Mod an MP3-CD player to accept HDD

Hey,

Been looking to make a portable MP3 player. So started looking at SBCs
and stuff. Figured out that its difficult to beat the commercial
HDD-MP3 players (US$200 for Neuros 20GB MP3 player!!) on price/size
bcoz a SBC is a general purpose computer whereas a commercial HDD-MP3
player is just that - an MP3 decoder.

So I figured what if the CD on a regular CD-MP3 player can be replaced
with a HDD?? Should it be perfectly possible. The Mp3 CD is the ISO
9660 that we burn on our PCs. So the CD-MP3 player must recognise
that. So emulate the HDD to look like a ISO 9660 CD and we should be
done (there are minor details like power supply, ofcourse )

And thats the question. How does one emulate ISO 9660 on a HDD. Or can
the CD-MP3 player read FAT32? I found some guy selling an emulator but
its too expensive (~US$250).

My guess is that they should read FAT32. Why? Look at the cheap
MP3-Flash players with detachable pen drives. The pen drive is
formatted to be FAT16/32. One idea was to plug an external HDD via USB
to the MP3-Flash player after detaching the Pen drive. However, such
combos have lots of controls on the pen drive and the cheap ones don't
have a LCD display good enough to wade thru GBs of MP3s.

Hints/Suggestions/Pointers? The goal is the cheapest portable Mp3
player per GB!!

The working solution will be documented and posted for everyone to
see. (Trust me )

TIA,

Siddhartha

On 7 Jun 2004 07:32:50 -0700, (Siddhartha Jain)
wrote:

Hey,

Been looking to make a portable MP3 player. So started looking at SBCs
and stuff. Figured out that its difficult to beat the commercial
HDD-MP3 players (US$200 for Neuros 20GB MP3 player!!) on price/size
bcoz a SBC is a general purpose computer whereas a commercial HDD-MP3
player is just that - an MP3 decoder.

So I figured what if the CD on a regular CD-MP3 player can be replaced
with a HDD?? Should it be perfectly possible. The Mp3 CD is the ISO
9660 that we burn on our PCs. So the CD-MP3 player must recognise
that. So emulate the HDD to look like a ISO 9660 CD and we should be
done (there are minor details like power supply, ofcourse )

And thats the question. How does one emulate ISO 9660 on a HDD. Or can
the CD-MP3 player read FAT32? I found some guy selling an emulator but
its too expensive (~US$250).

My guess is that they should read FAT32. Why? Look at the cheap
MP3-Flash players with detachable pen drives. The pen drive is
formatted to be FAT16/32. One idea was to plug an external HDD via USB
to the MP3-Flash player after detaching the Pen drive. However, such
combos have lots of controls on the pen drive and the cheap ones don't
have a LCD display good enough to wade thru GBs of MP3s.

Hints/Suggestions/Pointers? The goal is the cheapest portable Mp3
player per GB!!

The working solution will be documented and posted for everyone to
see. (Trust me )

TIA,

Siddhartha

Problem is that an audio/mp3 player may not have an IDE (or other computer
type) interface to the cd drive. No way of knowing until you tear one apart
and start reverse engineering it.

Jt