[Android General] mdwbeex:
I bought an HTC Incredible from a friend for 40 bucks with the express purpose of converting it to a dedicated GPS and MP3 player for the car.

While this seems a simple enough task, there were a few hurdles to jump through to make it happen.

Process steps:

1. Root the phone and install CyanogenMod 7.2 (instructions easily available elsewhere on XDA - unlock the bootloader at HTCDev first to make things easy)

2. Download CoPilot Live from the market - this gives you GPS capability without the need for a data connection, then download the US Map

3. Download PlayerPro from market - configure it the way you want.

4. Put the phone in Airplane Mode and enable GPS. Turn on Wi-Fi when required. If anyone knows of a good way to completely remove the phone without breaking it, I'm all ears - I tried renaming telephone_provider.apk and phone.apk, but that just caused an error loop that required a battery pull and reflash of the ROM to correct.

If you run into static or distortion in the playback (I did, and almost ditched the idea altogether because of it) try these steps:

1. Download and install CDex

2. Download and install MP3Gain

3. Copy contents of music folder to a desktop folder

4. Open MP3Gain and drag all of the music from the SDcard to your desktop folder. Delete music files from SDcard. (best to make another copy of folder so you can keep originals in case something goes wrong)

5. Delete all files from the PlayerPro folder except "Stats", ".nomedia" and "playerpro.pro"

6. Turn off USB connection and ON THE PHONE go to PlayerPro>menu button>Music Library>Refresh mediastore

7. Select All and pull all of the music from the folder into the MP3Gain window.

8. Select all in the window and choose analysis>track analysis from the menu bar.

9. You'll see that some of the files are highlighted red, these are clipped files. Leave the gain at default (89.0) and select all again (may not be required, but I did it anyway) then hit Modify Gain>apply track gain from the menu bar. You'll see that the "Y's" in the clipping column disappear, and the volume and track gain values drop to @89.0 and 0, respectively.

10. Close MP3Gain

Now...

1. Open CDex and go to Options>Settings:

a. General>Directories & Files:Set to somewhere easy to find.

b. Encoding>Encoders: Under Encoder options set Bitrate Min and Max to 128kbps

c. Encoding>Tags: if you're doing one album from the same artist, go ahead and fill all this in and set a picture. if not, skip it.

2. Drag all modified files into the window.

3. Choose "Encode" from the popup window

3. Reconnect phone re-enable USB connection

4. When files are finished, go to the output folder and copy over the MP3 Files to your music folder on device.

5. Disconnect USB and refresh playerpro mediastore again.

NOTE: If you have multiple artists and want to tag it all so it looks better, use MP3Tag to get all the information in quickly and easily. Good source for album art is Wikipedia... Just be sure to go to playerpro>menu>Look and Feel> and check "Prefer ID3 artwork" to use your own pictures.

You may have a quicker solution, but this went pretty fast and it got rid of all the static and hissing noises during playback in the car through the headphone port to stereo connection.

As mentioned before - if anyone has a tip for safely removing the phone functions, I'd appreciate it.