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Horntones Car Horn Plays MP3
Automobiles are more like computers on wheels these days and the technology you find underneath the hood now bears little resemblance to the mechanical technology that moved our cars in the last century. Gone are the carburetors that mixed the air and fuel, the distributors and rotors that managed the electrical impulses to fire the spark plugs are virtually nonexistent.
The mechanical gears and springs that made the speedometer, tachometer and other indicator gauges have vanished, replaced by computer technology that does the job a lot better by being far more accurate, visible and reliable. Heck even the car key has become a computerized device offering a lot more security as well as remote operability. Still there will always be the nostalgic yearning for the older days when you still had a chance of knowing what was going on when you popped the hood. Nowadays, you need some pretty sophisticated diagnostic equipment in order to make that determination.
Modern hybrid cars like Toyota’s Prius are literally packed with computer gear including screens that show when the driver is moving on gasoline or electrical power. My friend recently purchased one of these and I was intrigued with all of the vehicle’s computer data that you can now see on the dashboard’s video monitor not to mention watching the car’s rear-view video camera. Other cars offer GPS navigation with traffic updates as well as being able to pull up what movies are playing in which theaters complete with show times, where the cheapest gas can be purchased for the day, and then of course there’s music.
Automotive radios can lock onto satellite radio, pull in digital information to show a song’s title and artist, and even connect to your mp3 player. But I just discovered a new automotive accessory that too is designed to play mp3s but it doesn’t play them inside your car. It plays them outside your car because it’s actually your car’s horn. That’s right. Your car’s horn has now become the ultimate mp3 player and its called Horntones.
The Horntones FX-550 ($299.95) replaces your car’s horn with a three piece system. There’s the audio horn itself, a special amplifier and the control display player unit that sits inside your car. The player is the heart of the system and has 256 megabytes of flash (nonvolatile) computer memory.
It sports a backlit blue LCD display that will show you the mp3 sound that is about to play when you press any of the nine preset buttons to which you can assign an mp3 file.
Out of the box, the Horntones comes factory programmed with 27 tones divided into three preset themes. A theme lets you save a set of 9 tones per theme name. So for example, you could have an Animals theme with an elephant trumpeting, a jackass braying, a dog barking, you get the idea.
Of course, since this is an mp3 player with lots of memory, you can add other sounds too. The way this ability works is via the Internet. You surf on over to the Horntones website where you set up your own virtual player.
There you will see a replica of your Horntones player and screen. You can choose from a large library of sounds and themes or assemble the sounds you want into your own theme. You can even upload any mp3 file you have to be converted into a horn sound. To do so, you must first go to the Horntones store and purchase Tone Credits in groups of 10 for $10, 20 for $20 or 50 for $40. New tones require 1 credit each for processing. Once you have programmed your virtual player to how you want the sounds configured and assigned them to the buttons, you download the file and then offload it to any standard USB flash drive. Finally you insert the flash drive into the player’s USB port and transfer the file. You can now blast any sound to the horn as well as select any themes you may have created to switch button sound sets.
So what was once the simple horn that you pressed to get a driver’s attention has now too become a computer component and depending on the sound you choose at the moment, you’re probably going to get a lot more attention as well.
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Craig Crossman is a McClatchy-Tribune newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the nation’s longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on computers and technology, Computer America, heard on both the Business TalkRadio Network® and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network®, weeknights at 10PM Eastern time. Visit his website at http://www.computeramerica.com
Original Title: CAR HORN PLAYS MP3
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