Idea: A homemade hard disk mp3 player

First of all, sorry if i put it into the wrong forum section, but this one seemed the most appropriate to me.

Basically, i've been thinking about using an old computer (like pentium 1, 32/16 mb ram... you get the idea) with a 20 or 40 gb hard drive to make a cheap mp3 player, as small as possible, which you could use in your car or in the living room.

The whole thing would consist of a computer with modified case to be as small as possible, an lcd monitor (i was thinking about something like 10", although i don't know if those even exist...) and a keyboard.

Now, here's the linux part: i was thinking about a tiny distribution, which basicly only boots into the console and automatically runs an mp3 player program with curses interface, with possible playlist, basic music management and especially "jump to file" support.

I chose curses because you don't have to type commands to do anything, yet you don't have to run X and struggle with video drivers, not to mention the resource saving by not using X.

Now someone will probably tell me to just go and buy an iPod, but i really want to do this just for fun and it costs me almost nothing as i can get some of that old hardware for very low amount of money or even for free.


so, what do you guys think about this? do you think it is possible?

Sounds like fun :-D I'd probably try a minimal Slackware installation*, and you could probably add a line to rc.local to launch your mp3 playing program. I'm not sure from your post whether you were planning to write your own script to play the mp3 files, or whether you were looking for one that's already around, tho.

Good luck
Giles
*The other argument would be to try something like DSL's install to hard drive option - I only say that I'd try slackware because it's something I've personally tried before :-)

haven't tried slackware yet and i'm not very familiar with DSL either but i have tried it before.

i was however thinking about already made software just put together.

i'll try it when i get some free time. i searched the net a little and have found a bunch of mp3 players with curses interface so i'll have to do alot of testing before i can pick the best one... have you tried any good ones?

For this application, I would suggest TTYLinux. It comes with nothing more than the very basic utilities needed for a text console. You'd need to compile your own kernel (which is a good idea in this case) and compile whatever mp3 playing software you wanted to use.

I've done a similar project with Slackware as well. A headless Celeron PC with 32MB of RAM with a script that would check a directory for mp3s and then play them using mpg321. When I creating my script, I ran across some scripts that would do the job but I had some .ogg files as well which require ogg123.

The problem with using a curses-based software is that you'd need a keyboard and monitor (if you want to control it). If all you need is to play the mp3s, and they are all in the same directory, you can simple use mpg321 like this:

Code:

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mpg321 -Z --aggressive --stereo /path/to/mp3s/*.mp3

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Check the man pages for mpg321, there's also a -@ option which can be useful.