mp3 jukebox or something like that
 

My goal for the last month of my summer vactions :rolleyes: . Is to craft together a decent dedicated mp3 box. I was to have a box running linux that does nothing but play mp3s, and maybe act as a file server in the future. There is a ton of stuff online but to me nothing seems coherent. I was just wondering if anyone had done something similiar to this and if they had how they went about it. And if anyone has any ideas I'd be glad to listen to them. Anyways I'm done with work for the week so I'm getting the heck out of here. Have a great weekend everyone.

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking here Cam, and what exactly you mean by a dedicated MP3 box. Will it simply play music through computer speakers hooked to your box, or do you want it to be able to pipe music to multiple rooms? Are you interested in a remote control, or multiple terminals to call up music from, or just a simple box that does everything itself?

When I wrote my previous post I was looking more for ideas than help. My problem is that I'm not sure quite what I'm trying to do. At the moment I have it set up so I have to ssh into the box and it grabs the files off of a server. I guess my vision is to have a near silent pc with a remote and some small display that is used mainly for playing mp3's through a receiver. Really it's getting a remote and display working that's going to be my biggest problem.

I'm planning on buying a large hard drive to store all my mp3's locally on this box, and then serving any other computers on my network mp3's if someone wants to listen in another room.

I also want it to look good. I thought of looking for a old stereo receiver to rip apart and stick all the components in, not really sure how that would work, my computer building experience is pretty limited, but I guess it might be worth a shot.

You want to try to set up something like this?

(I'm not trying to stifle your do-it-yourself impulses, just a suggestion for possible features.)

Thanks for the link Steve, that's kind of what I pictured. Getting something actually working like that could be a challange, but that's why I took up this project. I've found a few programs online that give me a lot the functionality I need.
My biggest decisiong now though is deciding on a hard drive. Anyone have any suggestions for a reasonable priced 40-80gb hard drive that is close to silent.

Have you considered and XBox?
 

You'd be surprised what you can do with those things

:3eye:

Why not just buy an iPod? Then you could just take it with you wherever you go.

Because this gives me an excuse to play on my computer doing things that none of my friends understand. Oh and becuase I have an mp3 cd player in my car and my house and car are the only places I really care to listen to music on my terms.

I bought the older Archos Jukebox. It has a 20GB hard drive and is usable as a USB drive. It comes with a license for up to version 7.5 of Musicmatch.

It took me about 10 minutes per album to rip my 250 CD collection to use up 9GB of the jukebox. The software was %99 effective. There were less than 10 songs which the software kept trying to split into multiple songs.

Other than that, I am happy, since I can now take my entire collection with me in my pocket.

Of course, searching and editing playlists is much easier on the PC. No matter how well you try to organize it, navigating through 2000+ songs on a jukebox device is a pain.

BTW, I wish to remind everyone that this is a FAIR USE of my CD collection.

Okay. If you'll remember, when you annouced you got it, jaguar was like "haha, get an iPod, suck0r!" and I was like "dude, it's cool, whatever floats your boat."

But this is one area where I can honestly say that the iPod blows everything else out of the water. I regularly navigate through about 4,000 songs on my iPod and <b>it's a piece of cake</b>. Good lord is the interface awesome. The scroll wheel, which isn't actually comprised of any moving parts (i.e., it's touch sensitive) allows you to accelerate down the list, so you can scroll from the top song to the bottom song in three seconds. The faster you scroll, the faster it accelerates, so if you only wanna go half-way down, it's all good. You can very simply sort by artist, album, song name, most recently listened to, most listened to, favorite songs (based upon ratings), etc. If you had one, you'd be rabidly in love with it. :)

So, I'm not here trying to sell the iPod. If you're happy with your Archos, then there's really no reason to change. But what I am saying is that with the iPod, you can have your cake and eat it too. That's why it's the most popular portable music player.

this is funny cause this is what i am going through right now. i will tell you what i did, see if it helps

i have a tiny 10gig hd on my computer, and i have about 170 cds. so, i got a 80 gig firewire drive and a 15 gig ipod. mind that you can do this with any player you want to use, but you will see where the mac comes in handy here. My room mates and i wanted to have a place to put our music because we all have small hard drives (lol did anyone just see the enuendo there?) so i got the HD and what we will be able to do is put all the music on the HD and using Rendezvous we will all be able to listen to it because we have a little LAN action going on. I use the 15 gig ipod for just my music, and stuff that is thiers that i like and i hook it up to our stereo in the living room using a monster ipod cable. i have about 1700 songs right now and they have quite a bit themselves so it will be interesting to see how it works in the long run, but so far so good.

My roommate has a Nomad and it works great so you certainly dont need an iPod, but i have to admit, the firewire is hot! Good luck however you end up solving your pob.