Steve Ridley wrote:

> Stuart
>
> This sounds brilliant to me. I have been thinking of building an MP3 player
> for my lounge room and you have almost done the entire design for me.

I've been thinking of having one for home as well, get it to run through my home
automation system I'm slowly building up. That way I can do all the MP3 encoding
at home and when I drive in I just run a network cable out to my car and drag
and drop albums and playlists from inside to my car.

> Where
> do I get this stuff ?

www.winamp.com for the player (for win95)Just computers magazine (in Australia)
for the motherboard and other parts or a computer swap meet/market
You'll have to design your own powersupply for the car

> Now what about a remote control. I was planning to
> make my MP3 player Linux based. I figured I could knock up a bit of code to
> read the parallel port to provide an external user interface but I suffer
> from chronic laziness and if I can avoid doing any work I will.

I can't say to much about linux, I've tried running it at home but it's a steep
learning curve on your own, you could do the code yourself if you can but i was
trying to do it on the KISS principle

> What about
> fan noise. Is it possible to load this motherboard you have suggested with a
> processor that doesn't need a fan. I have discovered you can get away with
> less processing power doing MP3 stuff under Linux than Windows. This might
> help.
>
> Steve

I'm not to sure if you can get a processor without a fan these days. What sort
of fan noise do you mean? wind noise or electrical noise.
I'd say you could get away with less processing power under linux than windows
(it also would save you buying a copy of windows) and if I was experienced
enough in Linux I'd probably go that way myself.
Ive mentioned this Idea to friends and  if I got this working I think Iwould be
making four of them rather than one.
Regards
Stuart