I've recorded quite a few albums to the HDD. I have random play selected, but it seems to play a lot of songs among 6 or so albums and rarely pull songs from other albums.

Anyone experience this?

 

I was not aware you could do radomplay withthe HDD. I knew you could play by artist or song alphabetically. How do you do random?

 

its an option in the menu - random for an album or random across all tracks

 

Then it has to use some form of random number generator to sellect songs. Each song will have a number associated with it and when the RNG pulls up that number that song is played. My Rotel isc changer at hoe uses that theory and many times it will play several songs from 1 CD before moving one - why, I have no idea.

Thank you for pointing out the all songs randomly.

 

yeah - figured it was random number generator. My guess is that it uses the same starting value and the random generator isn't so random. In first 50 songs played, I hear virtually the sames ones on every trip and I have well over 300 songs on the HD.

I've worked with random generators before and consecutive numbers is not uncommon, but as I said the sequences I see are not so random in the car

 

Do you mind if I ask you an unrelated question?

Why do you use the HDD instead of an iPod as the "HDD," considering the difference in audio quality?

In my first RLX, I used the HDD a little bit, but ended up clearing it out and just using the iPod because the difference in bit rate was too obvious.

 

What bit rate do you get off the iPod?
I save to HDD using the "high quality" setting. Not as high as I'd like for the Krell stereo. I talked to Krell and they weren't involved in the selection of the reader.

 

I have varied tastes in music. There's all kinds of things on my iPod, so I settled for 160 AAC VBR.

That's sounding better than 320 MP3, if that's a comparison that's relevant to you, and I can't get the HDD to sound that good even when the sound was taken from a very high quality disc.

Apple Lossless sounds better with *some* kinds of music, like if you're into Russian or Greek liturgical music. However...you're not going to be able to get many files on any device other than those big old fashioned iPods with huge amounts of space.

I just use an iPod Nano, so I'm not going to go for Lossless.

 

Interesting - I did a comparison of all the compression formats as well as FM HD and XM a while back and will have to review my notes. XM was by far the worst.
How does the iPod connect?

What about connecting a big usb drive?

 

USB drive is not a terribly good solution, because the RLX system does not know how to interpret the music info, and it just shows up as folders. An old iPod or unused iPhone is much better. Plug it into the USB connector in the center console, and all the music metadata shows up on the upper screen for selection. Even the album art!

 

What fsmith said! :-)

You're right about XM. It's just so...convenient. And you want CNN, BBC and other odd things sometimes.

And of course...there's no worry about reception when you're traveling.

You're also right about the quality of HD Radio. I was surprised. But I can't find much that I like on broadcast radio!

 

thats interesting. I'm not much of an Apple guy so don't have that.
I've wondered why the HDD just doesn't function as an iPOD.

so the iPOD does the music reading/decompression and sends it to pre-amps?

 

Essentially. The iPod prepares the metadata in a known format and the car's head unit knows how to read it. A USB drive and an HDD are just hard drives, with no special music/metadata formatting.

 

But the head unit does not read the music from the iPod - correct. It receives decoded music and runs it through the amp

Whereas, USB, head unit must decode music

Am I understanding correctly?

 

That sounds logical, but I have now hit my limit of knowledge about this, which is made up of my testing different sources in my RLX, and is not grounded in theory. Someone else might know.

 

ok, not an apple guy here
I've got hundreds of CDs - can I put them on an iPod. Don't want to buy everything again thru itunes

 

Yes. But you have to convert the CDs, one at a time, using a computer and the iTunes application, into an iPod-compatible format (such as MP3) that the iTunes application will then copy to the iPod. Takes two or three minutes per CD. Easy to do while using your computer for something else, but takes a while if you have a lot of CDs. You can set the quality of the resulting iPod files to be better quality than MP3 if you want, at the cost of larger file sizes. Is that the info you are looking for?

 

yes - thanks