To summarize before I begin: home audio is constantly evolving and at a rather rapid clip. While once it may have seemed odd to hook up a computer to your home stereo. among my friends at least it's expected. Why isn't car audio nearly as cool?

I had a long talk with one of my oldest friends (literally...happy 30th. Mark!) tonight and got to talking about portable audio. what the iPod got "right" and nobody else did. and ultimately into "why can't I do this with my car."

I want to be able to pull my car into my garage at night and have the onboard audio system sync with my home media server. I want my car stereo to work as simply as my iPod and be as intelligent as one too. Car stereo makers are still full of themselves over being able to read CD-TEXT info off a CD. That's practically ancient!

C'mon. guys. let's join the digital revolution already! Start putting onboard storage (or at least SD/CF card readers) in the car and read those MP3/WMA/AAC files for not only the music. but the ID3 info as well. Let me listen to my digital music without ripping to CD format first.

I can get a whole lot more music in the car when it's not stored on a silver platter. cripes. I have a 1GB Lexar flash drive on my keychain - you can read off that too!

Is it too much to ask to get your car stereo to be a bit more useful?

stay tuned for the second part of this rant - how General Motors crippled what could have been an awesome entertainment system in my Saab 9-3. Just think of what could have been possible with the fiber optic bus if the software in the "brains" of the unit were done properly and the "supporting staff" of one more box to do the SD/CF/Flash interface existed. *sigh* Halfway there...too bad ColdFusion can't come to the rescue for this one :-)