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Do it yourself MP3 Stereo
ckotso writes "There's this guy who has created a
hi-fi-like MP3 player using an old PC case, an LCD
screen+a few keys attached to the case, a P100 and a
small HD booting linux. MP3s are read from a cd-rom,
which means 12 hours of continous music at home. I guess
it still needs work, but it seems quite good already. Now
I know what to do with that old spare midi tower."
Man I wish someone would make a kit with the lcd and all the power stuff already done. I wanna put one in my car and quick. Anyone know of any good sites related to making a mp3 car unit? I want it to have a good lcd screen and I want it to boot very quickly (what means would be needed to make it boot real fast... and would it be hard to configure) Anyway I can't wait to put one together and put a sticker on my car saying Powered by Linux!!!
NaTaS
http://natas.kfa.cx/~civ --Civilization:CTP page
All you need is a network cable to control your hifi setup. Well, the hifi manufacturers ARE trying to get everything networked together... with linux we're one step ahead.
For normal use just use the buttons, for a nice graphic session, just do it by TV or even from your main pc.
www.mp3kit.com
This sounds really cool, do you have a prc available? I had thought about using the pilot as a UI for an automotive MP3 player and was thinking about using this as a learning experience. Do you have a Palm III/V? IR would be way cool!
I've got a great MP3 box running on a Pentium 90 with 64 meg RAM. Of course, it's running NT.
I have been working with the same idea, but I am limited by my lack of knowledge. There is a winamp plugin that has i/o serial support (called serial control plugin). But I think that a palm would solve almost of the problems that keep me from doing this right in my car. If this would work and be able to see all the songs and playlists would be ideal.
Some peoples alerdy have made car version.. you can look for them at http://www.mp3.com under their hardware section.
they have ones that use harddrive, cdrom, memory etc. memory ones sorry tho like RiO player from diamond.
Hell..I do techsupport for Quantum and I got a complement about how our hardrive'sShock Protection system helped the developer who crated a MP3 player for car.. Fireball EX 12.7 he used.. 12.7 gigs!!!!!.. music for dayz!
yeah.. even the website look similar.
I'm somewhat picky about apearance with mp3 players. I got sick and tired of seeing the usal black/grey/boring/rectangular box. So I set out to build (still in progress-60% finished) a small mp3 player using standard components. So far it measures 210 x 260 x 55 approx (smaller than a notebook), using p150+ downclocked to 100Mhz, fx motherboard, bigfoot hard-drive, sb16, cd-rom, remote, 20x4 LCD(and an s3 card just to fiddle with). Also, there is no fan on board, as I am using a 150 x 200 x 25 mm heatsink to cool most of the components, using convection currents, so it is REAL quiet. I'm not talking FUD when I say the total cost to me was $100, using components nobody wanted, and some fairly good deals.
:))
Anyway I guess my point is that all the so called experts I spoke to know squat. You CAN connect a PCI cards to a PCI slot using a ribbon cable. (just use a female edge connector on one side and a male on the other). Mine measues 400mm (15.748" for the imperically anal) and it works great even up to bus rates of 66Mhz. I used 2 x ex-IDE cables and I hacked PCI and ISA slots off a fried motherboard.
Note-It is yet again NOT impossible to remove a pci slot without the use of a solder sucker or braided copper wire. It just takes patience (4 hours odd). If you are lazy, a very sharp craft knife will remove a slot in around 5 minutes, but the contacts will be short. Remember to keep all the wires exactly the same length between the ends. Also pre-solder wires to ease final assembly. Keep those end contacts SHORT! For ISA cards, 2x floppy drive cables work great too.
I reccomend NOT soldering directly onto the motherboard and PCI card, since then there is no gauranteed way of checking for short circuits between the ends of the cable ---- I learned the hard way. Remember: If your graphics card starts squeeking.... it's a bad thing.
And the point of THAT>? Well, you can re-position the cards anywhere (under, alongside, etc) and save a huge amount of space. I even have room left for my pci ethernet card
Total time per PCI extender : around 3 hours if you know what you are doing.
I do have design pix. No http site as yet. sorry!
(email: meccano22@hotmail.com)
>
I should know. I tried every trick in the book. Winamp 2.10 (or any previous version) does not like running 128 / 44 samples without skipping. I tried some 123 port in DOS, and it still skips. Maybe, just maybe if u overclock it slightly it might work. If you are thinking of using windoze, p75 is the minimum.
Linux is another story. Maybe dx4-100 is the minimum
I had problems with skips until I got an old winamp which let you load the whole song into memory before playing. I think this just works
for network streaming in the later versions.
This would take care of slow CD's and HD problems.
Anyway when the memory broke and I was down to 8 mb the windows swapping made it skip one second into every song.
I'm sure linux can do it better, you were damned if you tried to do anything else while playing.
Patrik, now using a portable PII instead.
A pentium all-in-one card together with the lcd it's made for, linux loaded into flash and a big HD.
I'm just waiting for someone to put together the parts and make a good linux installation, and you'll have the perfect system.
What I'm reffering to is a system like the famed matchbox-on-internet. The sound output would of course be toughest and recuire a PCMCIA port.
Anyone with information about suitable hardware?
Patrik
On my Pentium Pro 200, top says all x11amp threads combined are taking up like 3% CPU. When I had my processor over clocked to 233, I recall it being something like 2.5%. Its'a pretty decent optimization.
When I went to the HCC Dagen in Utrecht, The Netherlands in 1997 The Linux Usersgroup had such a thing already, built on a 486 board, which was built into an old sony cd-player. ther replaced the cd mechanism with a cdrom drive, and replaced the lcd screen. It looked great
There might be... if you are the geeky type... you'll own an Hp48g or gx hand held calculator.. It should not be too much of a mission writing Software to get them to talk via IR (Ive got a friend who's done as much) and carry out a few basic commands. The LCD display on the HP is more than adequte for up to 7 x 30 charachters, and has more than enough buttons to carry out mostly any commands.
Picture a High performance IR amplifier module, and you can pretty much run any song from an ugly machine from anywhere in the room, and get all the id3 tag info from the Hp display. I'm sure it's just as easy via any other handheld/palmtop/ir-able device.
That still does'nt solve the problem for normal people however... You would have to forgo the id3 tag info and go for a 3 digit lcd display, and rely on a typed sheet of all the songs on the CD.
OR include a pseudo randomiser button on the front panel to randomise after selecting a particular album, or just randomise the whole lot.
Forgot my @#%@#$% password
meccano22@hotmail.com
I found the things I thought about.
They are called PC/104 cards and they
have about everything, but are pretty
expensive.
An old motherboard would probably be better
Here's another page with the same LCD panel
http://www.hccomp.com/~paulb/cajun/
Check out http://www.eklektix.com/dat-heads.
I understand MP3 being used as a convienient audio distribution medium; you can sit at your machine munching snacky cakes and chugging Mountain Dew while bopping along to the newest Mariah Carey single. It's immediate, it's right there on your computer, and relatively cheap.
Now folks are attempting to intergrate MP3 players into a traditional Hi-Fi setup, which just stuns me. I think mainstream culture was dragged down quite far enough by the pathetic audio reproduction of traditional CDs, with their damn laughable 16 bit/44.1 KHz "superior digital sound," but now MP3, which is just frightening in its "quality," are starting to become more prevalent.
I make my living as a recording engineer, and everytime I listen to MP3s it makes me wonder why I've bothered investing so much of my life into making audio sound good. To hear things I've recorded squashed down into this infuriating lossy compression hell of a format makes me want to shoot myself. It's like the difference between a JPEG and a TIFF image, and it's a damn shame that "consumers" are willing to accept shitty audio to have convienence.
MP3 sucks the life out of recorded audio. Just listen to, say, an MP3 of John Coltrane vs. the new vinyl reissue. Or check out the new Low album on vinyl, which used nary a bit of digital processing anywhere in the chain. That, my friends, is what defines sound quality, not this convienent bullshit known as MP3s.
Slashdot readers go to such pains to have a certain level of Quality in their computer systems, but it would seem they couldn't give two shits about decent audio.
And much louder. Far superior to yours.
-->I really cannot see why MP3 is such a big deal. Sure you can down load it and it doesn't take up much space on a hard drive/CD-Rom, but this doesn't change that fact that it sucks.
Mp3's are a big deal because one simply reason: THEY ARE CHEAP or better FREE!!!! I love cd's but I can't buy 5 cd's everyday but I can download them for free even if it's piracy because music industry takes too much for a damn cd so f*** them and let's pirate everything!
And I have a awesome sound system and I not the difference... But for normal listening while studying and so on they R0ck!
cHEERS...
You are a recoding engineer, and thus have a ear for audio (the audiophile syndrom, its a curse :) anyway, all the "normal" (non audiophile) people i know that just listen to music to have something playing, mp3 (with a good encoder) sounds fine, but some songs just puke out on mp3. Ignorance is bliss. You go back to your adats and studio moniters and leave us fools to our crappy mp3.
:)
(ps. I also am working on a car mp3 player, just found a pentium 150 laying in my room, have to do something with it
Try empeg.com for an mp3 car stereo.. great for those long trips when you can't afford cd's =)
(but then of course.. we've all *BOUGHT* the cd beforehand, havent we? *stares down the barrel of the FBI officers Glock 17*)
Conect the VGA to a VGA-NTSC converter, or us a video card with NTSC / S-Video out and connect it to your TV? That's whatI did, and I got one of those RF keyboard/mouse combo's to go with it. No solderin required. Play MP3's and surf.
*please send all flames to /dev/null. This device references M$, viewer discretion is advised*
How about grabbing a DOS based MP3 player, load MSCDEX in the autoexec, write a small program (started by the autoexec) to run your interface (input is from stdin remember? send data to LPT1 for the display. Cinch) and parse the CD to see if it is MP3 or *gasp* CDDA, or even MOD,S3M,it, etc. (if your into old school tunes) and go from there? We could squeeze the whole thing into a 1 meg boot EEPROM, with less boot time, and maybe just a little less memory needed? Linux kicks tail, but DOS could have a bit better use in small non-multitasking appliances like this one.
A similar project, posted in a Slashdot discussion a while back. It has some interesting notes about running Linux in RAM only, so it can be shut down like any other stereo component.
hey,
if you compile mpg123 w/ the 3DNow! optimizations you only get about 4~7% cpu utilization.
i wonder if x11amp has the same optimization stuff in it.
henri
Posted by Someone@Somewhere.earth:
Have you checked www.empeg.com ?
Their working on it....
Looks like a really nice concept (the player). And I applaude his efforts,I may build something similar one day. I have enough old 'puters lying about the place.
See subject for webpage comment. I suspect I am not the only one w/o a 30" monitor.
#941
I've got an old P133 that would be more than enough hardware to make something like this. However, I'm sure that if I tried to do it myself I'd destroy it. Also, I wouldn't want to spend the money for better speakers, let alone an LCD display.
Nah, might as well just play mp3's in the background on my K6/300. Gotta hate losing that 10% of CPU or whatever, darn.
Now if only I had a CD-burner...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What were you using to play it? I know that a friend of mine had pretty good luck with a 486/133. :)
.mp3's that was just on slashdot... :)
Personally, I'd use mpg123, as optimized as possible, and start out playing mp3's downsampled to 22Khz, mono. If that works, start changing command-line parameters, and see what it supports.
(However, it sounds like that computer might be a good candidate for that hardware decoder board for
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Nope, I can't, my machine really is a K6/300, not a K6-2/300. :)
:)
(I bought it just before the K6-2's came out. But that's okay, if I wanted a new chip, I'd want, say, an overclocked Celeron, a K6-3 or a K7, or something nifty. But I don't. My K6/300 is more than enough horsepower for me right now, except for testing VMWare. But then, I don't really have much use for Windows, so that doesn't count.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't know how accurate their CPU usage reporting is... I've used more CPU under NT by moving the mouse. (try it, it's fun! :)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I have a 486DX2/50 in my bedroom playing mp3s for me. Running the precompiled binary of mpg123, with the flags -z2m. It plays 128kbps fine but I have the bitrate at 64kbps (my ears aren't exactly sensitive)...
On an unrelated note, anyone know what would make klogd become a runaway process? I have to kill it because it keeps my load average at 1.00...
Last I heard, desktop computer CD-ROM drives were not designed to handle the vibrations experienced in a moving vehicle. It'd be interesting to know how well the one on this device works in motion, and how long it lasts.
I agree with you. The idea of a hi-fi component which takes a minute to boot (and several if it hasn't been shut down properly) seems rather inelegant and cumbersome; the fact that you can have it hosting log-ins and cracking RSA in the background doesn't quite make up for that.
A DOS-alike could be useful; Isn't DR-DOS semi-freely available? Also, there may be a free implementation of DOS out there. Or possibly, if one was to go commercial, one could licence a RTOS, like OS/9 or QNX.
Alternately, it may be possible to cut Linux down into a lighter OS. Possibly a Linux kernel minus unneeded drivers, modified to boot from the Flash BIOS space of a motherboard, and leaving out all but necessary processes. If you eliminate read-write filesystems, you can bypass the fsck problem as well.
I think most DAT drives can't do this. Some company sells a special DAT drive which can suck audio off DATs as well as reading/writing data; it comes with Macintosh software and is marketed at audio professionals.
Of course, I could be wrong.
As for ADAT, isn't that an entirely different format, storing multitrack audio on expensive VHS tapes?
But still it wouldn't power up instantly. Linux would still take maybe 10 seconds to boot.
Then again, even with DOS there's the BIOS self-test time, which is unacceptable for a shelf hi-fi component. For such a device to be anything other than a geek curio, you'd have to replace the BIOS, possibly ROMming Linux or some similar OS.
There was a discussion yesterday on the autoLinux mailing list about in-home MP3 players.
One of the things we discussed on there was building lower-cost ($200-$300) units using embedded biscuit PC's with slow 486 processors and external decoders (for sound quality), and essentially sticking the linux kernel configured to boot via NFS into the flash.
No harddrive, and keep the MP3's and software on the network. A lot of us have pretty big networks at home, seems a good way to keep all the MP3's together, and use them from multiple locations.
You could also fit it in a much smaller case. One of the people on the list mentioned those PC-on-a-SIMM devices as a possible host.
I'll probably make the .prc (as well as the Perl script that it interfaces too on the Linux side) available once it actually does something more useful than what it does now, but unfortunately my time is split between quite a few things lately so it's not progressing as fast as I would have hoped.
To answer the other reply here, this is not a plugin to Winamp, though I suppose such a thing would be possible (I've experimented a little with using IBM's Viavoice to control Winamp via a program that takes advantage of Winamp's published API). I've found it's much much easier to do this in Linux because you really don't need a monitor, whereas with Windows it's nearly impossible to check up on what's going on w/o a monitor. On the Linux side you can throw a net card in the box and telenet in (if you're doing development) or even port the console to the serial port (perhaps the one you're not using to control MP3s with) and use your Pilot to check up on what's happening.
I've done something similar, but I use my PalmPilot (via a serial link to the Linux box) to act as the controller. The principle is that most of the time you're not changing what's playing, so it's not too much of a pain to use the Pilot as needed. Right now I just have stop/pause/skip, etc, and it plays the whole disk randomly otherwise. However, I plan to add the ability to select albums (each dir can be an album for instance).
I brought this to a party and connected it to a stereo and we had music for the whole night off 1 CD...it truely is cool.
I have a similiar project here
Digital optical outputs, and can play from just about any medium. There are actually a lot of these projects around the web.
How much would someone pay for one of these? I can make aluminum cases like this one (mind you JUST the case) for about $225. (lots of labor involved) but I don't think people would pay that.
With a little tweaking on behalf of WinAmp, I was able to get a 66 able to play (without any kind of visualization) without skips. Playing off a burned CD was miserable cause it was a real old cdrom, but locally stored files played fine. Set it up as a player for my little sister...
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
ph33r the effect:
Do NOT post this on the front-page of slashdot
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
Grab a window and shake it really fast and sometimes you can get CPU usage up to 100% (especially Photoshop 5 with a large image loaded)
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
The German computer magazine c't will have a description, board layout etc. of a hardware mp3 decoder that hooks up to the parallel port in their next issue. They claim it works with 80286 and even XTs. Sorry, don't have more info yet.
If people are paying ~$120 for the LCD why not buy a PalmPilot? The original one and not the Professional either. That should cost about the same but now you have a bitch'n touch screen for I/O and does it can do more. IMHO
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Works fine - connected to Yamaha receiver (Dolby Pro-Logic, five speaker system) and Medium-size TV (52cm). Also connected to a modem, allows internet browsing on the TV.
A P75 is just enough play 128k MP3s using "K-jofol" - don't expect to be doing anything else at the same time.
Quite old now.
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
He said that he didn't solder the 9 keys in :-)
because he needed to be able to plug a standard
keyboard into it to perform upgrades.
I'm guessing that's where the floppy might be used.
And anyway, why not?
A floppy drive is only about $10 to $20 and it'd probably come in handy for those 1 min. songs you want to play every once-in-a-while.
~enucite~
Check out Advantech's biscuit PC's. They've got one that takes a socket 7 CPU and has on-board ethernet, sound, IDE, video, everything. It runs somewhere around 600 bucks, but it's a 5.25" form factor and runs off a standard hard-drive power connector (only needs +5 and +12 volts). It's what I was gonna use in my project, but that's more than I wanna spend... BTW, on that page, I'm including most of the plans to do something like this. I haven't gotten it done yet, but hopefully I will this weekend...
Sounds like what I was trying to do with my old 486/66 DX2... but the only thing I could play without skipping was 24Kb/s MP3s... forget 128. I wonder if a P100 is necessary, or if a 75 or 90 would do. Any thoughts?
Conor
Programmer, Consultant, Geek, CTYer.
Yea, Linux stripped down and booted into single-user mode is pretty lightweight, perhaps U can use VFAT file system instead of ext2fs ? I've never tried it but i'm sure its possible.
If you strip it down far enough U could boot from floppy disk/Flash, and use CD for storage, and completly eradicate the Hard Disk.
Other options ? Has anyone tried ELKS (and is it up to the job ?)
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
Put in a LS-120 and it could be used for upgrades and uploading new tuned to the HD...
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
I'll build one out, throw Apache on it, write a CGI interface to the player and put it on my network downstairs. Then the world can come and see what is on my playlist and decide what I should listen to next 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
/. my MP3 home stereo equipment. That would be a first.
Just think, I could log peoples selections and see just how bad everyone's taste actually is.
I'll send a story in once its done and you can all
I know that the latest versions of winamp for Windows claim to be able to play without skipping at 128Kb/s on a 486 DX4/100.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
I've got a friend here with a similar project in the works. Linux on a 1.2 gig scsi hd with a floppy & cdrom plus an lcd. He's making it specifically for the car so he's getting the case custom made (out of clear plexiglass - iMac envy I think). A lot of the stuff is from shows so it's all pretty cheap.
As far as the linux boot speed issue raised above, our solution is to custom compile a kernel with only basic services and network (he's planning on an ethernet hookup to transfer mp3's) and mount the disk read only. I expect it'll come up pretty quick, and with the disk as RO, you can shut it off hard without any waiting for the OS to shut down nice.
That's the plan anyway. I'll have to see if I can talk him into making plans available once the final scematics are drawn up...
I'm doing the same thing, with more emphasis on look. If I'm going to spend $100 on an LCD, the machine must look spiffy. Heck, the LCD I bought ($120) cost more than the machine I'm using (including graphics card, network card, processor, power supply, shell, and memory). So, my plan is to juice up an old 70's 8-trak/Hifi shell by putting a pentium w/a large hard drive inside of it. My biggest problem now is that I have over 200 CD's and it's hard to keep them all in one place when I'm listening to them in the car, at work, at home, and in the gym. Storing them all on one machine would solve that.
I'm using a small keypad interface to the LCD, and I'm going to have three modes of selecting MP3's : Random mode, Scroll-to-Select mode, and a search mode that will act like one of those telephone answering systems where you search for someone's extension by entering the corresponding digits of their last name. I should be well on my way after this weekend - I have most of the code written in Perl. I used the POSIX module instead of the C code that came along with the LCD that everyone seems to be using.
The biggest challenge I see is finding the perfect 70's Hifi/8 trak shell for this machine - look is very important (I'll be using this thing at parties) and I want a non-computer user to be able to use it easily. My objective is to create the most powerful 8-trak machine in the universe. No one else will be able to play 200 CD's worth of MP3 off of their 8-trak. The geek factor of this is great too - I'll be able to telnet to my stereo!
i have a old P 90 compaq server for my home stereo, with like 16Mb ram. works great no skips at 160bit rate. i think you might be able to get away with the 486/66 if you stream mp3's to it... dont know, although that does give me a project now...
End Transmission....
My Town Car mounted Compaq Proliant started life as a 486/66 - with and old 83 mhz Pentium Overdrive chip it plays 320 Kbps encoded MP3 with no trouble at all. I have been using the CAJUN software (http://cajun.current.nu) for several months now with excellent results.
Jake
The Steampunk Workshop
Actually, playing audio on an old Creative CD-ROM drive mounted in the trunk works pretty well. It take the deepest of New England pot holes to cause the slightest skip. I expect that playing MP3s from the CD would work equally well, if not better, depending on the buffing. I still have 2 gig free on the hard drive so it's not an issue.
Plug for Paul B's car audio juke box that got me started: http://cajun.current.nu
Jake.
The Steampunk Workshop
I like... but whats with the floppy?
Lycestra
yes! i finally get to be smart for once!
ADAT actually comes in two different formats. The Alesis version stores 8 tracks of audio at varying bitdepth/rates on SVHS tapes. The Tascam format uses Hi8mm videotapes. From what I can tell, the more film/video people use Tascam more and the strictly music people use Alesis.
i have a friend that's a producer who has a whole stack of the Alesis ADATs and a BRC (Big Remote Control, i assume it stands for) that looks like something out of Star Trek(*). pretty rad with the lights out and all the lights flashing along to the music.
so, anyway, you aren't going to be able to play ADAT format music on a normal dat deck of any variety. DAT Hi8mm (**)
cygnus
"i feel like a quote out of context."
* i abhor star trek, to the point of yelling at the top of my lungs and lunging for the remote whenever it comes on. just wanted to get that off of my chest.
** BASIC rules!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
... a recording engineer and slashdotter who uses 'Low' as an audio quality reference. amazing. wouldn't have pictured that. (btw: low is good.)
i can see why 44.1 was a slight compromise even at the time cd's were recorded (should have been 48 kHz, but past 24 kHz you get from it aren't you reproducing stuff only your dog can hear?) and maybe 16 bit is sort of laughable now (esp. with those 'DSP' circuits in components that are supposed to enhance the sound but sound like a cheesy-ass digital eq averaging bits to the nearest power of 2). and the concept of some mathematical codec being able to decide what i can and can't perceive is almost facist. but the point of mp3 isn't really to be as 'digital' as a professionally-mastered digital recording. think of them as tapes. and as an engineer, these people aren't paying you diddley when they pirate your music, so aren't you glad they aren't appreciating the painstaking effort you put into making every instrument jump out of the mix and lick you. let them screw themselves.
cygnus
"i feel like a quote out of context."
Just raise the taxes on crack.
mp3.com has had a list of this sort of technology up for ages. I'm building one myself (who isn't? :) ), but I'm buggered if I'm spending that much on an LCD display. There must be a cheaper way of doing it that involves too much hardware spannering.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
I use winamp 2.10 on a NT machine with a P2-350, and it uses less than 1% CPU here... playing shoutcast streams all day long... Can't really say it's a CPU-eater...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Thank you. Finaly some one with some sense. Although I can not lay claim to having any kind of proffesional qualifications, I'm not deaf.
I really cannot see why MP3 is such a big deal. Sure you can down load it and it doesn't take up much space on a hard drive/CD-Rom, but this doesn't change that fact that it sucks.
Have any of you people who are talking about plugging an MP3 player into your Hi-Fi ever heard good music? Have you ever listened to a good quality vinyl (or even CD) system? Probably not. Because if you had there would be no way you would settle for MP3.
Well one `good' thing about MP3 is that anybody out there wanting to start a band and cut a record isn't going to have to bother about expensive things like recording studios and mixing and stuff. All you need is to gather around a simple tape deck, press record and off you go. Then releas it as MP3 and no one will hear the difference.
I want basically a head unit that has a massive HD, fast cd that I can rip music off of and play standard audio cd's, Digital am/fm tuner, network card for mp3 streaming and cdba, analog and digital inputs and a complete digital amp w/ that. So if you want you can hook up your record player and tape decks....
"The pen is mighter than the sword... But what if you can't write?"
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Fortanty LP's have a problem with dust and the media resolution is not the greatest. MP3 are near CD resolution, but there is some loss-ness to them, but they still damned good IHO. I think you can say MP3's resolution is a little bit better than something recorded on a metal tape using DBX noise reduction.
"The pen is mighter than the sword... But what if you can't write?"
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
You can mount the linux drive RO, and never need to fsck. Problem solved with bad shutdowns.
drop 32 megs of ram in the system. Do everything in memory.
Single use computers could benefit from the flexibility of Linux easily. Just recompile without all of the unecessary services.
Lowmag.net
I believe this device is supposed to stay in the home, not in your car. But yeah..unless your CD-ROM drive has electronic shock protection (like on those discmen), I wouldn't think it could stand the vibrations and jarring from driving on the road.
This is great! I think I'm going to steal your idea and set up a server like this. Also, implement an upload through apache or ftp so people can add mp3s to the available list of songs. Then broadcast it on internet as well as feed it though the speakers so I can listen to some tunes with thousands of my closest friends :-)
lunaslide
"I'm not really interested in product. I just want to know what's going on." -Misha Mahowald
I'm not a guru with electronics, so i decided just to use a TV-out capable gfx-card, place the minitower computer in a small closet near the TV, controlling it via an infrared mouse+keyboard(mainly). ..
:)
I've placed the DVD-kit and a tv-out voodoo1 card in it too
The main problem with this setup, and with all the other solutions on these pages so far:
NOISE!
harddrive+
ordinary cdrom (makes a lot more speed-noise than an ordinary cd-player)
+ the fan
I'm so annoyed with it that I have just ordered a stand-alone dvd player
Which in fact is a cheap-ass one too:
http://www.kissnordic.dk/msiepage.html
One final note:
I thought that I would be using the computer for playing mp3's as well, but since the setup was ready I have only used it a few times.
The point is that I like to have control with my mysic-playing, and therefore still uses my main computer (attached to the stereo) for mp3-playing.
I'll say that you have to make some serious considerations before building a stand-alone mp3-player.
just my 2 cents.
Jakob
-- A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Hmmm . . . I think the idea is that a lot of music can be stored in a small amount of space. People want it to be portable. As an aside, not many people understand my love of LP walkmen, but then I am 6'4"; the 200 watt amp and the 15" drivers don't look too out of place. Then there's the Honda generator on the skateboard dragging behind me . . .
People also want it to have a reproducible sound, i.e. its going to sound the same each time. Granted, I can tell the difference 'twixt a new vinyl album and an MP3, but it's not really that distracting, except to someone such as yourself who makes his living at this. In that clean room environment the LP should sound superb, but otherwise [POP!] [Crackle!] [ZZZZIP!] In that clean room environment [Crackle!] [POP!] the LP should sound great, but otherwise [POP!] [Crackle!] [ZZZZIP!] . . .
See my point? Relax. Don't take it personally.
The party's over
Fair call.
:) )....
:)
But, does a French chef not sometimes stoop to letting his wife cook sometimes or eating ? etc
I LOVE music, have a reasonable ear, played in a band for many years (albeit a mediocre one), nearly cried when Led Zep, Jimi etc came out on CD 'cause it did sound crap...
Now, I work from home programming. I have a nice components setup in the loungeroom, but realistically can't have it loud enough to hear it continuously in my office (sounds crap through walls anyway), don't want to move it into my office ('cause it's nice to kick back in the loungeroom), don't want to buy a whole new system, hate having to walk backward and forward changing CD's to the loungeroom (I have tried it
So, having a dirty great HD full of whatever I want to "listen" to anywhere accross my network without having to get up, walk to the loungeroom for every CD change, and all of the other things above, is kind of cool.
It is nice to hear someone stand up for what they love though
Just my AU$0.02 worth...
I'm acctually working on a project that's quite similar. I've got a p90 under the passenger seat in my car, playing mp3s. The p90 plays any quality I've tested (up to 192kbps) just fine, with a bit of room to spare. I'm hooking up an LCD as well (www.matrix-orbital.com) and an IR remote control like a TV remote. I tried a 486 DX2-66, but it doesn't play 128kbps without downsampling. I'm using mpg123 to play, and it's got an old one speed caddy-loading cdrom. I also managed to find room to cram an old 512K Trident video card, and a PCI network card in there. It's running a *very* stripped down "distro" of linux... no /sbin/init... runs a bash script instead. =) If anyone wants more info, send me a line and I'de be happy to reply.
Derek Lewis
Derek Lewis
(remove the spam-free to email me)
set up shout/icecast, let people find you with MP3Spy, broadcast to them and share your music with the world.
If you haven't (and you probably wouldn't if you don't look out a Window) seen it MP3Spy is the coolest piece of software ever.(my new siguote)
Especially now that I found a Phish channel all else is bliss.
+&x
The floppy enables the sneakernet for those really short songs.
I have a P75 running Windows (hey... it was free)
and dedicated to running winamp... plays full
bitrate mp3s with no problems.
anyone know if a P-60 or P-66 can do it?
-j
That sounds pretty cool. I gotta get one of those.
"I don't like this deep shit about crazy crap"
If your motherboard is fairly new, you can just burn yourself a bootable CD - I burnt one with a teeny bit of dos + a dos mp3 player, and it's great. Just switch the pooter on, and drop it in before the thing gets past its memory check. It was a bit fiddly setting up the generic cd-rom drivers ,and figuring out just exactly which drive letter the cd-rom got (not the boot image, that turns into a virtual floppy, but the actual mp3's) , but I had a bit of a poke around with a win98 (gasp! shock! ack!) cd, and it was no big deal.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Ah, the voice of a purist! Lets think about things here :
:-)
The average person's "Hi-Fi" isn't
The average person doesn't *really* care too much about quality (to some extent) , they just want music. (oh , and generally LOUD music please)
So does the average person , who just wants music whilst partying / reading / doing the housework / driving their car care? Probably not.
Yes, mp3's mangle the sound a fair bit.
I am willing to trade off the loss of fidelity, for the simple fact that you can jam (and 'jam' is probably the most approprate word) 12 hours on music onto a single C.D. No, it's not *perfect* music. The AM radio in my car is also woeful , but I still listen to it - and mp3's tend to sound a lot better than ol' AM.
Nothing in my "hi-fi" system comes anywhere near perfect, the listening conditions are nowhere near perfect, and lets not forget my poor old industrially-deaf ears. Why go to extreme lengths to get the most accurate reproduction , when most people sadly don't even notice.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I found mention of a group developing at Linux based car stereo for MP3s. It was portable, and could be removed from the car for stand-alone play or to attach to your home PC for downloading to the internal HD. The URL was www.empeg.com but as of today, I couldn't connect to it. Looked like these guys were almost ready to go to market a month ago when I checked.
-- When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.
definately, i agree... its not that i couldnt do it myself, because i am going to try to make something this summer, but if there were kits around i could get my hands on one after i screwed up my own system, therefore makeing my recovery from disaster alot less stressful. :) does anyone have any other kool web-sites that deal with this topic? if so leave a comment!
> ERROR: IEXPLORE caused an invalid page fault in module MSCONV97.DLL at 0137:01212d19. Stack dumped:
An engineering friend of mine has wired a similar setup into the trunk of his car. Custom power supply, lcd monitor and keypad on the visor and a 3Gb disk. This does indeed seem to be the
perfect home for servicable-but-retired components.
oh come on. . . you hook it into your existing stereo.
ahh!
excuse me, i just comtemplating living without bass, and i think my heart stopped.
man, everyone should have good speakers.
or should just live anywhere near us; we live in a dorm, and you can hear our speakers for several blocks when we crank them =)
gotta love the 12" sub under the couch.