CTAVGUSB003 MP3 / IPOD USB interface
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... IBSA:UK:11
Normally these are around £70 so this was a bit of a bargain.I was very suprised when nobody else bid. These will work with Alpha Beta and Gamma radios.
I have a 6CD changer in the boot already but wanted to have more choice so this seemed like the best idea, Not as expensive as a Phatbox and it also has a 3.5mm jack socket so you can connect an IPOD or other audio source if you want to. Comes with everything needed to fit including the tools to extract the radio/CD.
Dead easy to fit, Downside is that you cannot have a CD player as well, I thought this would connect in place of the CD changer in the boot but it doesn't work properly there, you have to connect it directly into the back of the radio where the single CD input is.
The interface has 2 sockets, the one goes into the back of the radio, the other duplicates the socket on the back of the radio and allows the single CD player and CD changer if fitted to be powered,But they won't actually play. There is a brown ground connection as well, I connected this under the pillar that supports and locates the back of the radio.
I put the module in the glovebox just remove the 5 torx screws around the inside of the glovebox and the 2 torx screws at the bottom of the glovebox lid.
There appears to be perforations on the back of the glovebox, I used a stanley knife to join some of these up so I could make a flap that I could then get the connectors through.If I remove this at some point in the future you wouldn't be able to see where it had been cut. The connectors can then be fed into the back of the radio.
I did have some problems initially as I was trying to use a 256Mb Dell memory stick to try it out and the operation was quite erratic. After some messing about I discovered that the interface won't work properly unless it has fast memory access. I presume that is why it comes with a USB2 SD/MMC card reader.
Bought a 2GB SD card from MX2
http://www.mx2.co.uk/default.asp?part=KSD2GB
Only £10 including the postage, This is enough to get around 450 CD quality songs on. With this it works great, I would of thought a fast USB2 flash drive would work as well.
The interface requires that the memory card is formatted FAT32 not FAT something else I discovered when playing with it. And the SD card comes preformatted as FAT so the first thing to do is reformat it.
The unit only plays MP3 tracks, it seems to support all the different bit rates including VBR but that presented me with another problem in that I have loads of music on the PC but it's all WMA.
Downloaded a great program from download.com that will change WMA files to MP3's, Does this quite quickly and will do hundreds of tracks at a time.
http://www.download.com/Free-WMA-to-MP3 ... g=pdp_prod
The files are put into 6 folders on the memory card called CD01, CD02 ,CD03 UPTO CD06. You can have upto 99 files in each folder so that gives you roughly 600 tracks.
When it is playing the display looks something like this
Selecting a track on another disc is obviously a lot quicker than the CD changer and the sound quality is every bit as good as a CD.