MP3 Player? What MP3 Player?

And well you might ask, for all that you probably didn't.

Since the dawn of car audio, people have pursued the goal of all audio junkies: More, better, louder!
It's no longer enough to have a mere 74 minutes of CD quality audio (and, lets face it, ye olde radio stations tend to be repetitive, or just plain bad), now we want MP3/WMA/OGG/your-format-here encoded discs that can hold hundreds of songs for hours of listening pleasure. And not just a single disc, changers full of them.

Which is all very well for those of us with tiny audio collections. Real music junkies can fill an MP3 changer with the music they bought last week. For real junkies you need an honest-to-goodness harddrive to store your tunes for the 30-minute drive to work. A 100GB Maxtor One Touch III Mini, for example.
To be fair, it's slightly over spec'd for my collection (and we'll completely ignore the fact that a 20-minute drive to work is on a slow day) which totals a mere 31G in around about 9,500 files. We all need room to expand (which is why belts have extra holes in them, but that's another story).

Of course, a harddrive is only part of the solution. We also need something to read the data from the harddrive and decode it from bits into noise. For that I've opted for a Macintosh PowerBook G3 200MHz (Wallstreet, for those who know) with the vast memory size of 64Mb. Not only does it make a lovely MP3 player, it even works well enough to run X and let me write this post.
As may be obvious, it's not running MacOS 9, or X, but instead Debian Sarge with the only downside being it's not new enough to boot directly into linux, instead requiring BootX. More boring details about this are on our website www.davison.org.nz. Consider finding the exact page an exercise for the reader :)

I'm quite impressed at how similar Debian Sarge on the powerbook is to Debian Sarge on a random i386 box. There is little difference between using this powerbook as the core mp3 player and the similar (but obviously different) NEC Versa I've got for the same purpose (two cars, doncha know). A few minor quirks with power management, and the odd package that hasn't been built, but otherwise everything is perfectly transferable.
This, of course, is part of the goal - an in-car MP3 player that is almost entirely generic in terms of hardware. In theory, the mac could die tomorrow and it would be easy to just drop in another laptop that has a serial connection, PCMCIA slot(s) and can run Debian. In practice, of course, the key is that the computer has serial and USB, since the music is actually stored on an external USB drive (if you were really keen, just USB, since you can get USB to serial converters).

The aim is to have the core computer accessible via WiFi and Bluetooth for management and music control (in addition to the headunit interface) and with music updates handled by soundcat and either USB drives (flash or hard) or CD/DVD - still haven't decided whether to connect a DVD drive (probably via USB) or not. Obviously when at home WiFi is perfectly acceptable too :)

I'm somewhat disappointed that (at least in NZ) there aren't a great many really good car headunits that support compressed audio. One of the best I've seen is from Dick Smith, of all places.