MP3 Player - home made

[Ormo]

A while ago I made an MP3 player for my car out of an old PC.

I used an alphanumeric Hitachi driven LCD with a parallel interface as an output to control the thing by and a numeric keypad to control it with.

Now I used Winamp and its API to code a small program in Delphi to capture keys and perform actions, then used a freeware component for Winamp to output to display.

Now I have bought a PCI graphics card with a tv-out and a little 4" colour LCD I want to use as a display to display visualisations and maybe even some video... But I also want to use the alphanumeric one to display track info etc as a 4" screen doesn't hold much text!
And now I want to use Windows Media Player as it can be used to organise media files easier than winamp. But I can't find a plugin or anything for WMP.
So I figure I will write my own, which leads me to the question!

Does anyone have any experience in coding for the WMP API in Delphi or any other languages?

 

[Deacon]

Huh? Care to put that in lament terms? I wouldn't be of any help anyways...but thats pretty cool that you made your own MP3 player for your car out of an old pc.

 

[jons911]

you oughta check out the "Winamp Library"... I honestly like it way better than the WMP media library - i think they may have removed it in v.3 - get v2.91 it's more stable than v3 anyway....

if you do want to use wmp - get the WMP developer edition sdk from msdn - there's a lot OK documentation.. I know there's more on msft's site - but i think you gotta have a subscription to get to most of it...

 

[brian4]

That's pretty cool you made an MP3 player for your car out of an old pc.

 

[pgp_protector]

Are you using a laptop HD or a desktop HD ? I know the Laptop drive can handle more abuse as there disk are made of a glass substrate normaly.

And as for the programing, not to shure, Ill see what I can find over the weekend.

 

[doofus125]

 

[pgp_protector]

FYI Some Info on there SDK can be found hear http://www.winamp.com/nsdn/winamp2x/dev/sdk/

Real quick it looks like is supports Direct X

 

[Stryper]

wow dude tahts an AWESOME idea. wow when i get into computers a bit more in the future, this is definately something i will do.

 

[Pseud]

That is way cool...

I want to build a device that switches on some music in the background when you walk into the room. I don't think it will be too difficult. Use a passive infra red detector that are used in buglar/fire alarms (you know the things in the corner of the room that detect motion of heat, and a light comes on when it picks something up?), and use that to trigger the on... now to turn it off hehe

Anyway

Can't help ya lol sorry

 

[gusto5]

ooo...this all sounds good...now all i need is my own car...

nice idea with the interfacing though

 

[Ormo]

It was great when it worked the first time. Like a huge CD changer in the boot!

I had to put this on the back burner for a while due to other commitments and kinda forgot about this thread. Since then though I have found http://www.mp3car.com there are loads of folk doing this and much more! Way moe than my little project!!

I have decided to go with WMP and have been looking at the SDK. There is an ActiveX component that can be embedded into an application (or webpage or whatever) which then gives your app (almost) all of the functionality of WMP. So Im gonna embed that sucker in there and mooch of microsoft! My only concern then is performance as I am running on a P200, but it should be ok. If not then I'll use Winamp 5. It seems to have the same API as winamp 2.x and will undoubtedly run quicker than WMP 9.

Thanks for all the guys!



PS. about the IR detector thingy, its possible to hook up a webcam as a motion detector and trigger software from it. There are definately apps out there that do this. So you could use a cheap webcam to trigger winamp or something to play music when someone walks in...or something...

 

[marduke]

umm winamp 5 is slow, uses to much system resources. its a slug on my p4 2.4
probably best to stick with WMP, maybe v7 might be a better option?

 

[Ormo]

Yeah, I like the features in WMP better too. The media library will be easier to code around. More logically structured code-wise!

I found Winamp 5 slow when I used the new skins. If I used the classic skin (or similar) it sped it up considerably..

 

[marduke]

when running in classic skin it uses between 70-90% of my resources!! i tell you what though it didnt last very long on my computer.

 

[Ormo]

Oh i'm not worried about 70-90% of resources! I have 100% to be used!

The probs arise when it is sitting using 100% and it is still slow...

 

[marduke]

id say stick to WMP very stable program, i use it to play all of my music, movie files now. ever since WMP8 came out i have been hooked.

 

[pgp_protector]

If your creating it from the ground up, you may also want to check out Linux, there's a 50Meg version "Da**SmallLinux (DSL)" that should also work, and will probably be more stable than windows

 

[Arnediad]

*cheers for FreeBSD again*

As an avid user of the above OS, I can say that it would probably work pretty well for you here. I can play CDs on ancient computers (playlists, etc.) using a text-based program that uses very few resources.

Probably not your first choice if you want aesthetics...

 

[QuePasa]

You could make FreeBSD run on a toaster if you needed it to.

 

[pgp_protector]

You could make FreeBSD run on a toaster if you needed it to.

You might need to do some heavy mods to get it to run on a toaster