Pioneer Z1?

Had a chance to play around with a Z1 yesterday and frankly I don't know. If anyone knows a work around to some of these issues post it. We have a fleet of trucks that were looking at putting these into. 1. The music license issue on loading up the hard drive was something no one was happy with. It copys Cd's at about 2 speed. We figured an average CD with 8-12 songs on it would take about 25 mintutes to copy on to the drive. If you want to load the 10gigs on the free drive space, well send out for pizza and I mean a lot of Pizza because your going to be there for a week of sundays. This particular unit did not have the Ipod interface connected yet. So does anyone know if you can connect a fully loaded Ipod and copy the music onto the hardrive of the Z1. (licensed Itunes) Itunes has a license agreement with Ipod that your not suppose to be able to do this, but as many of you know there is a work around to this all over the net to load your Ipod tunes onto your PC and then move them around. We tried some MP3 discs and the unit would not copy those over either. Again the license issue. Frankly this is a huge issue with this unit. One of our associates we spoke with installed two of these units last week and both customers came back p.o.'d that the unit was basically limited in use due to the license restrictions. Oh, and if you think thats protecting the music industry guess again. Many of the very first run CD's when they first came out in the mid 80's did not have digital license incoding on them. They can't be copied. People, and I know there few and far between that are music experts, that have the ability to convert vinyl pressings, (records) to Cd's can't copy them over either. 2. The Nav Gyro work around. PM me if anyone figured this one out yet. 3. Although its new anyone talked to their Pioneer rep about how much abuse the Hard Drive can take. For example in 4x4 trucks, commercial work trucks, etc.... Hard drives fail and I am curious as to what they are saying there drive will handle. Oh, and on subject of drives. A one year warranty is worthless if its a standard drive. At least Seagate gives a five year on all there drives, and who makes the Pioneer drive, anyone no that or can find out? It looks as if its a simple swap out drive, yet it does not have the ability to be copied. Would have been nice if they provided USB support so that one could plug a lap top into it to copy the drive info or for that matter upload from a laptop to it. Those are the questions for the moment. All talk to a few more of my associates and see what they have to add. Thanks ahead.

For the record, the AVIC-Z1 records at a 4x speed.

12Volt_Rep wrote: For the record, the AVIC-Z1 records at a 4x speed.

Well thats what we thought but it averaged at around 2x.

what controls are you limited to while driving? i still cante decide if i want to spen the extra 6-700 for it compared to the d1.There are 10 types of people in the world, ones that understand binary and ones that dont.

Looking back at the first post...

• "1. The music license issue on loading up the hard drive was something no one was happy with."

I don't know if iTunes is doing something special when it burns my playlists for me, but so far I've been able to rip every CD-R to the Z1's library. These are NOT disk images of commercial CD's. Rather, I take plain old DRM-free MP3's , stuff them in a playlist in iTunes, burn the playlist to Audio CD, stuff that in the Z1, and it automatically starts recording. If I make a playlist of an actual album it's even able to list the song names from GraceNote. I know, this is directly in conflict with what the instructions say, but low and behold, it works.

• "It copies Cd's at about 2 speed."

I disagree. I've noticed that 70 minutes worth of music copies over in about 15 minutes. This is a little OVER 4x. Still, this could differ for everyone as things like media and read errors come into play.

• can you connect a fully loaded Ipod and copy the music onto the hardrive of the Z1. (licensed Itunes)

No. The iPod interface does NOT mount the iPod in drive mode and therefore does NOT play the music directly. This is a good thing because it means you do not need to authorize it to play M4P audio – it plays directly from the already authorized iPod and is piped to the speakers. The down side here is that, since it's not actually processing or seeing the music files, the Z1 cannot copy them to the HDD. On a side note, it's interesting how the iPod connects to the Z1. Even though it's not mounted, the iPod is able to pony up ID3 and playlist/genra/etc data. I'm guessing it's requested through some sort of serial interface, hence the slowness in using the Pioneer iPod adaptor.

• Many of the very first run CD's when they first came out in the mid 80's did not have digital license encoding on them. They can't be copied.

Maybe you should try ripping them into iTunes and then burning them back to CD from iTunes? Like I said, I've personally loaded three CD-r's into the library that were burned from iTunes.   People, and I know there few and far between that are music experts, that have the ability to convert vinyl pressings, (records) to Cd's can't copy them over either.

• The Nav Gyro work around?

Posting safety feature bypass instructions is not allowed on the12volt as operating a system with the video enabled while driving is both unsafe and illegal.