Yes. Select "REC" on the lower menu after the CD loads to rip it to the HD.

 

Man, you people need to actually look at the manual for your cars sometime, there are all sorts of things the command system can do

 

you can load from the PCMCIA card to the HD if not mistaken

 

I bought mine on ebay. If you search for just "mercedes PCMCIA" you'll get a slew of results.

If i'm not mistaken (it's been ~2 years) this is the guy I bought mine from. Had no problems.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-Genuine-Original-PCMCIA-TO-SD-PC-CARD-ADAPTER-Supoort-SDHC-for-Mercedes-Benz-/251450828237?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a8ba325cd
You can't put anything on the hard drive that isn't ripped into full CD format. So each song then goes from the 5-10MB mp3 to ~40-60MB wav.

There are options to go from PCMCIA -> CF Flash, but i personally chose SDHC. Personal preference the adapters are 17-$30 then its just a matter what kind of card reader/cameras you have around the house.

The initial load time for me & my 4 foldered 3000 song collection was about 30 seconds. By the time I got down the driveway & just to the stop sign it would be working.

Of course occasionally (once per 3-4 months) it would need reseating, but that was about the frequency I would want to add new songs anyway.
HTH

 

What format the sound is stored in the hard drive?

 

MP3 I believe. Comand does not support Windows Media Format, and Raw storage would be too large (*.wav)

 

I have a 2008 CLK63 cab. Do I have a PCMCIA slot somewhere? Where might I find it?

 

I just got a pcmcia adapter
Very easy to use
Honestly between sat radio, regular radio, cd, hard drive and now pcmcia there is no shortage of music, plus the the engine sound

 

just installed 17 octo-bytes in my S class........I have all the movies in the world in every language as well as extra space for more

 

don't toy with us... i have a 20TB NAS at home that is about 3/4 full, so just realize that it is possible. that being said, it is really, really silly that the MB hard drive system is so small and can only be ripped to from optical media. I mean, c'mon. It's like 2008 already...

 

Keep in mind, many of teh restrictions on ripping music in cars comes from the various industry bodies (RIAA MPAA etc). This is why it is such a pain, as it is, copies of your own media are not legal in all countries that MB sells in, and creating different versions of the entertainment system core would be a pain.

 

pfft, Childs play :P

I have a 15 drive array with 2TB drives, 4 128GB SSD's for cache and log (ZFS) dropped into a quad quad_core E5 series Xeon server with 192GB of ram.. fear my VMWare server And funny thing is.. not a single movie or song on it... I am sad :P

Also, the weight on that server is like 150 pounds lol, carrier/server grade chassis in a rack.. hell the CPU heat sinks are like 5 pounds each.

 

I have this

 

Do you know the bite rate? It sounds a little better playing CD instead of Hard drive. The system will read SD card only in the format of MP3 and M4A (apples). No WAV.

 

Damn. I did neglect to mention that I also have a 2nd NAS as a MIRROR (even though I'm running RAID5 on both)... But they weigh WAY less than 150 lbs. That's heavy duty

 

You should switch to ZFS, provides the same protections, minus the raid5 hole and bit rot affect.

 

crap, now you got me worried about bitrot, and reading about btrfs and ATOMIC COW. Criminy. I clearly am WAY out of my depth in this area since I'm running a standard home NAS (x2) fulla music and vids. But I'll certainly look into it.

 

Sorry, did not mean to scare you.. lol, I am an IT Security Consultant.. Security (research, implementation and disaster recovery) is what I do.

It is not mission critical data, I would not worry about it. ZFS is just nice and scales well, and is not reliant on hardware. you can in theory remove all the drives, put them in a new machine in a different order, on different controllers, and your arrays and by extension files will remain intact

 

with this being said how do you feel about Chloe O'Brian?

 

I went the SD-to-PCMCIA route. The first generic one would not work, but found a Merc one for cheep on Ebay that works fine with a 32GB SD card.

 

I'm guessing even if you put a larger hdd in the mercedes COMAND a architecture probably has no idea how to comprehend and allocate that much space.

 

The command system is based on XP RT (ARM CPU based version of XP), so the limits on storage space will be whatever XP can read, and I believe it is XP FAT32 for the filesystem, so volume limits are limited to 32GB per volume. I do not believe the Comand software can read across multiple volumes, so that is your limit, Hard Drive or external Storage.

 

Thanks. It does really well with my 160GB iPod, fast search times, etc. I haven't tried any other data sources yet, but it just seems so strange that in this day and age with super inexpensive, super compact storage (micro SD cards, flash drives, etc.) that the system is so incapable of incorporating any of that. Then again, I've always wanted a much more robust storage system available in my car.

 

Keep in Mind, the ipod integration is not mounting the device as raw storage or USB Mass Storage, rather it is similar to a line out (instead of Aux out), the music is actually playing on the ipod and the sound is a digital signal.

Also, note that the comand system was built way back in the day when XP was the dominant kiost type software (there was not Windows 7, or even Vista for Kiost/ATM type devices) XP fro embedded devices has always been 32bit, since most embedded devices use 32bit hardware.

This is a hard limit, and in most cases, updates and patches cannot fix that (although for regular xp, you could use exFAT, or if you installed NTFS drivers, which are a pain in the *** and were never meant for XP), then you can increase the sie

 

Ok, NOW I know what you do for a living
computer nerd

BTW Is that english?

That looks to me, like some of the stuff I post does to others