Home > Consumer Reviews > Rockford Fosgate Omnifi DMP1-DWL12 Home/Car Wireless Digital Music System

I have a builtin 6 disc indash CD changer in my truck, but was getting tired of buying new CD and having to retire older ones to my house to make room for the new music CDs. I started looking around for a good MP3 alternative and wasn't too impressed until I saw the Omnifi. It does everything it says it is supposed to and makes for interesting conversation with your friends. All of my friends are just amazed that it connects wirelessly and updates the hard drive all by itself.

The install was easy, or so I'm told as I had it installed in under an hour.

It's relatively easy to use, though I did figure out that you should only put music on it that you intend to listen to because it does take a minute to find a specific song/artist on the headunit. The less you have, the less hunting around you do to find that song that you want to play.

I'd definitely recommend it.

I have both the car and home units.What a great product.I found an unofficial web site to upgrade the 20 gig HD to 60 gig.I now have room for over 10,000 songs in my car and the upgrade cost me about 80 bucks.You still have room for over 3000 tunes with the 20 gig drive so most people won't need to upgrade it. It's a lot cheaper than a CD changer which only gives you access to 6-10 CDs.Installation was simple.The hard drive is small and the cable coming from it long enough to install this in the back of a van or SUV.The controller has a removable faceplate thats the size of a standard DIN head unit and only about 3/8" thick.You can either use a FM modulator or if you have an auxillary input on your head unit this will plug right in via L and R RCA jacks(best method).Also if you have a factory radio with CD changer controls you can get an adapter cable to hook this up from just about any stereo shop.You do need a wireless router if you want to download music to the car while it's parked in the garage(or you can remove the hard drive from the car and download music via USB)and for the home music steamer which is a great way to access all your music files on your PC and play them on your home stereo wirelessly.There's also an ethernet input for the home unit if you want to go that route.I use WMA files instead of MP3 and I think they have better sound quality than CDs.
I had a little problem getting the wireless to work at first but all I had to do is configure my firewall(DUH).I definatly recommend this to someone that spends a lot of time in their car or needs a simple solution to play their music files on their home stereo.The software is very simple to use(that's why it's called Simple Center!!)

Overall it's a great idea for a product but it has some serious limitations.

1: Installation requires constant hot voltage, plus ignition, plus dimmer control hook in. Granted you can get this all of the back of your radio wiring harness it will still require some decent splicing.

2: Firmware updates required for all the devices to work with the wireless functions.

3: Software is incredibly cumbersome and not very intuitive. I accidentally ended up duplicating all the songs on the device.

4: Cleaning up the hard drive with thousands of songs was not easy.

5: The weekend I got mine the website was down and all the functionality of the software was dependant on registration which was offline.

6: The DMP is slow. I don't mean average slow, I mean really slow. Scrolling through songs at high speeds caused the device to hang and think about it for a minute and then it mystically jumped hundreds of songs deeper in the list.

7: Just after I got done setting everything up and running the device for 3 days, it simply erased all settings, favorites and playlists. I had to start from scratch.

8: The absolute worst part was the low temperature sensor. Anything below 32 degrees and you'll be lucky to get the hard drive powered up in your car. Absolutely impossible to function during a real northern winter.

I have been using my DMP1 in my car now for a few years. I have since upgraded both the software and the size of the HD. I can fit 1000's of mp3s on it and I could not imagine driving without this. I NEVER listen to the radio anymore because there is no need to when you have your entire music collection at your fingertips!

The software provided with the DMP1 is crappy. The GUI is clunky and very limited. The firmware would not allow seeking through songs. I managed to find an alternative open source software upgrade which allows you to be able to seek through songs. The alternative firmware is much faster - it let's you simply use windows explorer to access the HD which makes it much easier to transfer files back and forth to ANY computer with Windows installed. It allows for a simplistic and fast way to shape your music library just the way you want it.

I HIGHLY recommend this product!!

Please note: my review is written with the Omnifi DMS1 in mind, which is made for the home system rather than the car. Because my comments mostly address the idea of putting your music on harddisk, which is how the DMP1 works, I hope you will find them helpful.


Da Bomb!

Nutshell:
This technology is da bomb if you want to enjoy your CD collection at home on your stereo system. It's the next step in the evoloution of enjoying music. We had the phonograph, then the CD, and now this.

The only caveat: It's da bomb as long as it's working well. If you have trouble, then it's useless. I am currently living with the DMS1 for a short time. So far it works OK, but if I have trouble in the future I may have to report back.

Detailed review:
This is a fabulous system that will allow you to keep your entire CD collection online in your home entertainment system. It's easy enough for grandma to use, and that's important because other systems are so complicated that only a techno-geek will be able to work them.

What you do with this system is copy all of your CDs to the hard drive on your computer. Then you replace the CD player in your home entertainment center with this little Omnifi device. Then you turn the Omnifi on, and you instantly enjoy any CD in your collection. That's just getting started, but already that is worth the price of admission because you have access to all of your CDs. You don't need to search for your CDs anymore, and you don't need to find handy space to store them. You can file them away for safe keeping in your mini-storage warehouse. You just need a large hard drive and a computer that is turned on. Using this system gives you the many advantages of having your music off of the CDs and on the harddrive, yet your music is still available on an easy to use device in your home entertainment center without having to have a computer there, which is largely unworkable.

And then we go on from there to many more fab activities.

I am a musician and music lover that, as odd as it may seem to you, is just now in 2006 starting to explore the mp3 revolution. If you are like me and don't yet understand what mp3 can mean to you, I'll explain it. I never explored mp3 because I equated it with piracy, but mp3 can be used legally as well.

You use a program called a "ripper" to "rip" your CDs into files on your harddrive. The music on CD is just computer files anyway, so all "ripping" really is is "copying" the computer files from the CD to the harddrive. In the past this was for unfathomable reasons difficult for a program to do, but now we can get it done. The Simplecenter software that comes with the Omnifi can do it, as can iTunes and a host of other programs. There is a freeware program called "Exact Audio Copy" that reads the CD and gives you a 100% accurate file, and it gives you a report of any problems that it had so you can be sure, without having to listen to the file, that it made it to your harddrive without error.

At the same time you copy the CD, you encode the files to mp3. This shrinks the file by a large factor without sacrificing any meaningful sound quality and makes the files easier to manage. That way you can fit much more music onto your hard drive or your portable mp3 player, or even copy the files back to CD and get more than 74 minutes of music on a CD! Simplecenter, iTunes, and most other programs do this for you automatically.

When ripping CDs, mp3 is the way to go, you want to avoid any other format if possible. Simplecenter gives you a choice to rip to mp3 or to windows media format. iTunes and other programs give you a similar choice. Ripping to mp3 allows you to avoid having to deal with digital rights management (DRM) and allows your music to be played anywhere. iPod doesn't support Windows media, and generic mp3 players may not support Apple's AAC format, but everyone will play mp3. Ripping to any other format is helping Microsoft or whoever lock you in to their solutions, don't tolerate that! DRM gives you onerous restrictions like having to jump through hoops to transfer a license when you transfer your music from one computer to another or only allowing you to burn your music to CD a limited number of times, and other evil restrictions. mp3 avoids all of this and it's the way to go.

If you're worried about any legal restrictions on this type of activity, just think of all the mp3 players available for sale here on Amazon and that should tell you something. If you're still concerned, just punch up a few web searchs on the subject and I think you'll relax.

Don't worry about sound quality. Sound quality has never been an issue. Sound quality is an issue to people that want to sell you expensive equipment or magazine subscriptions. Your enjoyment of any music, classical or otherwise, will be the same as long as the sound quality is acceptable. That last 10% of full fidelity really doesn't matter. Do you have a $5,000 entertainment system or $3,000 speakers? If not, then it really doesn't matter. That said, this Omnifi and mp3 technology will deliver sound that is essentially equal to the CD, but it really doesn't matter. What matters is that you have your music available in ways that make it convenient to listen so that you will play your music more often. Don't listen to anyone that tells you that some proprietary format gives better fidelity than mp3. #1, it doesn't matter. #2: They are assuming the same bit rate, so if you really want to stick on this issue, just rip at a higher mp3 bit rate. The standard is to rip at 128 bits, so just rip at 160 and you're there. You can easily afford the extra space with today's prices.

This Omnifi is an alternative to a 400 disc CD changer jukebox. Those jukeboxes are not a great solution for various reasons: 1: They are huge, 2: They have a finite capacity, you may outgrow 400 slots, 3: They can damage your CDs, 4: They require hours of typing in order to set up the artist, album, and song names, 5: They can glitch and erase all those hours of typing, 6: They have limited functionality for skpping songs you don't like and random playing, 7: they are prone to mechanical failure, #8: they are slow, etc.

Using Omnifi and mp3 gives you these advantages:
+ You have your entire CD collection available in a small device

+ You can copy your music to a portable hard drive so you can take your entire collection to the office or elsewhere

+ You can easily copy your music to an mp3 player for enjoyment. iTunes is compatible with mp3, so Omnifi can even work with an iPod.

+ You can backup your music for safekeeping to DVD

+ You can use more than one Omnifi in the home so that you can enjoy your entire collection from various rooms.

+ You can delete songs you don't like so that you don't ever hear them. That's a big advantage because I usually only like a few songs, or just one, from any given CD.

+ You can shuffle play through artist or genre, which is also a big advantage. Otherwise you would have to create a custom mix CD, and that's a lot of trouble and it gets old after a few listens. This way it's always new.

+ You can buy songs from web sites like Amazon. That's a great way to pick up old favorite songs without having to buy the whole CD or music that's hard to find. Once you download them Omnifi can play them. However songs downloaded like this will often suffer from DRM.