I have an LG 120GB external hard drive. I want to know is there any way to play the MP3's on it in my car. Are there any adapters, cd players, anything that will allow me to do it short of putting a computer in my car?
There are no off the shelf products to do what you want. Not that I've ever heard of or seen. Even if your hard drive was a USB device, the appliance and your car's head unit would still need to be compatible with the file system, let alone read the fiels as mp3's and play them.
Why not just get a DVD and mp3 compatible head unit for your car? I took out the factory radio in my Jetta and upgraded to an Alpine DVA-9860 along with a 6 disk changer in the back...7 disks @ 4.7GB each of door thumping mp3's...
Your question intrigued me and I did some looking around...while I still don't know of any devices that allow for an external hard drive to be hooked up, however there are car stereo head units with built in hard drives specifically to store mp3's, like the Pioneer DEH-P90HDD or the Sony MEX-1HD...availability seems limited...at this point in time, this is prolly the closest you're gonna get to what you want...
I did it successfully. Just tonight in fact. What I done was take a normal 3.5" Hard drive in a external case. My car's stereo has a USB connector on it. But the only way you can get it to work is you have to format the hard drive to FAT32 file system. Its quick and painless and you can do it though windows or MAC. Leaving the drive in the external case makes life easier since you can just hot-swap from your computer to your car. Once formatted to FAT32, put whatever songs you want on it, have a 100 watt DC/AC inverter in your car, plug in, plug USB in, turn it on, and it should read the disk.
