Trance Mixes playlist is 235 tracks long? One of the advantages of the Rio Car is the way it lets you organize, search, and select your music in a variety of flexible ways. Boxing it into the CD/TRACK mentality is missing the point.
If an "MP3 Changer" is what you're really looking for, there are other products on the market which do this specific task. The Rio Car is better, though, since it doesn't box you into the CD/TRACK format.
Note: The above is only talking about a system where you want the Rio Car to control a CD changer or vice-versa. If all you want to do is connect the two devices together using line-level inputs and outputs, and you don't care about one unit controlling the other unit, then that's a whole different story. Click here or here for information on these kinds of connections.
|