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Well the latest gadget research was to solve the in-car music problem without having to spend hundreds on an after-market stereo or cd/mp3 changer…

I have had previous experience with FM transmitter solutions using MP3 players but it was always a less than optimal solution – with the power of the FM transmitter (and hence reception/sound quality through car radio) and battery life (in both FM transmitter and MP3 player) presenting fairly serious limitations/annoyances.

So the solution really is to:

• remove the external MP3 player (removes that battery problem),
• power the FM transmitter through the cigarette lighter (no batteries again, and a strong FM signal)
• and for a final trick – how hard would it be to build in an MP3 player that reads it MP3s off a USB memory stick?

Not that hard at all it seems – and this is the bit of kit that does it!

It’s badged as a solocar FM29 (or FM-29, or FM-29A) and looks like its manufactured by Shenzen Heywell Technology Ltd in China (surprise, surprise) and distributed by various vendors world-wide – in the UK it can be bought from Technet Online via Amazon for less than £20.

So this is not, at £18, an audiophile’s solution to music in your car. But, having said that, the sound quality is very good.

FM Transmitter

Functionally the FM transmitter seems quite strong, even for a car with a rear mounted antenna, and once you’ve found your quiet zone at whatever FM frequency – say 88.5 – you just tune the device there (and it remembers it which is a nice touch). Of course it never needs batteries… The other thing about this FM transmitter (and most these days – but do check) is it capable of being tuned to pretty well anywhere in the 87-107 FM spectrum (206 channels according to packaging). This becomes a real bonus if you, say, try to use the device in two countries – which I have done – where a fixed tuned device like the old Belkin’s had 4 channels – it worked fine in Australia but was pretty much slap in the BBC Radio 2 band in the UK, and therefore next to useless…

MP3 Player

The ‘internal’ MP3 player can play files from a USB or SD/MMC memory source – I’ve tried a 512MB MMC, and 512MB and 2GB USB memory sticks and all was well. I read that it’s ok with 4GB memory sticks too. USB’s are easy to plug in and out (especially whilst driving). I also seem to have a small (and growing) population of USB memory sticks :)

The let-down with the MP3 player (and this kind of let-down in detail often happens with otherwise excellent value ‘China built’ stuff in my experience) is it isn’t very clever re play ordering. It seems it just pulls tracks out based on the file allocation table order – however from a little testing (and thanks to D.J. Hollingworth for review at Amazon) if you move the tracks off the usb stick, order them (say on filename), and move them back – all seems to be well…

So, if you use something like MediaMonkey, say, to fill your device based on Album-Artist-Track#-Title – you sync – then using Windows explorer- move the tracks off (to C:\temp or where ever), order them, move them back to USB stick… all seems to order correctly on play…

The MP3 decoder seems happy to handle anything you chuck at it – CBR, VBR ~160 etc all seemed to work fine.

Photo: Solocar FM-29A ‘in situ’ in car …

Tips:

• Non obvious button operation is a long-press on track up/down also doubles as volume up/down (shown on my packaging).
• and a long press on play/pause/stop button also switches between ‘all sequential’ (A) play and ‘random/shuffle’ (S) play (thanks to S. Dawes review on Amazon).

External Source

This got interesting – using my iRiver S10 plugged in through the external phono connector doesn’t give quite as pleasing results as using the internal MP3 player. I think this has got to do with the extra amps and leads when using an external device and it simply seems to offer more places for radio noise to potentially creep in and spoil everything. However, it does work better than any other mp3 player/transmitter setup I’ve ever had – is more than acceptable – so if I need to use the more sophisticated ordering, playlist functionality, and the like of my iRiver at least I know I can.

Tip:

• put volume to full (21 on mine) on FM29 before you remove the usb stick and plug in the external phono connected device – as the volume control from ‘head buttons’, or remote, don’t work once FM29 is running on phono…

USB Charger

Not enough functionality for you yet at £20!? – well my friends, this is also effectively an in-car USB charger. So for me that means I can in-car USB charge my Palm T3 and my iRiver MP3 player with this device too! It wont power up an 80GB USB hard-drive (yes I did try :P), but hey…

Basically for under £20 it does what it says ‘on the tin’ and quite a few bits’n'pieces besides…

5 stars.