Inexpensive Do It Yourself MP3 Players

Paul pointed us to his MP3 Player Project. Now I admit, we've seen a lot of them, but this one is basically kit oriented for the do-it-yourselfer. For as little as $140 you can get a box of parts. For a bit more, a fully assembled board. Basically, put it in a box, add RAM, IDE hard drive (up to 80 gigs!) and power it and you have your own MP3 server. Its flash rom upgradable (and based on a core that is GPLd) and just looks uber pimp. I'm really interested to see what folks do with these things. It is ready for cars or homes. All it needs is some creative juice.

Comments

Minidisc

[geoffeg]

I believe this would be a good time to plug Minidisc... Please stand by as I climb on my little soap box and starting raving and ranting..

Minidisc's have been around for years and for now, I believe them superior to portable/personal mp3 units in many ways:
1) 74 or 80 Minutes of media/music for around $2 a disc compared to around $200 for a 64 meg expansion for most mp3 players.

2) You can buy tons of blank minidiscs and record your favorite songs to them and take them on road trips and such. With most non-hard drive mp3 units you have to use a laptop or desktop system with the correct transfer software and accesss to your mp3's when you want to change the songs.

3) Most portable mini-disc units can record (digitally and analog) and playback. Want to go record that live performance of the Backdoor Boys or Britney Arguilera, take your minidisc recorder and a mic with you in your pocket.

4) Most smaller portable minidisc units are around the same size as the popular mp3 units.

5) Edit songs on the fly. Most minidisc units allow editing of the media on the disc. This includes slitting, combining, re-ordering and deleting songs.

There are of course a few down-side of minidisc compared to mp3 but since I'm preaching for minidisc, there's no way I'm going to mention those here..

Check out http://www.minidisc.org for more information..

Thank you, and have a nice day! :)