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Music Media

Inexpensive Do It Yourself MP3 Players 172

Posted by CmdrTaco from the if-you-feel-like-doing-some-hacking dept.
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.
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Inexpensive Do It Yourself MP3 Players

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  • From the: C'mon-now,-this-is-just-cool! dept.

    Add to this the fact you're once again rubbing your money in our face, and I'm wondering if you won't rename Slashdot 'News for nouveau riches. Stuff that costs a leg' soon.

    I think you're missing the point. The point is not for /. to be touting some new product to gain the $$ of their readers (like they get commissions or something) but to show you the newest, coolest in geek. Yeah, the Rio costs $99. $140 + extras is probably still not cheap. (unless you have the parts laying around) Granted. But the point is that you, the independent, educated consumer, now has yet another choice in how your music is delivered to you. And by hell, if you want to build the darn thing yourself, get out your soldering iron!

    It's like a kernel. Sure, it's less time to just use the default that comes with your distro. Or, if you like, download and recompile one. Or write your own. Or rewrite it. It's more the attitude that you can, not so much that you must or should. It's just dang cool to say, "Hey, look: an MP3 player board. Instructions on how to make it. It takes standard computer parts (amazing in itself). WOO!" Nothing less than exciting about that. Three cheers for geeks and all they do.

    Keep tinkering, boys. You make the world fun.

  • Here is the real reason this item made the news..

    based on a core that is GPLd

    Now I'm suprised no one yet has asked if it can run Linux. Hoe about getting 20 of these and run a Beowolf cluster?

  • Amd just as important is that Rob has co-opted a word that has awful connotations. A pimp is _not_ a good thing. Pimps are users and abuseres. While hacks may be bitchen, radical, rakish or totally gear (gear fab gear fab) they cannot be pimp! A pimp is a despicable thing and we should not seek to cop pimp style. Don't go there.
  • I intend to do something similar. The reason for me to choose integrated is that pci-cards sticking out will prevent it from fitting in any decent (flat) case.

    ----------------------------------------------
  • Search for those 90-degree slot adapters so you can plug in your sound card and have it lay flat, parallel to the motherboard... I'm going to pick one up for my project, but I can't find the link to the site I found that was selling them at the moment. You could use Google, just as easily as I could, but I'm sure I'm lazier than you, sooo... I'll search later, and you can search now if you feel like it. *grin*
  • Q. Will the Genica player read CD-RW discs?
    A. No the unit will not read CD-RW.

    They probably mean it only plays MP3 CD-RW's, not music CD-RW's, but it's still odd.
    No, it probably means it doesn't read CD-RW's. It's probably one of the cheaper laser set-ups they have in low-end laptops. Those machines won't read a CD-RW disc burned in standard CD-R format (without multisesssion even) simply because of the characteristics of the substrate used. (One obvious clue: The color is different.) I recall the Adaptec driver for Windows to read CD-RW's in standard CD-ROM drives said the drive needed to be multiread compatible. It's the same reason your old CD player can't read your CD-R's and my in-dash CD player can't read music CD's burned onto a CD-RW disc.

    (Good thing I hit preview... I was typing 'disk' instead of 'disc'...ick. It's too early to be awake...)
  • 1) its not compatible with standard cd players. you need a special player. you also do with mp3, but if you're preaching recordable media then cdr has it all over minidisc. and the cdr blanks are ultra cheap these days and can be found anywhere.
    1. The CD-R is not re-recordable. MD is.
    2. You can't fit a CD-R in your pocket to tape shows. Ever seen a pocket-sized CD-R with a mic and a portable power supply? me niether. If you're going to bring a deck, you might as well bring DAT.
    3) the minidisc format never really caught on here in the US. it will die in 5 yrs or less, I predict.

    You predict? Well, that's nice. Do you have any evidence, or are you just a seer?

    wish
    Vote for freedom! [harrybrowne2000.org]
    ---

  • Was at the Best Buy in Appleton, Wisconsin yesterday... they had them in stock too. Perhaps you have to go shopping in the Midwest to find these things? =)
  • Minidisc is taking off quite well here in the UK. It's far superior to MP3 in terms of audio quality (ATRAC has improved a *LOT*) The players are not much bigger than an MD themselves, and playback time on most is in the 10-20 hour range before batteries need recharging. OK, recording MD's takes a while, but being able to switch MD, and not being limited to an hour of crappy quality music wins every time for me. Until hard disk based MP3 players become small, cheap, and reliable enough, Minidisk is the way to go.
  • Everyone keeps saying ground-loop isolators will help reduce noise, blah blah blah... I picked one up a while back for my trunk-mounted MP3 system, and it sounded like shit... it put a buzzing into the audio so nasty I swore it was overloading something and was going to blow an amp or something... Did I maybe have a defective part? There's no way in hell you can hook the damn thing up wrong... but here's another solution: Hook a wire up to the case of the player and ground it directly to the car's frame. It usually kills any ground loop trouble you might be having.
  • I practically cut my teeth on Heathkits. I kind of miss the 'good old days' of electronics you could really build from scratch - not that I'd ever leave VLSI behind.

    I have no MP3 collection, but this is almost reason to start one.
  • 2. If an ATAPI zip works, this may solve the remove the HD thing to load songs.
    Is this really a good idea? I used my Zip drive to backup some files to transfer between computers, and I deleted the files from the first computer before checking whether the files on the Zip disk were working fine. The disk had hit the (carpeted) floor a few times because of the Ultra-Springy(tm) eject on my drive, but nothing more than that... most of the files ended up being junk when I tried to copy them onto the 2nd PC. I doubt it would work in a car audio application... but it would be fine for home use. Besides, they're only MP3s...
  • The CD-R is not re-recordable. MD is.

    of course there's cd-rw!

    You can't fit a CD-R in your pocket to tape shows

    but you can do that with dat. and you'll have a much better and more reliable tape via dat.

    Do you have any evidence, or are you just a seer

    well, I've been a very heavy dat user for about 10 yrs now. I have a pro audio (both analog and digital) setup at home and generally follow the industry trends. I've seen MD rise and decline. before the mp3 craze, I would say that MD had a chance. but now, its mostly over. moving parts are passe' - with the next gen of mp3 units (recordables that go to directly to ram) it will totally kill any slight chance that MD has.

    and again, you can't copy MD at better than realtime (unless you have very fancy and specialized/costly equip). music is bulk data - and MD is just too slow.

    --

  • Well, if you don't mind using Windoze (ick, not the best thing to use for quasi-embedded applications), you can grab WinAMP, the WinAMP on TV plugin, and the IRman plugin, and grab yourself an IRman online for $35 or so last I checked... I always forget where the IRman website is, but I'm sure Google will tell you... I guess WinAMP on TV has a nice little interface that works much better on a TV than any skins you'll find... and the IR reciever is nice, works great... Grab a remote and punch in the buttons.
  • Um ... it seems as though you guys are overlooking a big issue: Minidiscs are DISCS and must be spinning to play. From our endless experience with portable CD players, we know that this can be a Bad Thing (TM) - skipping and scratching of the discs being the major two issues.

    I believe that the fact that players like the Rio have no moving parts is a HUGE advantage over their mechanical counterparts.

    I know I'm sick of discs ... and I can't wait until memory (ie. the Sony Memory stick-type technology) is cheap enough to fit 100s of songs on it. Of course, by that time we'll probably be getting custom mp3 streams via a wireless connection (ie. Bluetooth?) ... regardless ... :)

  • I suspect viewpoints like this come from spending one's creative energy hating successful people rather than directing it into activities that might make you a success as well.

    I suspect viewpoints such as yours come from projecting one's own sorry life unto others when one knows nothing at all about them.

  • mp3s DO sound like garbage.

    i mean, i like them and all. they're a cool way for me to hear new things, and listening to it on my computer, the sound ain't bad. but, i'd never want to use it as my main stereo.

    when i listen to mixes that people made in their cars and stuff, i often have to ask them to turn it down, or off, because i've spent so much time listening to mp3 music, and i can clearly hear it if it's mp3 sourced. it screeches and gives me a headache really fast. but once a player with at least 128 megs of memory comes out for around $100 (someday...), i'll grab one.

    -------

  • Rechargable batteries would solve the battery issue (Palm V anyone?). And since 16MB of MP3 data holds a lot of music, why would it skip from being tossed around alot? It streams as much of the data into memory as possible, and plays from memory (it has to anyway to decompress the MP3 data). It reads from CD occasionally once it's filled the buffer up. However much that buffer is, it can easily carry the tune while the CD recovers from a skip.
  • Kenwood makes a head unit with mp3 support as well. Aiwa's is ~$300, while Kenwood's is somewhere in the ballpark of $600.
  • Harvey Keitel is Sport, the greatest white pimp in film history. He's Jodie Foster's pimp that De Niro kills.

    -B
  • The hard drive in my car's MP3 player has been there through somre relaitvely "extreme" trips off road, and it's still just fine. I mounted it so the platters are rotating in a direction mutually perpendicular to the direction of travel and teh ground. That means that most of the shock it absorbs is parallel to the platters, and thus minimizes the risk of head slap.

    I really need to get the pictures of my player up on my site, and I should really get the customized distribution (drives a matrix orbital LCD, controlled by a keypad, I'm working on IR, boots in about 15 seconds on the socket 7 platform it's in now, and generally has worked great for about a year). <plug> :)

  • Why don't you just set the CD player on front panel of the treadmill?

    It skips, badly.

    It even has a 10 second anti-skip, but it still skips.

    I run fast and heavy, so the treadmill really bounces.

    The Cd player kind of works if I hold it, but it's hard to run.

    Plus, I occasionally run outside.
  • The main thing stopping me from playing MP3s is the low quality of the output of my soundcard. They sound ok at a low background level from my PC speakers, but when I hooked it up to the receiver and floor standing speakers of my main sound system, the noise and static is awful.

    The only soundcard that I've really seen recommended is the Soundblaster Live with digital output. I have a couple of spare digital inputs, but the Soundblaster is over $100. If this device for $150 gives good audio quality and can be stuck in a box (next to the stereo) with a 72 pin SIMM from a 486 I don't use anymore and a spare hard drive and spare power supply it could be a better choice.

  • Price of MP3 Player: $140
    Price of Selling Slashdot nickname: $102
    Total Price: $38


  • Moderator Mind Control Experiment (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Moderators, you know you are under my power completely. No matter how much you try to resist, you will be compelled to moderate this post down against your will. In fact, my control of your subconscious, and your subsequent lack of free will, is so complete that you believe that you want to moderate this down! Imagine your horror, if you were to be released from my control, and saw this brilliantly insightful comment that you moderated down! But do not fear, I have no plans to wake you from your trancelike state, for I relish power and dominance, even over weak willed fools. Now, I command you, my obedient slaves, loose your mod points on this post. I suggest the rating "Flamebait". On three ... One, Two,
  • Bad ass =) Just looked at it and it looks great. Now i need a burner... HELL! =)

  • I think you're missing the point.

    No, I think you're missing the point. There's this thing called humour, and you seem to have totally missed it. Not every comment has to be serious, /. even has a "Funny" moderation category...

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • A modkit for sony portable cd players to play mp3's. I bought an MPTrip/I-Jam/Genica/whatever-your-local-supplier-l abeled-it, and the sound quality is extreme shit. Meanwhile I have a kickass 250$ Sony Discman getting acquainted with the bottom of my junk pile. I wish I could just combine the two and end up with the be-all-end-all crisp loud sharp-bassed solid skip-free low-battery-consumption mp3-cd player.

    Or I could just sell the MPTrip to a deaf and dumb fool, use the cash to buy a bunch of blanks, and burn everything as Redbooks. Ugh.

    "She left me when I told her I get f%#ked by Bill Gates everyday.."
  • To be honest with you, I've found that the problems that low-quality MP3s usually have come from audio artifacting, where strange squeals and washes come in and out of the mix. Usually noise and static-sounds don't enter into it, and even that weird artifacting effect tends to go away when you encode your MP3's at 192 kb/s. Perhaps you have some other problem in your audio system that prevents good fidelity between your sound card and your stereo system. Are your levels peaking and distorting your stereo's preamp? Are the levels too low so that you have to crank up your stereo and you get all the additional noise that goes with it?

    One way you can prevent problems like this is if you have a Sound Blaster Live and a Dolby Digital receiver, you can send a digital signal out from your sound card into your stereo, preventing EMF and connection noise problems, as well as keeping a good control on the audio levels going into your receiver. That's what I do, and it sounds great.

  • Eh... I decided to visit CAJUN again from a link below, and they had a link to the slot adapters... so, here you go:
    Products of Adex Electronics [adexelec.com]
  • A K5-75 won't cut it. Neither will a K5-133. You have to go at least P-75, although I wouldn't use anything 100.

  • Floor-standing Jukebox (Score:3)

    by Izaak ( 31329 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @06:56AM (#777584) Homepage Journal
    My current project is to build a floor standing MP3 jukebox (like you would find in a tavern). It will be styled like a classic wurlitzer... crossed with an alien artifact (ala H.R. Giger). I'm shaping the exterior out of epoxy resin painted over an inverse mold made of styrofoam. After scooping out most of the styrofoam, the interior will be loaded with a linux computer and monitor. The sound will pipe through my stereo, and the entire thing will be controlled by two big dials and three buttons (which will be interpreted as mouse input by a custom written interface).

    I'll be documenting the entire thing on a web page as the project gets farther along. I have all the materials, and the custom software is 75% written. Should I try to create downloadable plans so anyone can reproduce this thing?

    Cheers,

    Thad

  • it's "dumbfuck" not "mholve"

    maybe you should look for a life on e-bay instead of whining

    as Lenny Dee says "if you're sore - get lost"
  • "bit rate of Mp3 cannot exceed 196 bit/sec or be less than 32k sampled at 44hz"
  • But roblimo ALWAYS sounds drunk :)
    Jeff on the other hand, sounds somewhat normal.. as normal as a slashdot guy CAN be.

  • LCD? (Score:1)

    by mach-5 ( 73873 )
    It would be cool if it had an LCD interface, or is that for the user to add on their own?
  • Ok, but I think you'll need a frequency generator. As far as I know (ie: next to nothing), the audio in samples the signal. I don't know if you can supply a constant input.
    An anlog joystick, on the contrary is nothing more than tow variable resistors (one for each axe) and a stick to turn them.
  • 3) the minidisc format never really caught on here in the US. it will die in 5 yrs or less, I predict.

    You predict? Well, that's nice. Do you have any evidence, or are you just a seer?

    There is plenty of evidence. Few people think about such things, but media changes take forever to catch on. CD (unknown to most people) were introduced in the early 80s...look how long that took to become mainstream, and that's only because several companies embraced CDs.

    Mini Disc won't necessarily die in 5 years, but if it DOESN'T catch on quickly, it will. MD has been around for a long time. Sony tried to push it many years ago, and failed. Then they came back with it, and this time they brought in a few companies (doesn't Philips support it now too?). But, it's still taking a while, and it hasn't caught on. More importantly, it hasn't been supported by the record industry.

    MP3 has similar issues -- like the fact that the record industry wouldn't support it if someone was hanging by their balls (unless we get a next-gen CEO in charge of one of the companies). But there is one thing that you might be overlooking: CD-R of MP3s. Panasonic, Philips/Magnavox and Alpine (not out yet, but coming) are all offering CD/MP3 players that play both CDs and MP3s from CDs. The huge plus side on that is the simple fact that there is no required media change.

    I've said it already, but a complete media change is not likely to get accepted quickly...if at all. If it a solid percentage of the market doesn't start useing the product within a certain amount of time, it probably won't get accepted at all. Need I remind you that Sony has failed at this before -- remember BETA video? A crystal clear format for video tapes, but it didn't catch on, because it required a special player (those tapes were small, besides). It never caught on, and the main video media is still VHS (sorry DVD people, DVD still only carrys a small percentage of the market -- but it's getting there).

    Just my economical background crashing with my technological interests and general observation.

  • Yep, agree :)

    I've been a Minidisc user for close to a year and it's been great for my purposes - it's the nicest portable format available.

    I had my little portable recorder for a year, but the big draw came when I decided to replace my car stereo. Although I have a sizable MP3 collection (~35gb), with all my own music ripped, I decided MP3 was not the way to go.

    I don't want to have a PC in my boot, or spend loads of cash (and time) on kits like this one, or blow over a grand on an Empeg. I just wanted something that would let me listen to the music that I like in my car (rather than the tedious radio stations) with the minimum of hassle.

    Tape - just sucks, frankly

    CDR - had the drive already, but not re-recordable, car CD players are notoriously fussy with them, they're fiddly to use in-car (unless you just shove them in the door pocket and let them get scratched after a couple of weeks)

    MP3/flash - either wiring up a portable player (been there, done that with my MD - too much hassle for everyday use) or paying at least 150ukp for a unit that sits on the dash and demands feeding with expensive flash cards. No thanks.

    MP3/CDR - not available yet, same issues as regular audio CDR (fragility, etc).

    MP3/HD - troublesome and expensive to set up, overkill for my needs (daily journey is no more than 1/2hr, longest one-off journey about 6 hours - who needs 2 weeks of music on tap?), concerns about durability (temp, vibrations, etc)

    Minidisc - super-durable, recent units have excellent SQ, cheap (Sony units start at 160ukp/$350 in US - a small amount more than their equivalent CD player), available and inexpensive media (I've just bought 20 80min MDs for 0.79 each).

    I love MD as a portable format too - flash MP3 players just seem hopelessly tied to PCs, and require you to spend a lot on flash media if you want more than an hour's music. The HD and CDR options aren't really "portable" - I certainly can't carry them about in the way I do with my MD.

    I can see the appeal of the flash players - people with large MP3 collections that are organised enough to put new material on it every day. I barely leave myself enough time for a Palm hotsync..

    Sure, MD isn't without it's flaws - most people are limited to 1x recording (there are several CD/MD products that will copy faster (eg. MXD-D3 [minidisc.org]), and strong rumours of faster PC links), and the issue of titling. Basically, you don't get titles unless you put them on yourself. However, keyboard inputs and titling projects [minidisc.org] can help out a lot. At worse (no titles), it's no less usable than CDR.

    Another nice bonus - it's a very simple way to capture streaming audio and the like. Rather than messing about with loopback cables+wave recorders, hacked about software, etc, I just plug my MD into the lineout and slide the REC switch.

    It's a shame the format's never caught on in the US - in the UK it's steadily growing. All the electrical chains have a decent range of units, many of the mini/micro systems include a MD deck, and blanks are even available in supermarkets..

    I don't see it as a competitor for MP3, just an excellent replacement for cassette tape and a superior to formats like CDR. If they bothered to promote it properly, the buying public might see what a good format it is.

    --
    qube

  • All this thing needs is a built-in 10/100 NIC and ftpd running, and it would be the perfect MP3 server.

    Now don't flame me with "Didn't you read the article?" I couldn't open the page either because it's slashdotted or my college's ISP is getting laggy again (I definetly will get a chance to view it at home).

    Remotely administrated mp3 server box, here we come!

  • Price isn't too reasonable but it gets the cool factor. The empeg [empeg.com]
  • It's about time someone actually got round to a decent kit player. One of the electronics magazines in the UK (Electronics and Beyond) has been publishing a series on how to add an lcd to and remove most of the functionality of your home pc but this is far better! And it's not in a huge rack mount case!!!
  • Maybe I am a little then, from years of obnoxious walkman usage, but I don't hear much of a difference between the CD and the MP3 except in a few cases (Sarah McLachlan springs to mind), where there is more 'air' in the CD. It's not the stereo which is pretty decent NAD separates. Of course, the PC running may well mask out some of the crud.

    The point still stands though that I can carry and listen to many more CDs with the MP3/HDD that lugging CD changers or CDs, and when I'm not home, it's likely to be played through either my work PC speakers (pretty crappy), or someone's boombox (not *as* crappy but still...).

  • Well, just to toss my $0.02 in, Minidiscs just don't skip... or I never have seen them do it anyway, I've literally dribbled my portable and it didn't skip a beat.

    In addition, I think minidiscs (especially the ones in iMac-esque cases) look really cool.

  • VA's stock is up... (Score:4)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @03:39AM (#777597)
    That's the only explanation I can think of for calling $140 + $50 + $250 "inexpensive".
    --
    Linux MAPI Server!
    http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
  • Yes. In fact if you do a bit of research and look for some SBC PC compatible boards that are really tiny, they have IDE connectors on them, and the only thing you need is for your embedded OS of choice to load a driver to control it.
  • I'm gonna need something like a 1ru style case, and get a decent sound card that can do digital out, so I can pipe it into the coaxial input of my reciever. That, and It'll need a remote, and buttons on the front w/ a volume control. Anyone have *any* idea how to get a volume knob to tweak software? I've been thinking of hacking up a netwinder for it's size, but I may end up using a small x86 box. 486 or so, since that seems to decode mp3's well enough

    da w00t.
  • Geesh.. you can get an SB Live OEM for about 40$ US, which has the digital out port. Unless you live in Alaska.
  • Or use a rotary encoder. These give a pair of phase-shifted pulses as output, indicating direction of rotation. While the cheaper ones don't have a lot of pulses per rotation, some don't have any detent so you can keep turning them in one direction or the other for multiple turns.

    Digikey lists Greyhill optical, CTS and Panasonic mechanical.

    No matter what you'll need a table or function to get from linear to log levels to match the way your hearing works.

  • Re: I've been trying (Score:3)

    by double_h ( 21284 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @04:26AM (#777602) Homepage

    Anyone have *any* idea how to get a volume knob to tweak software?

    You might have some luck hacking the guts of an old mouse (or better still, a game controller with some sort of potentiometer) to get something that you could bolt onto the backside of a knob. Eschewing a volume knob in favor of some buttons would be even easier.

    You might find some other ideas at the build your own arcade controls FAQ [speedhost.com] which, like your proposed project, deals with the question of attaching non-standard input hardware to a PC.

  • What the hell is that supposed to mean? Have you been hanging out with gangsta rappers or something???

    Yeah... He's been hanging out with German gangsta rappers..

    Hope that helps,

    Adolf

  • Oh, come on! I'm copping Pimp Style right now! 8P

    --K
    "I don't know what that means, sir, but it doesn't sound good!"
    ---
  • I have a pile of old Sun LX boxes (shoebox style Sparc 2 units), I'll be attempting to turn these into network-booting MP3 players using something like Amanda to access a central store of music files.

    These old Sun machines can take 96Mb of RAM and include 16-bit stereo sound cards. They should have (barely) enough CPU to decode and play MP3.

    Actually, due to the hardware overhead of uncompressing MP3, I may end up running MP3-to-WAV on a central server with some real CPU power and FastEthernet in it, then streaming the WAV data over switched 10Mb ether to the players.

    If you are interested in working on this project, feel free to contact me.

  • It depends on the board and equipment you choose, which of course is a dependant on cash. You can pay alotta cash for a hard drive from IBM that is about the size of a quarter and can hold Gigs of information, or you could spend a little less and get one of the standard IDE drives. The same goes with the board and what periphials you want on them. The more connectors and devices on the board, it is going to have to get bigger, with the exception of getting a CPU that has things like video instructions on the chip (i.e. Cyrix's MediaGX). You would just need to shop around for embedded solution boards or SBC PC compatible boards and find which you like with a ratio of features (including size)/ price.

    Hasues
  • Man, that is rude.

    Come in here, telling us about cool technology WITH an acceptable price, and then not giving a link. That means that I have to pull up Google.

    Don't let it happen again.

  • I know the CPU has the power to decode the 256, I'm not sure about 320. I would assume it can handle Ogg Vorbis stuff too. but I've not used the on-board sound, I've heard it's not too great, but you can put a PCI sound card in them if you forsake an internal 3.5" Hard drive(you can still have a 2.5" I believe).
  • - MD is a very small disk which is more stable, and is usually backed up with large amounts of buffer memory (40secs is standard nowadays). That also lets them save battery life - listen to the whirring of a MD player and you'll know it works for 5 secs, rests for 30 and repeats.

    If you're into using pogo-stick racing (and want music to listen to while you're at it) then flash is a good idea. For most applications, discs with buffers are fine.

    - MDs live in permanent plastic jackets with sturdy shutters. Scratching isn't a problem at all.

    I don't think any of the flash memory systems will get significantly cheaper any time soon. Until MP3 players can use small, cheap, re-recordable (MO?) media they'll be stuck as either "cool-light-low-capacity" or "huge-overkill-3-weeks-of-music" devices.

    --
    qube
  • No Rob has no friends, he just merely talks to his voices. As far as the cost goes, it will have to be more expensive then say a Rio. This is because those companies have paid for a specialty board for their product because they know exactly what they want for the product. When you buy small boards or embedded ones, first you usually don't buy in quantity, and secondly they are general purpose systems.

    Hasues
  • I would like an mp3 player in the size, shape and style of home audio components. Just stack it in there with your stereo. The emphasis would be on sound quality, so rather than (or in addition to) providing DAC conversion, I would just want an optical digital out cable to stick in the dolby digital receiver. It would, of course, be upgradeable to play new formats, like ogg vorbis. It would have an ethernet card and a high capacity hard drive, smb and/or nfs server so you can just move files on and off with any computer on your home network, and an lcd panel showing artist/title/playing time. Also, a web server could provide an interface to control it remotely from any computer. mmmm....


  • Oh yea, I forgot Jodie Foster was in that. I remember that cracker pimp daddy. Equal oppunity in pimp-nation.

  • I want an Aiwa CDC-MP3 [aiwa.com] if I can every find one in stock. I've seen them for $250-$300 but have yet to find them in stock.

  • Cheap? (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    For $140 you can practically buy one off the shelf. How much is your time worth?
  • I use a AudioPCI Ensoniq (now soundblaster) card that I picked up years ago for $99. The last I saw them they were only $50, they may be less by now. Anyway, my sound card doesn't have any audio quality problems.

    On a side note, I've noticed some 'audiophiles' saying that MP3s sound like garbage. I would like to tell them to try MP3s made by a Franhauer (sp?) MP3 compressor (I use MP3Enc on Linux). I used to use Bladenc, but when listening to MP3s made that way I would get a high end hiss and high sounds would make digital noise that is most disturbing at high volumes. Using the same CDs and compressing through MP3Enc has produced MP3s that sound exactly the same as the CDs. I know, some people would say that's not possible, but I tell you, even at high volumes there is no difference in quality. And hooked up to my stereo I can annoy the neighbors for hundreds of hours at a time without touching a thing.;-).
  • It's "ROM" not "rom", "ueber" (without the umlaut) is not spelled "uber" and is "pimp" your professional editorial opinion?
  • I have three ideas for this board....

    1. Use a IDE Sandisk like the iOpener uses for the IDE HD (no moving parts, but might be on small side....maybe this isn't a good idea).

    2. If an ATAPI zip works, this may solve the remove the HD thing to load songs.

    3. Add a LCD or LED display for displaying ID3 tags(might have to hack the player software if it's not already built in, but it's possible.)

    Of course one of my ideas would be to get one of those PC104 motherboard the wearable peoples use and adapt a small lcd to work on it using ncurses based mpg123 front end since X would be sluggish since the highest speed I have seen on these boards has been about 133 MHz (might be higher now tho). I do like the idea of using sandisk type of memory for doing a portable device since it's easier to deal with the vibration probs on those.

  • $140 seems to be way too much for that... why not buy an old multia, then add ram and netboot it, or if you want, you can add a HD, it's got audio and NIC built in, and if you get the one with internal PCI, you can add a Live! or some other PCI sound card to it. You do still have to write software to control it, but isn't that what do it yourself is all about?
  • (whoops, the proper url is here [speedhost.com]... dunno how that extra %3C/a snuck in there...)
  • By the time I encoded my music selection to MiniDisc, I would have either decided that it was time to listen to something else, or else I would be too old to get my groove on. MiniDiscs are cool and all, but crikey! Real time recording? That's a joke!

    Hasues
  • I don't know about anyone else - but I already have a dedicated MP3 harddrive (40gigs) and I'm sure I have simms in the parts closet.

    What I am lacking is a way to control it. I've spent a considerable amount of time researching pc based MP3 players at mp3.com. The form factors are ugly though. With a kit like this you have a lot more leeway (sp?) in how you package it.

    What I would be critical about is that he is selling boards that he hasn't even finished coding for yet. What happened to completed projects, but that is life under the GPL from what I have seen.

  • I found a remote with a trackball on it (called a "web remote" which plugs into the serial port, so I hacked the output format and wrote a custom plugin to irmp3 IRMP3 [dpotter.com] which translates track ball motion into volume / balance / bass / treble (hold down different buttons for each). Works fairly well (only problem is the web remote has lousy ir error detection, so occasionaly presses the wrong button, so I would reccomend finding another brand).
    Kevin
  • Hi, Paul here. I'm really sorry that my little website is buckling under the weight of the slashdot effect. I moved all the images to a virtual hosted (faster) server, but the slashdot effect is indeed formidable!

    Here is a mirror of the MP3 Player portion of the site [inetarena.com]. The links to the on-line store and the non MP3 player material will still take you back to our (very slow) server, but at least you'll be able to browse the info about the player.

    Please use this mirror instead of the google cache, because there were a large number of additions to the web pages in the last couple days, including the GPL'd firmware source code.

    I hope you find the player interesting, perhaps even uber pimp (whatever that means?)

  • Is fat32 the most efficient filesystem for this kind of device? The more robust? Reliable?

    --

  • They sound ok at a low background level from my PC speakers, but when I hooked it up to the receiver and floor standing speakers of my main sound system, the noise and static is awful.

    I'm not a hardware geek, but it sounds to me like you're picking up computer-generated RF. The noise might go away if you move your computer (class A or class B?) away from your amp.

    Given the electronic noisness of a PC box, I often wonder why there aren't more external sound cards. Somebody who knows what they're talking about should step in here.

  • Mp3Box better option (Score:3)

    by Bryan_Crowl ( 87192 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @04:34AM (#777631) Homepage
    I would rather just fork out the extra money and build one of these [mp3sb.org]
  • When selecting my new portable music device I gave minidiscs very careful consideration, and finally elected to go with an mp3 player. All of your points were valid, but there is one thing that made my decision for me: I hate having to spend hours to put together a custom disk. Now that all my CD's are ripped to mp3 I can make myself a custom playlist on my mp3 player in minutes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I am aware, this isn't possible with minidisc, you need to make recordings the old fashioned way. Sloooooow.

    Also, if I'm on a trip chances are I'll have my laptop with me to serve as a base station for my mp3 player. Need new tunes? Just boot it up and upload new selections. I can have 4-5 gigs available that way, even if the player only holds 64 megs.

    I also jog/run quite a bit, and I'm afraid I just don't trust mechanical media however buffered to work uninterrupted while being subjected to consistent jarring.

    If none of these things bother you though, minidisc probably is the right way to go.

    Obasan

    If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?

  • See empegcar [empegcar.com] for a slightly more expensive alternative...

    Just heard from a friend that he's got one of these 36GB in-dash Linux-running monsters. Gonna have to have a look at it.

  • Why spend 3 times as much when you can get an MP3/CD player for about $130? Works great, and you can use it just like any other portable CD player.

    Because for three times the cost, you get ten times the music. No CD's to carry around, works better than a CD player (Less skipping).

    Erik Z

  • You are correct in all your assertations.

    There is a small market for minidisc, however, outside of the consumer-music mainstream. MD-DATA has made an inroad in the project studio market, with several products (Yamaha in particular) designed for multitrack recording on the MD-DATA.

    Tapers have also shown interest in minidisc, mainly because of it's small size and inexpense compared to DAT. If you're doing stealth taping (because the band doesn't allow it) minidisc is a good medium for you.*

    Now there's fierce competition in the home recording market, with Zip drive recording, hard disk recording, "budget" ADATs and DA-38s.. I think fostex even makes a machine with a SCSI port, so you can use Zip, Jazz, SCSI HD, or whatever you want. It will be interesting to see if minidisc survives in this market. (I hope it does, because I own a Yamaha MD8). :)

    I agree that minidisc is probably a lost cause for retail music, but Sony has found some interesting ways to keep it alive. Their new MP3 player also plays ATRAC, and the software that comes with it rips to ATRAC, not MP3.

    The main reason for my post was the disagreement with the statement "it will die in 5 years or less, I predict"

    I think it was the "I predict" that really got to me. :)

    later- wish

    * I do not endorse the taping of bands who do not permit it. I believe that bands would gain from permitting it, but if they don't I respect that.
    Vote for freedom! [harrybrowne2000.org]
    ---

  • Minidisc (Score:5)

    by geoffeg ( 15786 ) <`gro.htols' `ta' `geffoeg'> on Friday September 15, 2000 @04:41AM (#777654) Homepage
    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! :)
  • Actually I took an old Compaq 386 laptop and did the same thing...cept that I used a CD ROM, and a boot disk. Thing was pretty small because Compaq layared the motherboard in the particular model I had. I ran pretty good, but it needed more RAM to really keep up with playing the MP3s extensively..
  • You did miss the point. I didn't say Slashdot had any commercial interest in pushing this product; I said Rob was rubbing a $450 gizmo in our face and calling it inexpensive. Cf recent claims of playing DVDs on his portable while on the place, and you'll see what I mean.

    I wish I didn't have to explain these things, but ah well.

  • the sblive does NOT have a quality digital output!

    it does resampling (poorly, too) so that the output is always at 48k even if the input is at 44.1k ;-(

    if you want a semi-cheap true digital output soundcard, try the midiman Dio 2448 [midiman.net].

    while there is a slight advantage to having even a resampled spdif output (compared to a regular old analog out present inside a noisy pc bus), sblive value2 is about $50 while this midiman card is about $109. if you're into audio quality, might as well spend the extra $50 and do it right.

    --

  • WTF? (Score:4)

    by Enoch Root ( 57473 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @03:46AM (#777674)
    just looks uber pimp

    What the hell is that supposed to mean? Have you been hanging out with gangsta rappers or something???

    Rob, you're losing touch with your inner geek, it's not even funny... Add to this the fact you're once again rubbing your money in our face, and I'm wondering if you won't rename Slashdot 'News for nouveau riches. Stuff that costs a leg' soon.

  • My current project is to build a floor standing MP3 jukebox (like you would find in a tavern). It will be styled like a classic wurlitzer... crossed with an alien artifact (ala H.R. Giger). I'm shaping the exterior out of epoxy resin painted over an inverse mold made of styrofoam. After scooping out most of the styrofoam, the interior will be loaded with a linux computer and monitor. The sound will pipe through my stereo, and the entire thing will be controlled by two big dials and three buttons (which will be interpreted as mouse input by a custom written interface).

    I'll be documenting the entire thing on a web page as the project gets farther along. I have all the materials, and the custom software is 75% written. Should I try to create downloadable plans so anyone can reproduce this thing?

    Why bother? It sounds pretty simple to me.

    -thomas


    "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

  • Inexpensive? (Score:4)

    by Shotgun ( 30919 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @03:47AM (#777678)
    $140 to do it yourself? And that's just for the circuit board that doesn't yet support the DRAM. You still have to provide a hard drive ($100) a power supply ($20) and the memory ($20). So the actual cost is $300 for a very fragile homemade unit.

    Thanks, but no. For now, I keep converting MP3s to CDs and use my $50 Walkman.

    Now, as a hobbyist demo, this is cool, but hobby projects aren't done on the basis of cost.

  • Compared to a mainstream $99 Rio, $140-$250 is cheap?

    The only reason I want an MP3 player is for when I run on the treadmill. I play CD's in my car and at home.

  • Interesting.

    One little thing, though. You're spending $600 on a stereo component, designed component-by-component. Why integrated sound, then? Seems to stuff it up to me, as the quality isn't exactly going to be fantastic now is it?

  • Network Filesystem and NIC (Score:3)

    by kevlar ( 13509 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @04:57AM (#777685)
    This would be perfect if you could have a built in NIC that can mount an SMB file system or NFS. Combine that with an LCD, and you've got the perfect interface for your stereo with mp3's without having to keep a klunky computer or expensive laptop around....
  • Did you see Taxi Driver? True Romance? Superfly? Pimps Up Hoes Down? Pimps rock.

    -B
  • The point (for me) of MP3 is to be the biggest damn auto-changer there is with no change-over delay. I have a lot of CDs, I dislike searching through them for an odd track, and it's impractical to carry them around. With this device I can carry my whole CD collection with me.

    A Pioneer 100-disk changer was about $500-600 last time I checked, and still has a change delay, isn't computer controlled, and couldn't reasonably be called portable.

    My current solution is a removable caddy with a 40Gb drive, which is now full halfway though ripping my CDs. This still needs a PC to be useful. Bigger drives are around now, so a portable (as in small boombox) MP3 device with 80Gb+ is not at all unreasonable, and the price is good if that is what you want. It's not a rio competitor.
  • What cases will this and a disk fit in? I look forward to the Cases Catalog and Cases Contest Results.
  • sorry, wrong answer. minidisc is most certainly not the best answer. in fact, its a total waste.

    1) its not compatible with standard cd players. you need a special player. you also do with mp3, but if you're preaching recordable media then cdr has it all over minidisc. and the cdr blanks are ultra cheap these days and can be found anywhere.

    2) you have to swap discs (like you do on cd players) when that very short disc is over. with mp3 on a hard drive, you can have literally weeks worth of continuous nonstop nonrepeating music.

    3) the minidisc format never really caught on here in the US. it will die in 5 yrs or less, I predict.

    4) the sound quality is on-par with high-end mp3 - but you don't have the density/compression of mp3 with MD. for more playing time, mp3 clearly wins.

    what about good old dat? you can have 4 or 6 hours on a single dat tape. dats are smaller than MDs and actually sound better than cd's (at 48k, if you choose to use that rate). but dat for consumers is totally dead - like MD will be soon.

    mp3's are normal computer files. MD audio isn't really like that; meaning that I can't have a hard drive at home full of MD music and randomly program (at better than realtime) from my hard drive to my portable player. if MD ever has a serial protocol that is better than 1:1 speed, then maybe it might have some staying power. but since you have to feed the audio at 1:1 speed (either digitally or via analog in's) its too slow to 'upload' to.

    --

  • I think I've discovered how you're going to finance the purchase, though.....

    I clicked on your nifty link, I'm astounded: you are an entreprenuer of the most prodigous sort!
    Not only are you selling your slashdot account, you're getting over $100 for it. Sure it's not stock in VA Linux, but who knew that we all had equity in our slashdot accounts? Now we can all Karma Farm for profit!

    One note: you said the +1 bonus kicks in at about 50 in your auction. That may have been true once upon a time, but I have two accounts with +1 and they're not above fifty. Seems to me it kicked in about 25.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @03:53AM (#777702)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Note, at this time (Aug 31, 2000) the firmware does not yet support the DRAM. This means it will work without a SIMM
  • If you can mount an IDE HD I wonder how tough it would be to get an IDE CD-ROM up and going?

    It seems like it would make swapping media a heck of lot easier... if I'm running this thing in an car, I don't wanna go using a HD anyway. CD-ROM or flash would be preferable.

    Oops! Another bumpy road - there's $250 down the tubes.. :)

  • Aiwa -- yes, a real car stereo company -- and Rockford/Fosgate both make car MP3 players. Aiwa's takes normal ISO9660 CDs.

    Why the hell bother with the Empeg when you can play MP3 CDs?!

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • The best you can do, with 90 meter tapes, is just over 3 hours. Use 90Ms at your own risk, though. Most manufacturers don't recommend it, as the tape's too thin.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Re:WTF? (Score:3)

    by Enoch Root ( 57473 ) on Friday September 15, 2000 @03:58AM (#777720)
    I'd rather not listen to Jeff and Rob sound drunk over badly-sampled webcasts, thank you!

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