EDIT: Title changed to reflect end of sale and ongoing install/operation/tweaks discussion...

Hi all. I recently wrote up my S2000 OmniFi install HERE.

It's an MP3/WMA media streamer, kind of like an iPod for your car PLUS one for your house.

The company from which I got my bundle, WOOT, is selling the same bundle for the same price, $205 shipped, no tax for most people. The catch? Only until they sell out (which could be any moment) or until Midnight Central Time tonight, when they will switch to a new deal.

This bundle includes both the OmniFi DMS1 package for home, and an OmniFi DMP1 for the car AND two WiFi adapters. It's really an unbelieveable deal.

I am not affiliated with anybody or anything here, just a very satisfied customer who loves his new gadgets!

This is great for anybody with a digital music collection, and even better if you have some PC infrastructure already (a home wireless network, and maybe an old PC you can leave running somewhere in the basement as a server--I use an old AMD Duron 850 MHz box and it's fine.)

-You run an application on your PC called SimpleCenter (other UPnP streamers will also work with this hardware.) SimpleCenter catalogs your music and makes it available to the DMS1 and DMP1.

-The home streamer DMS1 is essentially a wireless bridge between your PC and your home stereo.

-The car DMP1 is a little different. It is a 20 GB ejectable hard drive that gets hidden in your car, with a DIN-sized faceplate to control/select music. See my install for pics. You need an INPUT available for your head unit. One of the cool things about this is it will automatically SYNC with the PC when you park in range of your wireless LAN, making your S2000/garage the coolest docking combo on the planet. (You can set it to sync at 3 am if you wish...)



For reference: Crutchfield has the Home streamer DMS1 on CLEARANCE for $130 (without the wireless, for which they charge $40 ?????!) and the Car Streamer for $250 without wireless ($40). So Crutchfield's total price for the woot.com package is $460.

The single Crutchfield home review/rating is half valid, and I think all true. The guy was frustrated that "The Clash" came up under "T" instead of "C". Okay... The simple solution there is to use a simple utility to re-tag your songs the way you want them. I had one instance where the home version froze when I was scrolling, but no problem at all after updating the firmware. Also WEP wireless worked onlyafter updating firmware. I think the Crutchfield mobile reviews are more glowing. My mobile version works FLAWLESSLY and I love having a few thousand songs in my S2000...I just need to upgrade the hard drive because 20 GB isn't enough for me!

The last time woot had this deal, many speculators bought the limit (3 of them) and tried to sell them on eBay. The eBay market was flooded and many sellers broke even or even lost money. So that may be a second chance if you miss the deal today, look for brand new packages on eBay.


Anyway, I'm posting this because I love my setup both at home and in the car. There are support and modification sites available and I will be happy to add links if anybody needs them.

Woot.com is reputable and reasonalbly fast, but you are buying this without many guarantees from them. They like to get stuff in and ship it out, and pass support off to the manufacturer. (I think they will refund for defective returns).

 

Active Yahoo Group for OmniFi:

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/omnifi/



Unofficial Mods, including swap to larger hard drive:

http://members.cox.net/techfire/omnifi/start.html

 

Alright - ordered one. Primarily to port my MP3 collection from the office to the HiFi. Mobile kit looks cool though.

 

Got one too......sounded like too good of a deal to pass up.

 

Bummer, missed it.

 

[QUOTE=ruexp67,Apr 13 2005, 09:46 AM]Bummer, missed it.

 

Thanks for the tips. I did see your post about them on eBay (and I have seen the shipping tricks.)

This would be interesting for people with more than one car too.

 

Got my Omnifi WOOT package today. Hooked up the home unit this evening in about 30 minutes and can now stream all my MP3's to the home stereo.

It works really well with the exception of not having a lot of control of how the software imports your media and builds the playlists. Guess I will have to go back and reorganize everything and re-import it.

Only small issue I had was with my WEP setup. The wireless device would not connect until I disabled WEP. Once it connected I was able to enable it again and set the WEP code into the DMS1

Very cool indeed

 

I'm glad you got it working okay.

I have the same issue with SimpleCenter. My collection is nearing 8000 tracks and it becomes difficult to organize music for easiest access. Initially when I loaded everything into SimpleCenter, tracks would be separated into different albums because of simple things like capitalization differences like "to" vs. "To." That would make two separate albums.

So it took some cleaning up of tags. Right now I find the easiest seek method to be the Album/Artist mode because it at least takes me "in" an extra layer.

One thing I have read about and I intend to do is to add custom Genres and utilize the existing ones better, just to parse out the music a little more.

I think most digital audio devices have the same challenges, even my fiance's iPod. The OmniFi interface won't change (much) so the biggest impact we will have on music accessibility is by reorganizing the file database.

I manually add music to SimpleCenter now after getting some duplicated entries and such. No watchfolders for me.

By the way if you have more than 10,000 tracks in your collection, there is a modification you will need to break the 10K barrier. It is available at the Yahoo group. I haven't done any of those unofficial "upgrades" yet, but there are clearly some smart programmers over there working on different improvements.

EDIT: I should say I use a program called Tag & Rename for maintaining tags. It is also good for re-organizing folders/subfolders and, as its name implies, renaming tracks.

 

I thought the IPOD software was not that great either and I had a number of firewire sync issues and .

My wife has a Creative Zen. The software that came with it is great. You can force genre, album, artist, etc... by the actual folder names.

I guess I will have to clean up the folder names for starters.