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