Iggy the Biker

More Information on the MP3 Player

03.30.2009 | 2:35 pm | Goldwing

Being the inquisitive person I am, I did some more rather thorough testing today so I could experiment with this unit. But before I go into that, I need to preface it with a few facts:

The OEM Honda CD player is a 6 disc player. The MP3 player connects to the OEM connector with no user modifications, and uses the existing wiring harness. You just plug it in.

Since the MP3 player is NOT a CD player, certain things will not work, because you are attempting to make the CD player do things it was not designed to do. It does not have the ability to fully emulate a CD player using folders full of MP3s.

So, certain features of the CD player will not work:

It will not shuffle or random play songs from different directories.

It won’t automatically play from one folder into the next. When it plays the last song in a folder, it starts over with the first song in the same folder.

You can put up to 99 folders, with up to 99 songs in each folder on the SD card. But, since the OEM CD changer was only designed to handle 6 discs, it gets confused and will flash “NO DISC” on the display screen if you select a 7th or greater folder. However, it plays the songs in the folder just fine.

That being said, on with my review.

I successfully tested the unit with several different SD cards, from a 512mb up to a 2gb card. I even tried a micro SD card in an adapter. All of them worked correctly. I merely copied the MP3s that I wanted to play onto my SD card using a standard card reader attached to my USB port on my computer. I opened the trunk, popped the card into the unit and cranked up the tunes.

This unit also has an AUX IN port that takes a standard 1/8 inch audio plug for plugging another music source into the bike’s audio system. It also has a USB port that accepts a USB jump drive, but I have not tested either of these features yet.

My personal thoughts so far:

If you want to keep things simple and easy to install/use this unit fills the bill. It mounts safely in the trunk (or wherever you choose) and utilizes the existing control buttons. I prefer this to an externally mounted music unit anyway since I find that I can easily get distracted by fiddling with the radio instead of watching the road.

To keep it from flashing “NO DISC”, only use 6 folders. That still gives you almost 600 songs to choose from. I have no plans to take my entire music collection with me. If I need another 600 songs, I can just stick another SD card or two in my pocket and plug them in when I stop for gas.

If you want all the functions of a full featured iPod, then get the iPod interface and you are good to go. For me, I think I prefer the ease of installation and convenience of the MP3 unit. Plus I don’t have the additional expense of having to buy an iPod for the bike. I own an 80gb iPod Classic, but I don’t want to risk damage to it by having it bouncing around on the bike.

I will try to test out the AUX input and the USB jack features in the near future.

BikeMP3.Com looks like they may be offering a BlueTooth interface soon. If I get my hands on one, I will post about it.