Pandora Hd Enclosure Add-on

[CandidStan]

It would have been awesome if the Pandora had screw mounting holes for a laptop drive.

 

[chris_merris]

the sound quality of the Pandora itself can come into question.

QUOTE

- headphone output up to 150mW/channel into 16 ohms, 99dB SNR (up to 24 bit/48KHz)




I am not acquainted with what numbers are good for sound - but I'm assuming these stats are good?

If the audio quality of the onboard chip was bad - maybe there is a miniature usb audio interface with better sound...

 

[chris_merris]

If you're that concerned about music quality, why would you even consider using the Pandora for playback? It'll never even approach the quality of a dedicated music center; it's a friggin' iPod, forgossakes.

So either buy a portable drive and plug it into something that can play back your flacs, or recode your music for playback on the Pandora, where you won't even hear the difference between flac and mp3.

What is out there with comparable size and better sound quality?

 

[gruso]

Pandora's sound looks like it's going to be really good quality. It will probably do your lossless formats more justice than your average portable device, as long as you remember that it is just a portable device, and will never compete with a home audiophile system or a pair of studio monitors.

A few of us have thrown around the idea of using it for professional(ish) audio, for these purposes a USB sound card would be needed. But for headphone / home stereo listening, I'm sure Pandora's onboard sound & headphone out will more than meet your needs.

 

[chris_merris]

This is possible with a skin case that is modified to also hold the hard drive. Since the size is almost like the ds, we can start looking at some of the skin cases for the ds. Also, does anyone know if they make very short usb cables and ones that don't stick out that much? Would work great for this mod.

Awesome idea - I'm going to check this out - Thanks for the idea.

Pandora's sound looks like it's going to be really good quality. It will probably do your lossless formats more justice than your average portable device, as long as you remember that it is just a portable device, and will never compete with a home audiophile system or a pair of studio monitors.

A few of us have thrown around the idea of using it for professional(ish) audio, for these purposes a USB sound card would be needed. But for headphone / home stereo listening, I'm sure Pandora's onboard sound & headphone out will more than meet your needs.

Awesome - I'm more excited than before now that you tell me that.

I am also into music production. It would be great to have a portable multi-track recorder as well - possibly with some soft-synths as well. It seems like with the limited ram, however, it might be easy to overload it. It would be so awesome to be able to hook my M-Audio O2, though.

 

[mindlord]

This is possible with a skin case that is modified to also hold the hard drive. Since the size is almost like the ds, we can start looking at some of the skin cases for the ds. Also, does anyone know if they make very short usb cables and ones that don't stick out that much? Would work great for this mod.

I've been looking everywhere for a USB cable like this:

So that the plastic of the USB A male connector sits almost flush with two flanges sticking out for gripping, just like a molex for power on the old 12V power cables on the inside of computers (for older IDE harddrives and CD drives). With a flat ribbon cable about 1-3 inches long with a mini-USB B male connector on the other end (just like the one that will fits the GP2X's USB slave port) made the same way with a flanged connector for easy gripping.

Actually, any configuration of USB connectors would be useful here, but every time I've encounterd a useful application it's always been a USB A male to mini-USB B male that I've needed. But I can think of a few places where a A male to A male connector would come in handy too.

These simply don't exist, and I don't understand why! This configuration seems to be a logical evolution in USB cables, but it hasn't happened yet. I would love to have a few connectors like this one for a half-dozen applications besides the Pandora.

 

[Arrowofdarkness]

well the duct tape mod would be in the spirit of the pandora

 

[javaJake]

An alternative method is to load your music on MediaMaster, and then develop a client for it using the recently released developer API. They said themselves that they don't re-encode anything, so you get your music in all its glory when you listen. The whole thing is free right now.

(The main website is down due to some power outages upstream, but they're working on that, and they continually update the community on their progress.)

Edit: And this is an "alternative" method for a reason: it won't be the easiest method to get your music on the Pandora, for several good reasons.

 

[Micket]

I dunno about the math in this thread.
You average 400MiB per CD? First you had 300, then you said 400, but even at 400 you'll be reaching 160 GiB, not 320GiB.
And, do you really need to have ALL 400 CD's loaded at the same time?
Sounds like this would be doable with a few big SD-cards, i bet 32GiB cards will pretty much be the standard soon.

 

[ashdjones]

Don't forget, you can zip the files if they're uncompressed.

 

[Orkie]

Don't forget, you can zip the files if they're uncompressed.

They would be compressed, just 'losslessly'

 

[chris_merris]

I dunno about the math in this thread.
You average 400MiB per CD? First you had 300, then you said 400, but even at 400 you'll be reaching 160 GiB, not 320GiB.
And, do you really need to have ALL 400 CD's loaded at the same time?
Sounds like this would be doable with a few big SD-cards, i bet 32GiB cards will pretty much be the standard soon.

All I know is I have somewhere in between 300 and 400 - it's been a while since I counted - and it will be 400 or more within the next year or two. And there is no such thing as an 80 gig SD card... hence, still a need for a hard drive.

I knew when I posted this thread that people would just tell me to compress my music and use SD cards, as if I don't know what's best for me - can't you see it's all a matter of opinion? Yes, I do really need to have them all loaded at the same time, as much as I "need" anything else on the pandora. I don't "need" playstation emulation, but I would like it, and it's part of the reason I'll be buying a pandora. I don't "need" a touch screen - but I would like one. I don't really even "need" a pandora. You get what I mean?

And I'm okay with some added size. If I can get over 5 times the storage for half the price, with everything on one drive, and only add a little bulk to the machine - then I will do it. I didn't post this thread to ask if that was a good idea - I posted it to see if it was feasible, and how we could go about it.

There are also more reasons to have a large hd than just music. Movies, for one, are close to a gig a piece (usually 700mb) - at least the ones I've been downloading - and I don't plan on re-compressing, because it's time consuming, and unlike most other devices, Pandora will be able to play most formats thrown at it. PSX roms aren't going to be very small either.

If there were such a device as an add-on hd, I think you'd be surprised how many people would be interested. You might not consider their uses for it "valid" - but that's all a matter of opinion.

 

[trooper]

I dunno about the math in this thread.
You average 400MiB per CD? First you had 300, then you said 400, but even at 400 you'll be reaching 160 GiB, not 320GiB.
And, do you really need to have ALL 400 CD's loaded at the same time?
Sounds like this would be doable with a few big SD-cards, i bet 32GiB cards will pretty much be the standard soon.

All I know is I have somewhere in between 300 and 400 - it's been a while since I counted - and it will be 400 or more within the next year or two. And there is no such thing as an 80 gig SD card... hence, still a need for a hard drive.
</Snip/>


Wow, Someone step on your toes ?, Anyway, As you say "but that's all a matter of opinion." Which the posts above were their`s.

Anyway, Just buy the biggest 2.5 inch hard drive, Bung it in an enclosure, And velcro it to the base of the Pandora. Get the shortest usb mini cable you can find, And hopefully the Pandora has enough grunt via the usb host port to power said hard drive, If so job done.

Trooper

 

[mindlord]

It's a fairly well known fact that physical hard-drives suck the power. What you're asking is completely possible, but if you plan on watching video or listening to music directly from the HD I strongly suggest getting an enclosure that is self powered, preferably with it's own rechargeable battery. Such enclosures exists, and aren't too much more expensive. Yes, I know it adds bulk, but I think you might be disappointed if the Pandora's battery can't hold up to pushing a HD enclosure while performing some cpu intensive Video decoding. Especially high cpu formats like h.264.

If you aren't going the rechargable route you might still want to invest in a big SD card and just plug in the HD long enough to copy a movie or some music over then unplug it (This is my plan).