Making Mp3 player

[lomtik]

Hi,
I am planning to learn how mp3 players are done and make something for myself. Has anyone of you done it before? interested in making one as well?
I would like to hear some thoughts on that.

There are quite a few designs on internet, Among them are Minty and Yampp players, which are quite nice and compact.
Right now I am choosing the design and will start buying parts soon. Another option is building an FPGA based player by modding some available decoder cores. This one is a bit more expensive and would reqire hardware architecture knowledge though. Other than that, it's a great learning project. If anyone is interested, let me know. I would like to do both designs, at least prototypes without casing.

Now, the question is
Do I need to get PCB's for these projects? Do you think the sound quality will be good enought with a regular prototyping board? Thanks!

[phn]

What's wrong with the yampp board here? Price is 99 SEK, or about US€14.50.

I realize you want do this to learn, not to save money. But if this is the kind of PCB you need then at least this electronics illiterate wouldn't consider making one.

[jaycee]

Theres a number of MP3 decoder IC's in existance. Two that I know of are the Micronas MAS3507D and the ST STA013. All you really have to do is pipe MP3 data into them via I2C, and connect up an I2S DAC.

There is also a controller from Atmel that has an MP3 decoder onboard and also facility to connect up CompactFlash/IDE drives. This is another option.

The yampp website shows how it can be done in quite a number of ways. I think even if you design your own it is good to look here to get ideas.

[lomtik]

Originally posted by phn
What's wrong with the yampp board here? Price is 99 SEK, or about US€14.50.

I realize you want do this to learn, not to save money. But if this is the kind of PCB you need then at least this electronics illiterate wouldn't consider making one.

Originally posted by jaycee
Theres a number of MP3 decoder IC's in existance. Two that I know of are the Micronas MAS3507D and the ST STA013. All you really have to do is pipe MP3 data into them via I2C, and connect up an I2S DAC.

There is also a controller from Atmel that has an MP3 decoder onboard and also facility to connect up CompactFlash/IDE drives. This is another option.

The yampp website shows how it can be done in quite a number of ways. I think even if you design your own it is good to look here to get ideas.

Hey guys, thanks for the replies. I didn't realize yampp board is so cheap. I might consider it then. Before, I was mainly looking at Minty player because of it's easily available case

However, the reason I've asked about prototyping board is just to make sure that it's still good as an option. Also, to make sure that PCB in mp3 player is done just for compactness. Let me know.


Connecting IDE harddrive or cdrom would be a nice option! I'll check it on the website.

Thanks

[phn]

My "what's wrong" was sort of a joke. I figured you missed the PCB. Having that said, it does look fairly complicated. And the price (it should be a $ sign, but that you knew) is hard to beat. And if the price includes VAT, which it should, that's US$12.

[lomtik]

I saw the board before, but didn't use exchange rate to see the price in US/CAN. I just assumed it's somewhere around 40-50 like the other ones.

what's VAT?

[phn]

Don't they call it VAT in the UK? Well, sales tax.

My mistake, though. The page says: 123,75 Kr. (inc VAT), 99,00 Kr. (ex VAT)

So it's US$14.50

[lomtik]

Great, I'll take a look at it.

Hope I will not get charged too much in brokerage fees.

[phn]

If they charge you more than 99.50 SEK (that's about US$14.50, which you should know by now) they are ripping you off. (I did a quick search on the Swedish Mail site.) I don't think they will. I'm sure they get lots of orders from outside Sweden. And they accept PayPal. So I think it's safe to say that it won't cost more than US$30. What happens on your end, I don't know.