It may be easyer if you had raw uncompresd audio on the disk insted of mp3.SO i wod directy send what it reads to an DAC.This eliminates the MP3 decoder.
And some compilers have Comopact Flash card libarys that can be used to interface whith a hardrive prety simply.But most only suport FAT16 and it suports only 2GB.
And making is portabe is imposibe since harddrives are heavy,bulky and consume a lot of power.Flash memory is a beter way to go.
Il give you shocking experience.
mpxplay
not exactly an hdd mp3 player:
http://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/
requires:
486pc with hdd (for mp3)
dos
You want a nubee to make a 486pc to run those programs? :?:
My 486-100 played MP3s pretty well, except it got jerky when the sceensaver came on. :lol:
Uncle $crooge
Hmm,
Is it possible to record analogue (audio) on to a hard drive ?
It doesn't have to be noughts and ones surely ?
John
Hmm,
I suppose if you could arrange for the head tracking to motor slowly
to the middle, then you could have a tune on each head, and switch
between them. Maybe two or three tunes for each head, if you can
track the heads slowly.
John
Of course a hard drive records one's and zero's. To record analog without the compression of MP3, you feed the audio to a A to D converter.
A D to A converter plays it back. Pauses in the sound will waste a huge amount of memory.
Uncle $crooge
Thank you for your reply Audioguru,
but you may have mis-read the question:
Is it possible to record analogue (audio) on to a hard drive ?
It doesn't have to be noughts and ones surely ?
I would have thought a magnetic recording head could record an
analogue signal.
John
Hi John
It would be a nightmare to redesign the electronics of a hard drive to make it into a "cassette recorder".
Uncle $crooge
Yes, it's essentially building your own harddrive, although you would at least have the advantage of the mechanics being ready built!.
But why would you want to record analogue on a harddrive anyway?.
PIC programmer software, and PIC Tutorials at:
http://www.winpicprog.co.uk
Hi Audioguru, Hi Nigel,
Oh, i don't want to do it.
I was trying to think of the easiest way to use an old hard drive to
play music.
Using it as a form of cassette player would not be easy, but it would
probably be easier than building a dedicated MP3 system to do it.
Although there are lots of things i dont know about hard drives.
It may not be possible to have the head(s) move evenly across the
unit, they may only move in little jerks, this i don't know.
I don't know how long you could get in minutes by using it in such
a wasteful way, but you could switch between heads, like changing
tracks on an 8-track.
And the heads are quite tiny, they would certainly need a bit of a
pre-amp.
Just contemplating possibilities ....
John
It would be far simpler to record and play back the audio digitally, as the drive is already designed to do, there are plenty of existing systems that already do this - multi-track hard disk recorders for recording studios.Originally Posted by john1
I would suggest building one of those would be greatly simpler than converting a harddrive to record analogue directly?.
But you also seem to have changed your requirements?, going from MP3 to plain audio?, MP3 is far harder because of the compression and de-compression used, although you can buy MP3 decoder chips - hence the numbers of designs on the Internet for MP3 players.
PIC programmer software, and PIC Tutorials at:
http://www.winpicprog.co.uk
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