For private interest and as a birhtday present I want to develop a simple MP3 Player which plays a song from some kind of solid-state memory when it receives a signal. The power for the playing of the music must come from a battery and while it is not playing I want to power down as much as possible - in essence it is enough to startup everything on the signal. As interface to this device I would like to have a USB Port over which I can stream a new piece of music onto memory. Ideally in such situations it would draw it's power from USB and I can also check the battery status over the USB. I've been programming on PCs for the past 10 years from C over C++ to Java and C# and have a strong Desktop development background. I have some Assembler (x86 and a bit of Alpha) knowledge and had 2 courses on embedded programming with microcontrollers during my studies. My problem isn't developing the micro programm or the device driver for windows nor (obivously) the frontend for it and I don't mind it being a closed solution in the sense that only my software has access to the device. I'm looking for some viable hardware with which I could create such a solution. I have found some MP3 chips, but a certain level of documentation for dummies is a requirement. Some pointers where to start as semi-newbie and ideas how to solve the problem would be great.
Greets, Eduard Ralph