I'm thinking about hooking up a usb hard drive in my car. I have a Pioneer FH-P8000BT that states it can play MP3/WMA/ACC and has a USB input. Want I am wanting to do is use a lossless codec instead of lossy. I know it wont support FLAC, so I thought the closest thing would be WMA Lossless. I use dBpoweramp to convert my CDs to WMA Lossless. Do you think the Pioneer will support the WMA Lossless?

 

If the player supports WMA, I don't see why WMA lossless wouldn't work. If you've got an external USB hard drive already, give it a shot and see if it works. Just make sure that the hard drive is low power enough to be run off of the head unit's USB power. I think Pioneer's USB ports have some insanely low power output, so you may end up having to tap a power source in the car, or use a DC/AC converter.

I encode all my stuff at 320kbit constant bit rate mp3's in stereo. Yeah it's still lossy, but it's about 1000 times better than any variable bit rate mp3 I have on my Ipod. I despise low quality music files.

 

just check how many songs it can hold... beacuse some decks can only read up to a certain amount of songs... my clarion vrx575usb was like that so i just settled for a flash drive

 

I think you need to use windows media player to do it.
Everything seems to be based on windows, and you know how they are about not wanting things to work unless you use there ****.

You could also try this program it works for me
http://www.audio2x.com/ezmp3xp/index.htm

Or try this site
http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware

 

Thanks everyone. I'll just have to try it out and see if it works. I mean its not a life and death situation. I can always convert WMA Lossless to a high quality MP3 format. I just need to get the hard drive setup equipment. I found a few different sizes of Apricorn Aegis Mini's that is suppose to run strickly of the USB bus but I don't think the drive isn't going to give that much performance. I may just have to get a DC/AC adapter and a faster hard drive with a case and do a setup that way. I think I already have a few hard drives laying around here.

 

just get a small drive and you should be fine. dont be trying to hook up a 320g hard drive and expect it to work. 80 is by far the max that "should" work.